David P. Barash

Here's a book that falls squarely between "literary criticism" and "science." This is science applied to literature, and the result is fascinating. The authors argue that literature can be analyzed in light of evolutionary biology, that the conflicts that drive the great novels and epic poems stem from our genes' need to survive and thrive. This isn't a dry-as-dust scientific treatise, though. The Barashes know how to throw bits of humor into their work (would you name a book Madame Bovary's show more Ovaries if you had no sense of humor?), and they know their approach has its limits--scientific works aren't going to be winning prizes for literature anytime soon. It is an original and interesting way to look at the Great Works, however. show less

This book is definitely not Pareto-optimal.

If that means nothing to you, ironically, this book may be for you. That's because it is a very non-technical introduction to game theory -- that is, the branch of mathematics devoted to determining the best "strategy" when confronted with a particular set of choices (euphemistically called "games"). A game might consist of deciding whether a wife should go to an event her husband loves and she despises, because she loves him ("Battle of the show more Sexes"), whether to turn stool pigeon after being arrested ("Prisoner's Dilemma"), or how often to play heads or tails in a heads or tails matching game. Or it might consist of deciding whether to ratchet up the threat to North Korea or try negotiating instead. All of these are "games"; in theory at least, all of them are the province of game theory.

Game theory has been one of the most intensively studied areas of mathematics in the last half a century, and the results have been vitally important in economics and often useful in other areas as well. And it is in fact a relatively straightforward area of mathematics (generally no calculus needed, e.g.). But it isn't entirely mathematics-free (having the ability to do arithmetic is necessary, and I wouldn't want to try it without algebra, either). Author Barash has attempted to present game theory with as little mathematics as possible -- so little that he doesn't even allow himself to produce mathematical formulae.

Obviously this means that you won't learn any actual game theory from this book. But you will learn a little about what the field can do, and some terminology. Such as Pareto optimality. A situation is Pareto optimal if you can't improve one person's life without making someone else's life worse. Take a very simple example: Suppose you have two people. One of them has a billion dollars; the other has a hundred dollars. If the first guy had a hundred dollars taken away from him by a tax, he would be only very slightly worse off, but if the second guy were given a hundred dollars, he would be much, much better off. Thus, by taking $100 from the first to give to the second, we significantly increase the overall well-being of the two. But this is not Pareto-optimal, because transferring the $100, although it makes one player much better off, makes the other ever so slightly worse off. There is, in this case, a more optimal situation (two guys with half a billion dollars are both in a very fine situation), but there is no way to get from one way to the other without depriving one of them. A plan can only be Pareto-optimal if you can get from the start to the end while making everyone's life better every step along the way.

(Note incidentally that this is why things like tax reform are so hard: We know that a tax system with lower rates and fewer deductions is generally more fair than a system with higher rates and more various deductions that brings in equal revenue, but there is no Pareto-optimal way to get from the latter to the former; someone is always hurt, and so someone screams.)

So: A Pareto-optimal non-mathematical game theory book would be one that you can read -- and then, if you want, turn and go into a real game theory book and learn the mathematics, without the first book getting in your way.

Unfortunately, it isn't possible with this book. That's because it gives you a whole bunch of misleading descriptions of games. Having read most of the book, one that particularly got to me is Barash's description, on p. 172ff., of a game known as "Deadlock". Only he doesn't call it "Deadlock." He calls it a variation of "Prisoner's Dilemma." It is not. It applies in different situations. There are far too many instances of this.

Does the terminology matter? If you just want an idea of how game theory works, then no, it doesn't, and this is a good and interesting volume. But when I first encountered game theory, it was in a similar book that mis-defined the most important game of all, "Prisoner's Dilemma." It took me a very long time to realize that I had gotten a classic game wrong. I had a lot of re-learning to do, and it interfered with my ability to understand the field. The sort of mis-definition Barash engages in could be very handicapping if you want to really learn game theory. So don't get yourself into a place which is not Pareto-optimal. If you want to really learn game theory, bite the bullet and buy a book with some actual math in it. If you are sure you don't want to learn the math -- if you just want to have some fun -- then this book should be just fine.

Signed, the Curmudgeonly Mathematician. show less

The main problem with the book is that it purports to go about dispelling the myth of monogamy, but it goes about doing so using monogamous language. The term bandied about most in the book, "EPC," stands for "extra-pair coupling." The term assumes that coupling should take place in what researchers perceive as a pairing and anything outside of that is extra when perhaps, what is seen as a pair has nothing to do with coupling. The authors also use words like marriage/marital to refer to show more animal pairings, which makes no sense at all, and don't even bother to use quotes around it; by contrast, when they refer to female primates bonding platonically with males so that those males might protect them, they call it "friendship" in quotes. Other terms they use without quotes that are questionable include lady-love, serenade, cad, divorce, jealousy, wives, girlfriends, Mrs., and bachelor. Sometimes, they even switch back and forth between using quotes for a word and then not.

