我们每个人都希望爱与被爱，但为什么我们最珍视的爱情关系中会有如此多的冲突与矛盾？
《欲望的演化：人类的择偶策略》（最新修订版）基于众多关于择偶的科学研究，利用不同文化背景下的择偶行为案例，揭示了人类的择偶策略渗透进了每个人的行为之中。在巴斯看来，这些策略既塑造了女性之间的地位等级，也助长了男性的性背叛。它们既以爱之名义让恋人们激情相拥，又用嫉妒的怒火和残忍的背叛让恋人们黯然分手。总之，人类的性心理根深蒂固于社会行为的结构之中，其外表既光辉闪亮又令人不安。而所有这一切，都是由于大自然中存在一股无形而强大的力量，那就是：进化。

The Ape that Understood the Universe is the story of the strangest animal in the world: the human animal. It opens with a question: How would an alien scientist view our species? What would it make of our sex differences, our sexual behavior, our child-rearing patterns, our moral codes, our religions, our languages, and science? The book tackles these issues by drawing on ideas from two major schools of thought: evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory. The guiding assumption is that humans are animals, and that like all animals, we evolved to pass on our genes. At some point, however, we also evolved the capacity for culture - and from that moment, culture began evolving in its own right. This transformed us from a mere ape into an ape capable of reshaping the planet, travelling to other worlds, and understanding the vast universe of which we're but a tiny, fleeting fragment.

在这本书里，你可以随着著名灵长类学家达里奥·马埃斯特里皮埃里的指引，从经济学和社会生物学的角度重新审视人类的社会行为。这些“猿猴的把戏”不是横空出世，不是空中楼阁，而是跟我们的动物性有着千丝万缕的联系。为什么舌吻成了浪漫的示爱方式？要知道，这是一种身体侵略行为，还容易传播疾病。为什么老板很长时间才给你回邮件，而你早已经等得花儿都谢了？哪怕在你发了加急邮件时，情况也从未改善。为什么跟陌生人搭乘电梯时，你会觉得不自在？为什么没人推荐，在意大利军队中服役几乎就是死路一条？答案就在这本书里。除了这些，还有很多有趣的内容，等着你来一睹为快。

According to the reigning competition-driven model of evolution, selfish behaviors that maximize an organism’s reproductive potential offer a fitness advantage over self-sacrificing behaviors—rendering unselfish behavior for the sake of others a mystery that requires extra explanation. Evolution, Games, and God addresses this conundrum by exploring how cooperation, working alongside mutation and natural selection, plays a critical role in populations from microbes to human societies. Inheriting a tendency to cooperate, argue the contributors to this book, may be as beneficial as the self-preserving instincts usually thought to be decisive in evolutionary dynamics.
Assembling experts in mathematical biology, history of science, psychology, philosophy, and theology, Martin Nowak and Sarah Coakley take an interdisciplinary approach to the terms “cooperation” and “altruism.” Using game theory, the authors elucidate mechanisms by which cooperation—a form of working together in which one individual benefits at the cost of another—arises through natural selection. They then examine altruism—cooperation which includes the sometimes conscious choice to act sacrificially for the collective good—as a key concept in scientific attempts to explain the origins of morality. Discoveries in cooperation go beyond the spread of genes in a population to include the spread of cultural transformations such as languages, ethics, and religious systems of meaning.
The authors resist the presumption that theology and evolutionary theory are inevitably at odds. Rather, in rationally presenting a number of theological interpretations of the phenomena of cooperation and altruism, they find evolutionary explanation and theology to be strongly compatible.

Updated for the first time, the classic book on why cooperation is not only natural but also the best survival strategy The Evolution of Cooperation addresses a simple yet age-old question: If living things evolve through competition, how can cooperation ever emerge? Despite the abundant evidence of cooperation all around us, there existed no purely naturalistic answer to this question until 1979, when Robert Axelrod famously ran a computer tournament featuring a standard game-theory exercise called The Prisoner's Dilemma. To everyone's surprise, the program that won the tournament, named Tit for Tat, was not only the simplest but the most "cooperative" entrant. This unexpected victory proved that cooperation--one might even say altruism--is mathematically possible and therefore needs no hidden hand or divine agent to create and sustain it. A great roadblock to the understanding of all sorts of behavior was at last removed. The updated edition includes an extensive new chapter on cooperation in cancer cells and among terrorist organizations. "This book, if read, grasped and applied, could have a profound effect." ( Wall Street Journal ) "A fascinating, provocative, and important book." (Douglas R. Hofstadter, author of Godel, Escher, Bach )

