74. Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters

74. Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire, by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa

I had never really heard of evolutionary psychology before I picked up this book this weekend, but I think I will be reading more about this soon. This was really fascinating. They did a couple of things I really liked, one about how they treated the material, and one involving the end notes. First, they made a point of saying that just because something is shown scientifically to be the way things are, it doesn't mean they are good or that we shouldn't try to change things. But, if we want to change things, first we need to understand what is going on, even if we don't like it; we can only make effective changes if we are looking at reality rather than what we would like it to be.

Second, on the endnotes, they used a regular superscript for notes that were just citations of studies, and bracketted superscript for notes that contained additional information. I have never seen a book that did that, but it was wonderful. I hate paging back and forth just to read something like Miller, Brown and Doe, 1987. It was nice to know when it was really worth it to go to the back of the book.

More about the actual topic--fascinating. Not shockingly, it turns out that the motivation for almost everything we do is sex and reproduction. It is interesting to see how different behaviors make their way back to sex and reproduction, though. The sections on risk evaluation were interesting, too. I am very motivated to find more in depth books on this topic.