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From Robert Wright's brilliant book "The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology." You should buy it.

> The pair-bond hypothesis was popularized by Desmond Morris in his 1967 book The Naked Ape. This book, along with a few other 1960s books (Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative, for example), represent a would-be watershed in the history of evolutionary thought. That they found large readerships signaled a new openness to Darwinism, an encouraging dissipation of the fallout from its past political misuses. But there was no way, in the end, that these books could start a Darwinian renaissance within academia. The problem was simple: they didn't make sense.  {55} 
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> One example surfaced early in Morris's pair-bonding argument. He was trying to explain why human females are generally faithful to their mates. This is indeed a good question (if you believe they are, that is). For high fidelity would place women in a distinct minority within the animal kingdom. Though female animals are generally less licentious than males, the females of many species are far from prudes, and this is particularly true of our nearest ape relatives. Female chimpanzees and bonobos are, at times, veritable sex machines. In explaining how women came to be so virtuous, Morris referred to the sexual division of labor in an early hunter-gatherer economy. "To begin with," he wrote, "the males had to be sure that their females were going to be faithful to them when they left them alone to go hunting. So the females had to develop a pairing tendency."2
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> Stop right there. It was in the reproductive interests of the males for the females to develop a tendency toward fidelity? So natural selection obliged the males by making the necessary changes in the females? Morris never got around to explaining how, exactly, natural selection would perform this generous feat."
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> Maybe it's unfair to single Morris out for blame. He was a victim of his times. The trouble was an atmosphere of loose, hyper-teleological thinking. One gets the impression, reading Morris's book, and Ardrey's books, of a natural selection that peers into the future, decides what needs to be done to make things generally better for the species, and takes the necessary steps. But natural selection doesn't work that way. It doesn't peer ahead, and it doesn't try to make things generally better. Every single, tiny, blindly taken step either happens to make sense in immediate terms of genetic self-interest or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, you won't be reading about it a million years later. This was an essential message of George Williams's 1966 book, a message that had barely begun to take hold when Morris's book appeared.

And also this:

> How have societies over the years coped with the basic sexual asymmetry in human nature? Asymmetrically. A huge majority --- 980 of the 1,154 past or present societies for which anthropologists have data --- have permitted a man to have more than one wife.71 And that number includes most of the world's hunter-gatherer societies, societies that are the closest thing we have to a living example of the context of human evolution.
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> The more zealous champions of the pair-bond thesis have been known to minimize this fact. Desmond Morris, hell-bent on proving the natural monogamy of our species, insisted in The Naked Ape that the only societies worth paying much attention to are modern  {90}  industrial societies, which, coincidentally, fall into the 15 percent of societies that have been avowedly monogamous. "[A]ny society that has failed to advance has in some sense failed, 'gone wrong,' " he wrote. "Something has happened to it to hold it back, something that is working against the natural tendencies of the species. ..." So "the small, backward, and unsuccessful societies can largely be ignored." In sum, said Morris (who was writing back when Western divorce rates were about half what they are now): "whatever obscure, backward tribal units are doing today, the mainstream of our species expresses its pair-bonding character in its most extreme form, namely long-term monogamous matings."72
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> Well, that's one way to get rid of unsightly, inconvenient data: declare them aberrant, even though they vastly outnumber the "mainstream" data.

Buy the book! http://smile.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-Science-Evolutionary-Psychology/dp/0679763996/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1450556519&sr=8-1&keywords=moral+animal

Yes. that is correct. i have a sneaking suspicion that most psychological processes have been selected for to aid in genetic survival (i.e., passing on your genes). What we consider is attractive is really just healthy (non-symmetry in nature is typically a sign of a mutation or disease). Why men and women find exotic as erotic is probably to maximize genetic diversity. When women deem particular (highly masculinized men) as better short-term sex partners than long-term relationship partners, and other particular (more feminized men), vice versa, what we are seeing is the product of those successful ancestral humans. the second commenter is right - you could talk about this for days, weeks, months, and probably till the end of time - we've only scratched the surface with EP. That said, a good book is Thornhill, R., & Gangestad, S. W (2008). The evolutionary biology of human female sexuality I would recomend a book that explains male human sexuality - but guys are pretty uncomplicated (kidding, but not really). As an aside, it's typically the more investing sex that makes the rules and as such is the crux of the sexual selection process (i.e., men's minds are the way they are as a function of female's demands)

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!

There is lots of research that correlates violence with mating success but it is often very controversial. The Evolution of Desire by David Buss has tons of interesting data on this stuff and research is quite robust. It was something close to 40,000 people studied across nearly 40 different cultures.

Here's a list of their work. They haven't produced many books. Mostly articles. If you're interested in Evolutionary Psychology, I'd recommend checking out [this](https://www.amazon.com/Evolutionary-Psychology-New-Science-Mind/dp/0205992129/ref=sr_1_1? ie=UTF8&qid=1523978075&sr=8-1&keywords=evolutionary+psychology+buss) book. I believe they wrote a few chapters in it

I doubt many academics would consider it a "staple", but I found The Origin of Minds to be quite good:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Origin-Minds-Evolution-Uniqueness/dp/0609605585

This was my textbook for a philo class I took at Clemson University on evolutionary phychology. Amazon has it.

Edit 2: I found this while looking for a review of Nature After Darwin.

• Leda Cosmides & John Tooby: Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer - central paradigm
  
• David Buss: Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (4th Edition) - expensive but comprehensive
  
• Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary edition - theoretical background, easy to read
  
• Steven Pinker: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker - about the problems of cultural determinism
  
  If you're into original research, you should also check out (lots of PDFs)
  
  
• David Buss' Publication list
  
• Leda Cosmides & John Tooby's Publication list

I second your recommendation of Spent.