Decoding Love: Why It Takes Twelve Frogs to Find a Prince, and Other Revelations from the Science of Attraction Review

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(More customer reviews)Love is a many-splendored thing.It's also how we, as a species, manage to reproduce and survive.This book looks at love from the latter perspective.In that vein, it discusses love (and sex) through some very non-romantic lenses - psychology, evolutionary and otherwise; economics; game theory; physiology; non-verbal communication ...

Trees really does cover all the bases here.This topic is a particular interest of mine and I've picked up bits and pieces from all over the place.This is the first book I've come across, though, that really puts it all in one place.

If you're familiar with this stuff, it's all there - David Buss, The Red Queen, bonobos, The Paradox of Choice, oxytocin, vasopressin, Helen Fisher, waist-to-hip ratios, Frans de Waal ... you name it.At the same time, though, you'll probably also learn a thing or two.

If you're not familiar, however, you'll learn quite a lot.For example, do you know why humans have larger testicles than gorillas, but smaller ones than chimpanzees?How many years do you think being single take off your life?Why are there so few genes on the Y chromosome?To be able to attract a female, how much extra money does a man have to make per inch under 6' he is?What kind of smelly male T-shirts are women attracted to?

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you'll become something of an expert, as Trees covers just about everything.He also does so in a very lucid, engaging style - something that can't be said for all the experts.I can't really imagine a better introduction.

The only problems I had with the book were in the last few chapters.One of these is ostensibly a list of do's and don'ts.Most of these were prefaced in the rest of the book, but some of them were simply a grab bag of things he wanted to introduce and hadn't had a chance to do so yet.These were mostly of the form "A study said that x, so you'll definitely want to do x."No discussion, no debate, no counter-arguments, no nuances.Some readers might even see this as a problem for the rest of the book too.

Another thing that was a lacking was a happy ending.Believe me, a lot of this stuff is incredibly depressing.And it's not that Trees didn't have a chance to.His last chapter talks about marriage, which had a number of good things to be said for it.In particular, I was struck how happily married couples tend to idealize their partners.What a great way to end such a depressing book.I think Trees recognized this idea's potential, but he really didn't play it up as much as he could.

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A smart, entertaining, and eye-opening look at the science of love.

Relationships should be so simple. You meet someone. You fall in love. If all goes well, that person falls in love with you. You live happily every after.

As Andrew Trees reveals in Decoding Love, this 'romantic storyline' has shaped our thinking about relationships for centuries. But the fairy tale is deeply flawed. Researchers today are making shocking discoveries about how and why we choose the people we love.

Drawing from the latest studies in economics, brain science, game theory, evolutionary psychology, and other fields, Decoding Love takes on a topic we all think we understand-how we fall in love-and illustrates that most of our assumptions are wrong. Along the way, Andrew Trees offers surprising new insights into the nature of attraction and desire as well as an intimate look at the strange intersection of romance and the modern world of dating. Throughout, Decoding Love reveals the frequently bizarre scientific findings about human attraction from the powerful influence of smell to a mathematical theory that one must date twelve people before happening upon Mr. or Ms. Right. Everything from a genetic marker for infidelity to the way the pill can sway a woman's choice of her partner is explored in this astonishing and thoroughly amusing account of what goes into determining why one person falls in love with another.

Page-turning, thought-provoking, and sparkling with wit, Decoding Love is an uncommon look at that most common of human pursuits: falling in love.

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The Christian Woman's Guide to Sexuality Review

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(More customer reviews)I enjoyed reading this book, particularly because it validated me as a Christian woman and validated my sexuality in a healthy, spiritual way.
The book was informative from a "sex ed" point of view, as well as from a Biblical point of view.I especially appreciated the discussion on birth control and the emphasis on the fact that children and fertility are gifts from God.

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Witch in the Bedroom: Proven Sensual Magic Review

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(More customer reviews)Witch in the Bedroom is an interesting book about the subject of proven sensual magic. Author Stacey Demarco blends traditional relationship advice with magic wiles.

Topics covered in this book range from how to find and attract an ideal husband or wife to overcoming first date nervousness to healing the psychic scars that can result from breaking up. This book contains all sorts of magical meditations, rituals and spells that apply to all aspects of romance and family life.

This is an excellent book on the subject and also serves as a fine introduction to what might be called the magical alternative lifestyle.

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Stacey Demarco brings the "Witch's Way" into the bedroom in this delightful guide to love, sex, and fertility. Blending personal empowerment techniques, core values of Wicca, sex magic, and proven spells, she tackles affairs of the heart with Witchy flair.

Demarco begins by tracing the origins of Witchcraft and explores how Beltane, The Great Rite, and Pagan traditions and laws relate to love and romance. She demonstrates how magical rituals, such as Power Circles, can help one build self-esteem, attract a fabulous partner, and maintain an exciting relationship of any kind. There are spells and rituals for enhancing sensuality, resolving body image issues, invoking gods and goddesses as sensual consultants, finding balance in relationships, and letting go of old flames. Also included are rituals for boosting fertility and increasing chances of conception, even for those undergoing medical procedures, such as In Vitro Fertilization.

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The Evolution Of Desire - Revised Edition 4 Review

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(More customer reviews)I teach evolutionary psychology in college, organizing my classes around the "logic of inquiry."I use this book to illustrate cross-cultural investigation, including the pragmatic difficulties of getting good data from massive studies.For that purpose, the book has its uses.
However, unless you are a critical, already-knowledgeable reader, this book may not be a good choice. The book exemplifies neither the state of the art nor a model of how to think soundly about the questions.
Buss's hypotheses tend to be very vague. Indeed, he often says things like, "Evolutionary psychology explains this constellation of traits," as if there were some one hypothesis held by all evolutionary psychologists.He rarely, if ever, presents alternative hypotheses from within evolutionary studies.
He presents little, if any, contradictory or complicating data, never shows what would be involved in falsifying his hypotheses, and never shows why his theory is better supported than others' views of evolution. You get no sense from this book of the vigorous, usually exciting debates on mating *within* evolutionary circles.
You get litle or no sense from this book that problems of sexual adaptivity do not occur alone.You would never know that for humans, copulation has less to do with reproduction than in nearly any other species-and that this complicates immensely understanding our evolved mating habits.
You would never know thatacross the animal kingdom problems of mate selection depend heavily on what we eat and how we attain it.You would never know that across the animal kingdom mating habits depend on social structure.You get no sense that evolutionary psychology must grapple with the difficult questions of how other essential-and extremely odd-characteristics of human life set limits or biases on mating.In general, you would think from reading Buss that mating has exclusively to do with reproduction or survival of offspring.
Indeed, if the logic of Buss's inquiry were correct, there would be no reason for species to differ sexually.He presents his arguments as if human mating patterns follow directly from the differential investments of males and females.But that difference exists in all species!Why, then, do species differ so?Buss doesn't even let you know (if he has even recognized) that this is a fundamental question.
You would never know from reading Buss the commonplace that motivation need not resemble function.That is, a behavior (or traits) may be pursued for motives that have nothing to do with why it is reproductively advantageous.For purpose of natural selection, why an organism prefers a behavior is of no moment.Though he obviously knows this, and mentions it in passing a couple of places, he writes as if the function were the cause of the behavior.In many, if not most, cases, we are caused to do something for reasons-e.g., how much fun it is-that have nothing to do with why it is naturally selected. This complicates understanding what's selected and why--especially since motivational systems have evolutionary and cultural histories of their own.
As others have noted, Buss's original work relies altogether too heavily on self-reports and "what if" questionnaires.
Now, we know fairly well (though Buss never tells you) that self-reports tend to reflect both cultural norms and a bias toward presenting one's self favorably (even, oddly enough, in anonymous questionnaires.) We can improve and cross-check self-reports, but the methods are cumbersome (requiring a great deal of time with each subject, generating massive amounts of data, and requiring extremely powerful statistical analyses) and expensive.This book gives little evidence that much of Buss's data has been appropriately cross-checked.And in fact, other researchers have shown that even with some of the same populations as Buss studied, more extensive testing shows results very different from Buss's.
However, we cannot cross-check answers to hypotheticals!For instance, a question like, "How many sexual partners would you have in the next year, if you could?" cannot possibly be checked for accuracy.
However, you can do things like correlating answers to that question with other variables.But it is not at all clear that Buss, suffering from a very simple-minded theory to guide his research, has tested for and analyzed the right variables. For instance, some researchers have shown that men suffering ambivalence and anxiety about sex tend to offer inflated numbers on questions like that-and that when data is analyzed controlling for psychopathology, men and women differ on the question far less than Buss claims.
Similarly, you'd never know from Buss the difficulties of identifying which of our traits are selected, and whether they are naturally or sexually selected.Generally, you need to know what to explain before you start explaining it.
Buss's writing style misleads, too.Though he does not overtly misrepresent his data, he places far more emphasis on ways that men and women disagree than agree, even though in fact his data show that the range of agreement vastly exceeds disagreement-and remains equally stable over time.
Generally, I think this book reflects more energy and ambition than insight and imagination.Buss's data matter, precisely because they cover so many subjects in so many locations.But the book also shows the danger of collecting massive amounts of data without an adequate theory to guide what you study.
The reason I structure my classes as I do is that, in fact, nobody knows yet just which elements of human life are accurately explained as naturally selected (or why or when), sexually selected (or why or when), cultural, geographical, and so forth.I emphasize to my students that these questions matter deeply (and why), that we know the standard social science model to be false, and that we are just beginning to develop a reliable science of human evolution.I want my students to be able to participate in the emerging inquiries, to know how to think correctly about data and about alternate candidates to explain the data.
To read Buss, you would think my design is all wrong-you'd think that the data are great, the answers are settled for all but the muddle-headed and stubborn, and that there are no alternative explanations.And if, having read Buss, you thought those things, you would be wrong.
That's another reason I use this book.It shows how much of what passes for truth needs much more scrutiny, proving my point that understanding the logic of inquiry matters most.

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