The acknowledgments for this book must include not just colleagues who have directly commented on its contents, but those who have influenced my personal evolutionary odyssey, which has spanned more than twenty years. My interest in evolution began in an undergraduate geology class in the mid-1970s, when I first realized that there were theories designed specifically to explain the origins of things. My first evolutionary groping was a term paper for a course in 1975 in which I speculated, drawing on now laughable primate comparisons, that the main reason men have evolved a status striving motive is because higher status produced increased sexual opportunities.
My interest in evolution and human behavior grew when I was in graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, but I found the most fertile evolutionary soil at Harvard University, which offered me a position as assistant professor of Psychology in 1981. There I began teaching a course on human motivation using evolutionary principles, although the text scarcely mentioned evolution. My lectures were based on the works of Charles Darwin, W.D. Hamilton, Robert Trivers, and Don Symons.
I started corresponding with Don Symons, whose 1979 book is considered by many the first modern treatise on human evolutionary psychology.
I owe Don a special thanks; his friendship and insightful commentary have informed practically everything that I've written on the subject of evolutionary psychology. Influenced by Don's ideas, in 1982 I designed my first evolutionary research project on human mating, which eventually mushroomed into a cross-cultural study of 10,047 participants from thirty-seven cultures around the world.
Part 1 Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology
Part 2 Problems of Survival
Part 3 Challenges of Sex and Mating
Part 4 Challenges of Parenting and Kinship
Part 5 Problems of Group Living
Part 6 An Integrated Psychological Science