The Harbor
Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters
I liked parts of this book. Thats really the only way to put it, as it is written so that no one needs to read it straight through (as I did) and only needs to read the parts that interest them. The parts that focused on sex and mating were funny, interesting and really seemed grounded in good scientific theory. The rest of the book just seemed a little forced. After reading the chapter twice I still can’t understand what the desire to reproduce has to do with the creation of religion. I am a firm believer in the fact that the simplest explanation is usually right, and some of the justifications were so twisted that I couldn’t help but think the authors were pulling information out of their asses to make somewhat comprehensible theories. All in all though, the book was interesting if evolutionary psychology is your thing or if you just want to read some good nonfiction that isn’t travel lit.
Pros: The sex and mating chapter was funny, The authors were very straightforward about their purpose and didn’t worry about stepping on toes to achieve it, The authors also acknowledged most holes in their arguments in the final chapter.
Cons: A lot of their arguments had holes, They work too hard to explain things that are probably better off explained by another field, They completely diss every other form of the social sciences and don’t give nearly enough credit to culture as a cause of personal taste.
Up Next: Water For Elephants- Sara Gruen
In other words, men make more money because they want to; women make less money because they have better things to do then make money.
There would be no civilizations, no art, no literature, no music, no Beatles, no Microsoft, if sex and mating were a male choice. Men have built (and destroyed) civilizations in order to impress women so that they might say yes. Women are the reason men do everything.
All men (criminal or not) are more or less the same. The ultimate reason why men do what they do- whether they be criminals, musicians, painters, writers, or scientists- is to impress women so that they will sleep with them. Men do everything they do in order to get laid.
So physical attractiveness, while a universally positive quality, contributes even more to a women’s reproductive success than to men’s. The new hypothesis would therefore predict that physically attractive parents should have more daughters than sons. Once again, this is indeed the case.
Clear evidence of women’s promiscuity throughout evolutionary history is in the size and shape of men’s genitals and what men do with them.
Stereotypes tell us what groups of people tend to be or do in general; they do not tell us how we ought to treat them. Once again, there is no place for “ought” in science.
