David Buss

David Buss (born April 14, 1953) is a professor of psychology at University of Texas, Austin, known for his evolutionary psychology research on human sex differences in mate selection. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology at University of California, Berkeley, in 1981. Before becoming a professor at University of Texas, he was assistant professor at Harvard University, and he was a professor at the University of Michigan.

Buss is the author of a number of publications and books, including The Evolution of Desire, The Dangerous Passion, and most recently, The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and The Murderer Next Door, which introduces a new theory of homicide from an evolutionary perspective. He is also the author of Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, the first widely-used textbook for the subject.

Criticism

David Buss's methodology has been criticized by philosopher of science David J. Buller. Buss used the practices of the Turkmen of Persia to bolster his argument that high status men are more desirable to women:

...in a well-documented study, the anthropologist William Irons found that, among the Turkmen of Persia, males in the wealthier half of the population left 75 percent more offspring than males in the poorer half of the population. Buss cites several studies like this as indicating that "high status in men leads directly to increased sexual access to a larger number of women," and he implies that this is due to the greater desirability of high-status men (David Buss 1999 "Evolutionary Psychology the New Science of the Mind").

To which Buller notes:

But, among the Turkmen, women were sold by their families into marriage. The reason that higher-status males enjoyed greater reproductive success among the Turkmen is that they were able to buy wives earlier and more often than lower-status males. Other studies that clearly demonstrate a reproductive advantage for high-status males are also studies of societies or circumstances in which males "traded" in women. This isn't evidence that high-status males enjoy greater reproductive success because women find them more desirable. Indeed, it isn't evidence of female preference at all, just as the fact that many harem-holding despots produced remarkable numbers of offspring is no evidence of their desirability to women. It is only evidence that when men have power they will use it to promote their reproductive success, among other things (and that women, under such circumstances, will prefer entering a harem to suffering the dire consequences of refusal).

The practice of reflexively attributing all human behaviors to biological tropisms, regardless of cultural context, is one of the major complaints of critics of evolutionary psychology.

External links

• University of Texas page for Dr. Buss
• David Buss' Evolutionary Psychology Lab at UT Austin
• an evolutionary psychology primer by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby