Attention Book

This is an old book, and many of the studies and ideas in it have long since disseminated into the world and become commonplace, but it was worth the read for me to have the case for evolutionary psychology laid out so plainly and compellingly in the first few chapters, at least. When I first encountered the idea however many years ago, it just seemed so plainly true. We evolved, our brains evolved, so presumably the way our brains work evolved, maybe we can see evidence of our evolutionary history in universal human behavior, or come to understand how and why we think and act the way we do knowing our evolutionary history. Of course, going from the general concept to particulars is going to be a mess, and that mess has resulted in much skepticism about the entire field in the world at large. As an undergrad, I expressed interest in taking an evo psych class to my advisor, who discouraged me, saying it was all so much just-so stories. While reading this book, I had some discouraging responses to me reading it: one complaining that evo psych tries to force humans into a box, one complaining that evo psych is just fodder for racism and sexism. Yes, it's true, we are trying to put humans in the box of being biological organisms subject to natural law; and yes, similarly it has been decided that genetics is not a valid field of science because eugenicists want to use it (whether they understand it correctly or not) for ill purposes.
And yet if you READ the papers, you find that somehow, despite everything, it's still kind of a lot like science. Some studies may be better run than others, or more or less conclusive. At least in this volume, no outrageous claims are made, just modest suggestions that some correlations seem to exist and might support a particular evolutionary hypothesis, that more research is needed. You get sentences like "As in many other areas, sexual stereotypes may act to magnify considerably the effects of such preexisting dispositions." - as if by magic, able to acknowledge the effect of stereotypes while still in line with very basic biological facts (there exist sexual differences! no really!).
It's almost as if reading the source is more informative than hearing about it vaguely from the least trustworthy people! There are a wide variety of topics addressed in this volume - some seem more promising than others, some more fruitful or worthwhile, some more trustworthy. I would like to think exposure to the types of things you can think about using the known science of evolutionary biology, as well as the caution and scrupulousness exhibited, might be of interest to people who read an incredibly bad science journalism article once, but I'm probably being too optimistic.