As my title indicates, in contrast to the contributors before me, i would like to point out some serious downsides of the book at hand. First though, i want to point out that it definitely is an interesting volume, with some quite important contributions. The downside mentioned above consists of a few articles which are outright bad, in that they either seem overly pan-adaptionistic or/and one cannot help but get the impression listening to a child screaming 'I'm right I'm right I'm right!'. A prime example of this last vice are 2 of the editors themselves, namely Tooby and Cosmides in their introduction article, which sadly clutters the book for already 130 of its about 600 pages. To me, they seem to be a prime example of investigators that badly need to step back for a while from their work, to free their minds and maybe become a little bit more open for contrasting views. Their dogmatic approach is almost ridiculed by their intense attacks on dogmatism they perceive on the side of social scientists.It might be a more promising approach to not inherit the mistakes of ones opponents. An example for pan-adaptionism, among some others, is Mr. Pinker. I don't think he needs further introduction here. He has some valid points, but mainly he relies on rhetoric to make up for missing research. There are some quite valuable articles in the book as well, so for example the one by J.Barkow or the research by Silverman/Eals. They make the book worth reading, if one keeps a keen eye for possible mistakes, overeagerness or unappropriate simplifications. The book rates somewhere between 2 and 3 stars for myself, since i don't believe in excessive superlatives as is often exhibited in these rating systems - meaning, ppl either scoring items with 5 or 1 star.