Nature versus nurture - nowhere is the debate more heated than in the areas of sex and sex differences.
adds fuel to the fire. Symons's thesis is that some of the typical differences between men and women in sexual behaviors, attitudes and feelings are innate: identical rearing of males and females will not result in identical sexualities.
Anthropology, Sexual Studies, Psychology, Sociology, Gender and Cultural Studies

Mitochondria are tiny structures located inside our cells that carry out the essential task of producing energy for the cell. They are found in all complex living things, and in that sense, they are fundamental for driving complex life on the planet. But there is much more to them than that. Mitochondria have their own DNA, with their own small collection of genes, separate from those in the cell nucleus. It is thought that they were once bacteria living independent lives. Their enslavement within the larger cell was a turning point in the evolution of life, enabling the development of complex organisms and, closely related, the origin of two sexes. Unlike the DNA in the nucleus, mitochondrial DNA is passed down exclusively (or almost exclusively) via the female line. That's why it has been used by some researchers to trace human ancestry daughter-to-mother, to 'Mitochondrial Eve'. Mitochondria give us important information about our evolutionary history. And that's not all. Mitochondrial genes mutate much faster than those in the nucleus because of the free radicals produced in their energy-generating role.This high mutation rate lies behind our ageing and certain congenital diseases. The latest research suggests that mitochondria play a key role in degenerative diseases such as cancer, through their involvement in precipitating cell suicide. Mitochondria, then, are pivotal in power, sex, and suicide. In this fascinating and thought-provoking book, Nick Lane brings together the latest research findings in this exciting field to show how our growing understanding of mitochondria is shedding light on how complex life evolved, why sex arose (why don't we just bud?), and why we age and die. This understanding is of fundamental importance, both in understanding how we and all other complex life came to be, but also in order to be able to control our own illnesses, and delay our degeneration and death. 'An extraordinary account of groundbreaking modern science...The book abounds with interesting and important ideas.' Mark Ridley, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford

Drop something in front of a two-year-old, and she's likely to pick it up for you. This is not a learned behavior, psychologist Michael Tomasello argues. Through observations of young children in experiments he himself has designed, Tomasello shows that children are naturally—and uniquely—cooperative. Put through similar experiments, for example, apes demonstrate the ability to work together and share, but choose not to.
As children grow, their almost reflexive desire to help—without expectation of reward—becomes shaped by culture. They become more aware of being a member of a group. Groups convey mutual expectations, and thus may either encourage or discourage altruism and collaboration. Either way, cooperation emerges as a distinctly human combination of innate and learned behavior.
In Why We Cooperate, Tomasello's studies of young children and great apes help identify the underlying psychological processes that very likely supported humans' earliest forms of complex collaboration and, ultimately, our unique forms of cultural organization, from the evolution of tolerance and trust to the creation of such group-level structures as cultural norms and institutions.
Scholars Carol Dweck, Joan Silk, Brian Skyrms, and Elizabeth Spelke respond to Tomasello's findings and explore the implications.

人类是自然界中的奇迹。尽管在许多方面与其他哺乳动物相似，特定的行为却让人类与众不同。无与伦比的适应力让我们占据了陆地上几乎所有的栖息地，我们的社会更加庞大而复杂，也比任何其他哺乳动物的更具团结性。在《基因之外》中，彼得·里克森和罗伯特·博伊德论证了只有文化演化的达尔文理论才能够解释这些独一无二的特征。
《基因之外》提出了有关人类演化的根本性解释，论证了我们的生态优势和非凡的社会体系源于为适应复杂文化而产生的心理机制。里克森和博伊德认为，文化对人类的适应性至关重要，和用双足行走一样属于人类生物学范畴。通过引用人类学、政治学、社会学和经济学的田野研究，里克森和博伊德有力地展示了文化与生物学之间密不可分的联系。
* * * * * *
“里克森和博伊德努力展示了他们独创的有关文化演化理论的核心要义，同时揭示此要义对于研究人类行为的意义，令人陶醉其中并得到启发……这是一本充满智慧的著作，逻辑严谨、表述清晰。”——罗宾·邓巴，《自然》

