Elly symons biography of donald
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And only men rape. At UCSB he joined forces with Brown and with a third colleague, Napoleon Chagnon, to hire the brilliant young anthropologist John Tooby, who had had an epiphany that there could be a science of mental life, after taking a course on psycholinguistics as a Harvard undergraduate. Chastened, Brown rethought the anthropological dogma that cultures could vary without limit and went on to write the classic 1991 book Human Universals.)
But human sexuality defies the rhyme in important ways.
But a man’s investment is optional—he can sire a child with a few minutes of copulation—whereas a woman’s is obligatory, committing her to nine months of pregnancy and, in traditional societies, years of lactation. It can only select genes that grow brains that have desires that, over the long run in the kinds of environments in which we evolved, resulted in more surviving offspring.
Biography:Donald Symons
Donald Symons | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | One of the founders of evolutionary psychology Pioneering the study of human sexuality |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | University of California, Santa Barbara |
Donald Symons (1942–2024) was an American anthropologist best known as one of the founders of evolutionary psychology, and for pioneering the study of human sexuality from an evolutionary perspective.[1][2][3] He is one of the most cited researchers in contemporary sex research.[4] His work is referenced by scientists investigating an extremely diverse range of sexual phenomena.[4] Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker described Symons' The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979) as a "groundbreaking book"[5] and "a landmark in its synthesis of evolutionary biology, anthropology, physiology, psychology, fiction, and cultural analysis, written with a combination of rigor and wit.
Symons, who died of cancer last year at 82, is remembered with awe and affection by the legions of evolutionary psychologists and sexuality researchers he influenced.
We don’t normally feel delight in oxygen, even though it is crucial for survival, because it was never hard to obtain; we just breathe. Homo sapiens, Symons pointed out, is atypical among mammals in the degree to which fathers invest time, care, and resources into their children and the children’s mothers.
(Symons, Brown, and Tooby died within a year of each other; Chagnon five years before.)
Symons’s psychological mindset allowed him to take on other obvious features of human sexuality that had been ignored by the prissy sex science of his day:
That individual reproductive “interests” must in some degree conflict with one another may account for the intensity of human sexual emotions, the pervasive interest in other people’s sex lives, the frequency with which sex is a subject of gossip, the universal seeking of privacy for sexual intercourse, the secrecy and deception that surround sexual activities and make the scientific study of sex so difficult, the universal existence of sexual laws or rules, and the fact that in our own society “morals” has come to refer almost exclusively to sexual matters.
It also led him to take the advice of an anonymous reviewer of an early draft of EHS that he fortify his claims with observations from novelists and memoirists who had noticed the same foibles in human sexuality.
Around that time UCSB also hired the cognitive psychologist Leda Cosmides (who was married to Tooby), and the trio, together with a small circle of visitors, plotted to make evolutionary psychology an academic reality at UCSB and beyond. The late Jimmy Carter was one of our more monogamous presidents, but as he confessed in his notorious 1976 Playboy interview, he had often committed adultery in his heart.
Symons’s insistence that natural selection left its fingerprints in consciousness rather than behaviour led to the idea that a new Darwinian science of humans should be an evolutionary psychology, with a focus on thought and feeling, distinct from the behaviourist approaches of sociobiology, behavioural ecology, and Darwinian anthropology.
As a result we are turned on not by opportunities to make babies but by opportunities superficially resembling those that would have allowed our ancestors to make babies. Columbia University Press
That’s why we rouse ourselves out of sleep with auditory alarms, and why the quintessential test of whether we’re dreaming is to say, “pinch me.” He also coauthored a short book on erotic fan fiction and female sexuality with Catherine Salmon, Warrior Lovers.
Symons himself was no warrior.
ISBN
(1992) "On the use and misuse of Darwinism in the study of human behavior" in Barkow, J., Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (eds) (1992) The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (New York: Oxford University Press)
(1995) "Beauty is in the adaptations of the beholder: The evolutionary psychology of human female sexual attractiveness" pp. 80–120 in Abramson, P.R. and Pinkerton, S.D. (eds.) Sexual Nature/Sexual Culture, The University of Chicago Press.
This bold yet qualified proclamation was how Donald Symons announced the theme of his epochal 1979 book The Evolution of Human Sexuality(EHS).
The extreme case of this overlap would be a hypothetical couple on a desert island who were perfectly monogamous, resistant to pressure from kinfolk, and destined to die at the same time.