Reddit reviews Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

I highly recommend the books below. Both focus on consumer behavior via an evolutionary lens and provide a great intro into evolutionary psychology.

http://www.amazon.com/Consuming-Instinct-Burgers-Ferraris-Pornography/dp/1616144297/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373402559&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Spent-Sex-Evolution-Consumer-Behavior/dp/0143117238/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373402620&sr=1-3&keywords=geoffrey+miller

Enjoy!

You're being too general, and shifting the topic of our conversation.

Your original comment was that prejudicial judgments and stereotypes were part of "how we as a species have survived," specifically in relation to a comment reading, "Shes got one of THOSE faces. So vapid, not suprised at her response," which was a response to a comment about looking like "bootleg Kylie Jenner."

My point about quackery and nonsense goes for almost all evolutionary psychology, but in this case it was related to the idea that evolution somehow prepared us specifically to have prejudices about intelligence based on resemblance to kylie jenner - or some unspecified way of looking "vapid."

Your point requires that judging people based on whether they look like kylie jenner has been an advantageous survival strategy for AT LEAST the tens of thousands of years that are required for genes to change. Which is obviously not true.

Now, your more recent comment is suddenly just talking about "having a preconceived idea about someone's personality" and "making assumptions about people based on their appearance." That's completely general. It could mean anything. We can talk about evo psych work on stereotypes and prejudices in general, if you want - and there definitely is SOME reasonably high quality work there, although not much - but you have effectively changed the topic.

I was arguing that you can't claim evolutionary origins for modern sexism, which is true. Modern sexism is too specific, and there's no good evidence suggesting that sexism has remained stable over evolutionary time. Our specific forms of sexism are not the same thing as heuristic-based perceptual strategies, which is the general topic you're referring to in your most recent post. "Gender and beauty standards" were the exact topic under discussion in the chain of posts we started with, which I why I mentioned the evolutionary psychology pseudoscience that deals with those topics. Which is, as I said, complete fucking quackery and nonsense. Check out, e.g., this sack of garbage.

So, tl;dr, no, modern sexism is not a genetic trait. That is an incoherent and unsupported position. Heuristic judgment is maybe an evolved trait, but there's good reasons to think that psychological traits in general don't evolve the way anatomical traits do.

FINAL NOTE: saying that x "is so obviously" y is not a very strong form of argument.

http://www.amazon.com/Spent-Sex-Evolution-Consumer-Behavior/dp/0143117238

If you like this, I would also recommend Spent by Geoffrey Miller!

http://www.amazon.com/Spent-Sex-Evolution-Consumer-Behavior/dp/0143117238/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371226040&sr=1-2&keywords=spent