Quote marks are not the only forms of punctuation with whose proper use the authors seem to be unfamiliar. One of the most infuriating things the authors do is speculate extensively in parentheses. The most egregious example is when they speculate about how women within harems compete. Instead of just researching the behavior of women in households with multiple female partners and only one male, which is a common occurrence all over the world, they decided to ask an easily-answerable question as if it were the biggest mystery in the universe. Another form of punctuation that the authors abuse is the exclamation point. When used sparingly, the exclamation point can be a functional part of a good piece of writing, but they use it in excess -- even in the index (!)

One example on which the book spends considerable time is that of predatory birds. Because the male of the pair tends to spend a lot of time hunting and the female on child-rearing, the birds do not have time to seek other partners. When discussing this, the authors frame it in language that implies that the female of the pair allows the male to mate with her because supposedly, if she is already raising a brood with that male, there would be no reason for her to mate with him. Sadly, the authors completely ignore the fact that the male would have no reason to mate with the female, either, and there's no way to assess which male is "allowing" which to mate. Here, as in with other parts of the book, patriarchal thinking trumps science.

The analogies used in the book, especially in reference to female behavior, tend to be questionable. In some cases, they are downright disgusting. One such case is when they compare a female mating and acting favorably with each of her multiple male partners as analogous to a grandmother telling each of her grandchildren that he or she is her favorite. Not only is this obviously somewhat stomach-churning, the fact that they could only think of a platonic family situation to compare to a highly sexual one speaks to the authors' lack of imagination.

The book's points on pornography are unforgivably biased. The book talks about how men are aroused by hetero porn, but not about how women are physically aroused by ALL kinds of porn, from depictions of gay men, straight couples, lesbian pairs, and even animal sex. The book doesn't talk about female response to porn at all. I don't know how new the study that shows that is, but I doubt all research on the topic of female response to porn is newer than 2001.

The authors' dismissal of rape is particularly troubling. They imagine a scenario where a woman "happens" to visit a man's hotel room at night as a way in which a woman might have sex outside a pairing, something that too closely resembles the way in which rape apologists speak. Furthermore, their only mention of feminism or even writings against rape is in criticism of a single point in Brownmiller's important work, Against Our Will: they call her out on her claim that only human beings rape. While they might be right about her being wrong, to describe a rape apologists' fantasy for victim-blaming in nudge-wink terms and then to reduce Brownmiller's work to nothing but a single claim to disprove is to bulldoze over the importance of the fight against sexual violence.

The authors, even aside from their troubling discussion of rape and glossing over of women's response to pornography, do very poorly on women's issues. The books' criticism of property theory as a solution for the problem of the worldwide poor treatment of women sets up a strawman instead of actually addressing the heart of that particular theory: the fact that women are often treated as property. Instead of actually debunking that claim, they just decide that the theory is wrong because men supposedly amass property to attract women and don't even address the fact that women are often seen as property to be amassed. Furthermore, their choice of language re female animals tends towards "feisty" while males are described as "aggressive," a clear projection of human feelings on animal behavior.

I can forgive a book for being outdated or uninformed, but I cannot forgive all of the assumptions, horrible misuse of language, and overbearing, forced informality of this book. I had to actually stop in the middle of reading this book to take notes on what was so wrong with it in order to be able to finish it in relative mental peace. Even as an artifact representative of outmoded thinking (and the book is less than ten years old), it's not worth the time I spent reading it. In the end, I had far more notes than could be fit into a coherent review, and so I will just say, again, that the book is not worth reading. show less

Once and for all – are we monogamous or polygynous? David Barash answers the age old question in 200 pages of research and facts from all over the world, from all over the animal kingdom, and from all over the human psyche. The answer appears to be yes.

It’s a big world, and you can find support for pretty much any kind of sexuality and hierarchy you espouse. But one trait stands out; mammals tend to be polygynous. Polygyny is a branch of polygamy, where males take multiple mates. Much show more rarer – but still visible – is polyandry, in which females take multiple mates.

The book ranges far wider and deeper than expected. Chapters cover the violence of males, the range of parenting instincts, the way adultery is treated by species of all kinds, and how God fits the framework.

Throughout history, it appears that most men ended up with one wife. This was not so much because it was right or desirable, but because the alpha-male harem-keepers took far more than their share (sometimes tens of thousands!), and everyone else was lucky to hook up at all. Having a lifemate is clearly advantageous, and keeps men from going even farther overboard. Barash cites Engels saying maybe it’s not religion that’s the opiate of the masses, but monogamy.

Barash says we are confused over the most basic trait of any being – reproduction. Our advanced brains have taken us places we were perhaps never intended to go. This has muddied the basic functionalities of our animal roots. No other beings are as uncertain about reproduction, have so many myths, customs, rituals and taboos around it, or have such a constantly evolving relationship to it. Cultural evolution has led Homo sapiens to monogamy, while its instincts remain polygynous.

The book is packed with ideas, facts, quotes and allusions. Every paragraph is a challenge to knowledge. It is one of those science books where there is no point using a highlighter; the entire book would be soaking in yellow and you couldn’t find a thing.

David Wineberg show less