A brilliant book celebrating improbability as the engine that drives life, by the acclaimed author of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker. The human eye is so complex and works so precisely that surely, one might believe, its current shape and function must be the product of design. How could such an intricate object have come about by chance? Tackling this subject--in writing that the New York Times called "a masterpiece"--Richard Dawkins builds a carefully reasoned and lovingly illustrated argument for evolutionary adaptation as the mechanism for life on earth. The metaphor of Mount Improbable represents the combination of perfection and improbability that is epitomized in the seemingly "designed" complexity of living things. Dawkins skillfully guides the reader on a breathtaking journey through the mountain's passes and up its many peaks to demonstrate that following the improbable path to perfection takes time. Evocative illustrations accompany Dawkins's eloquent descriptions of extraordinary adaptations such as the teeming populations of figs, the intricate silken world of spiders, and the evolution of wings on the bodies of flightless animals. And through it all runs the thread of DNA, the molecule of life, responsible for its own destiny on an unending pilgrimage through time. Climbing Mount Improbable is a book of great impact and skill, written by the most prominent Darwinian of our age.

The Aesthetic Brain takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey through the world of beauty, pleasure, and art. Chatterjee uses neuroscience to probe how an aesthetic sense is etched in our minds and evolutionary psychology to explain why aesthetic concerns feature centrally in our lives. Along the way, Chatterjee addresses fundamental questions: What is beauty? Is beauty universal? How is beauty related to pleasure? What is art? Should art be beautiful? Do we have an instinct for art? Chatterjee starts by probing the reasons that we find people, places, and even numbers beautiful. At the root of beauty, he finds, is pleasure. He then examines our pleasures by dissecting why we want and why we like food, sex, and money and how these rewards relate to aesthetic encounters. His ruminations on beauty and pleasure prepare him and the reader to face art. He wanders through the problems of defining art, understanding contemporary art, and interpreting ancient art. He explores why art, something that seems so useless, also feels fundamental to our humanity. Replete with facts, anecdotes, and analogies, this empirical guide to aesthetics offers scientific answers without deflating the wonders of beauty and art.

For at least the last fifty thousand years, and probably much longer, people have practiced religion. Yet little attention has been given, either by believers or atheists, to the question of whether this universal human behavior might have an evolutionary basis. Did religion evolve, in other words, because it helped people in early societies survive?
In this original and controversial book, Nicholas Wade, a longtime reporter for the New York Times's Science section, gathers new evidence showing why religion became so essential in the course of human evolution and how an instinct for faith has been hardwired into human nature. This startling thesis is sure to catch the attention of both believers and nonbelievers. People of faith may not warm to the view that the mind's receptivity to religion has been shaped by evolution. Atheists may not embrace the idea that religious expression evolved because it conferred essential benefits on ancient societies and their successors. As The Faith Instinct argues, however, both groups must address the fact, little understood before now, that religious behavior is an evolved part of human nature.
How did we evolve to believe? Wade shows that the instinct for religious behavior is wired into our neural circuits much like our ability to learn a language. Religion provided the earliest human societies with the equivalents of law and government, giving these societies an edge in the struggle for survival. As a force that binds people together and coordinates social behavior, religion supported another significant set of social behaviors: aggression and warfare. Religious behavior, both good and ill will remain an indelible component of human nature so long as human societies need the security and cohesion that belief provides.
Social scientists once predicted that religion would progressively fade away as societies advanced in wealth and education. They were wrong. The first objective and nonpolemical book of its kind, The Faith Instinct reveals that to understand the persistence of faith, one must first acknowledge that religious behavior is embedded in human nature.

