The Evolution of Desire (hereafter ED) David Buss addresses topics that he and his army of collaborators defined in the first place: the preferences of each gender, differences in their strategies for casual mating and for long term partnerships, maintaining relationships between spouses, conflict in sexual agendas, breaking up of partnerships, marital careers, and harmony between the sexes. He closes several chapters with predictions of what research might tell us in the next edition of ED. Contrary, however, to one of the cover blurbs, ED is no longer a shocker: The differences between the behaviors of our two genders and the evolutionary explanations for them have been caught naked in Time and Newsweek. Matrix could as well substituted genes for computers. Thus, any shock in ED comes not from our conduct but from science's finding good sense in what we do instinctively.
The rest of us will like ED but it's old news. We watch the nature shows on television, our kids compete to know all about dinosaurs, and we buy Scientific American's special issues about human evolution. Further, human gender stereotypes have always appeared in C&W tunes but now with an extra layer of detail: Chris Kagel refrains "'Cuz the girls love it" to questions about why men do dumb things. Dierks Bentley sings of a young girl who screams "Faster!" when her date races them in a truck through a cornfield at night with his lights off, eluding the cops.
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