进化心理学是一门革命性的新科学，它提供了一个有趣而独特的视角来观察人类的心理和行为，是现代心理学和进化生物学在理论上的真正融合。作者戴维巴斯是进化心理学领域的权威学者和领军人物，他在本书中对进化心理学这一日新月异的领域进行了全面而深入的回顾和展望。全书论述的主题是按照适应性问题来展开的，从生存挑战、择偶、抚育、亲属到群体生活的挑战，包括合作、攻击、性冲突、地位以及社会等级。各章不仅介绍必备的理论背景，而且还提供了生动具体的实例，帮助读者透彻地理解这一领域。作者的写作风格清晰简洁，轻松易读，逻辑严密，引人入胜，即便是普通读者也可以将书中学到的相关知识应用于理解自身和他人的生活。
自1999年首版以来，本书一直是进化心理学领域里程碑式的著作，是了解和学习进化心理学的必读书。最新第4版不仅增添了400余条新文献，而且增加了大量内容，包括：跨文化研究、生理学研究、遗传学和脑成像等研究方法；进化形成的导航机制理论；火和烹饪；凶杀；模仿择偶行为；男性择偶偏好对他们实际择偶行为的影响；等等。

译者前言：这是一本奇书！
这是一本奇书！
奇在它是影响欧美命运的一本书。
英国与美国甚至整个西方国家，为什么如此之发达？与这本书有很大的关系。本书从一定意义上来说，是对英美教育的观察与总结、指导与推动；时至今日，那些智慧的光芒依然璀璨闪耀——毫不过时，更显生命力——这就是经典。
这是一本奇书！
奇在它一针见血地洞悉教育的目的。
人是有意识的动物，做任何事情，先要明白：目的是什么？
作为孩童，作为学子，您明白教育的目的吗？
作为老师，作为家长，您明白教育的目的吗？
活到老，学到老，终生教育，您明白教育的目的吗？
可是——教育的目的究竟是什么？
中华人民共和国教育法的解释是“教育必须为社会主义现代化建设服务，必须与生产劳动相结合，培养德、智、体等方面全面发展的社会主义事业的建设者和接班人。”
台湾地区教育法的解释是“教育之目的以培养人民健全人格、民主素养、法治观念、人文涵养、强健体魄及思考、判断与创造能力，并促进其对基本人权之尊重、生态环境之保护及对不同国家、族群、性别、宗教、文化之了解与关怀，使其成为具有国家意识与国际视野之现代化国民。”
近百年前，本书就一针见血地指出——就是——学生是有血有肉的人，教育的目的是为了激发和引导他们的自我发展之路。
您知道吗？您明白吗？
您想知道吗？您想明白吗？
这是一本奇书！
奇在它关乎所有人的命运！
我们每一个人，都是受教育者，我们也都是教人者；家庭教育、学校教育，社会教育，自我教育，等等，可以说，教育——它与每一个人都息息相关。
不光仅仅关乎欧美人，日本人，更是关乎您个人、家人、亲戚、朋友，以及所有你所爱人的命运。
这是一本奇书！
奇在它翻译与注释齐举，中文共英文一书。
我们深知，通过中文了解西方教育思想，需了解西方文化背景。为了便于您的阅读与理解，我们进行了较为详细的注解。译者水平有限，不达意或错漏之处，在所难免，恳请方家批评指正。
我们深知，翻译不可能完全呈现原著，所以，我们将英文原版一并呈上，当读者诸君对字里行间有疑问时，可对照英文再看一下。也许我们错了，但是您更明白了——这是我们希望竭尽全力为您做到的。此外，我们特别建议有一定英文基础的人，读一读我们为您特别呈上的原著（中英文对照豪华本，敬请期待预约）。
这是一本奇书！
错过——遗憾一辈子！
迟读——遗憾一阵子！
知而不读——后悔一辈子！
知而细读——幸运一辈子！
所以，这是一本值得所有人认真研读的奇书！
给你一缕前所未有的有神清新 ！
给你一个千载难逢的拍案叫绝！
给你一个今生难得的相见恨晚！
幸运的你，从现在开始，尽快拥有，尽情地享受吧！

《进化心理学:心理的新科学》(第2版)正是关于这方面研究独有的著作。本书选题具有前沿性，涉及多学科，资料少，难度大，对拓展我国心理学研究和理论视野，建构活生生的人化心理学具有重要的学术价值和现实意义。进化心理学是当代西方心理学的一种新的研究取向，然而，这一西方新思潮并未引起国内足够的重视，除了零星介绍外，有关这方面的西方专著一直未曾引进。