The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love and Sex [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

'Dangerous Passion' written by David Buss is a nicely accessible work for the layperson interested in the topic of human sexual jealousy spun with a sociobiological take. Written to emphasize the 'battle of the sexes' in mating behavior, its central message fits in nicely with the goal of writing somewhat sensationalized popular science.

What is this message? It's that the fairly socially taboo emotion of jealousy is actually a desirable trait, perfectly natural, and proven to have been an evolutionary adaptation.

So what's new? Such an assertion has been a foregone conclusion amongst biologists for many, many years. Rather than a simple emotion that can be suppressed or un-learned (a lame, naive notion often posited by some members of the super-liberal new-age set), jealousy is actually an instinct. Like many other instincts, it has been selected for and gradually honed over the eons of mankind's development. Buss gets this point across in the book very adeptly.

Ultimately, however, this book slightly disappoints the reader who is seeking something a bit meatier, something that is able to proceed past that which has already been covered many, many times by many other books on human socio-sexual behavior. Rather than trying to be so much a cursory lesson on Sociobiology 101 with a rehash of all the new theories thrown in, 'Dangerous Passion' could have focused more on integrating sociobiological concepts with detailed observations and field work. When it does do this, it does it quite well. Particularly fascinating was the measured correlation between the likelihood of infidelity and the 'mate value' of different partners.

Still, I like how Buss cleanly gets his often-forgotten message across. I'd give it four stars as an introductory work; if Buss had just further explored similar findings and gone out on a limb more with the specifics of mating strategy, I would have given this book five stars.

I liked this book much more than Buss's earlier "Evolution of Desire". He seems to have matured immensely as both a thinker and a writer, so this book has many more insights into behavior in intimate human relationships.

The basic thesis here is that rather than being pathological, such things as jealousy and concern about a mate's fidelity (and other items we'd wish didn't exist) are evolved behaviors which gave our ancestor's a reproductive advantage. These things are especially important to males, who have no certainty of paternity. By flipping the view around from sickness and disdain to a response to reproductive risks, many things which once seemed to make no sense all of sudden become clear and understandable, even reasonable to some extent. Of course this doesn't make Buss an apologist for bad behavior since his take is that certain types of relationship problems can't be solved without grasping their underlying motivation. And Buss does all this with writing which is both easily accessible and illuminating of the depths of psychology.

As a (physical) scientist I have no problem taking ev-psych as a working model of reality rather than The Truth. Since I understand it's just a way of looking at things, I don't have the trouble with it that some do. In that sense, this book is some of the best ev-psych, combining science with obvious personal insight and a plausible amount of extrapolation. It deals expertly with topics which are difficult to write about from a fresh perspective.

In his latest book, Buss uses evolutionary logic to explain the sexual double standard. Jealousy, infidelity, and murder have been with us since the dawn of time, long before the advent of the media, Hollywood films, and other modern phenomena, which are often blamed for the more horrific aspects of the human psyche. In the book, Buss does a much better job of explaining how he estimates the rate of infidelity than he does in The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating. He averages numerous studies to come up with the estimate of how many men and women engage in "at least one affair" during a marriage. This allows the perceptive reader to reason that there must be a heck of a lot more extrapair nooky going on than we would like to believe. Buss also points out that many men do not limit themselves to just one extramarital partner when engaging in clandestine liasons, a fact that many women do not always seem to realize. The most humorous aspect of the book is in regards to the "derogation of competitors." Didn't we all want to know that female intrasexual catfighting was adapative and psychologically therapeutic in raising self-esteem? On a more serious note, it was sad to read that the work done by Buss and his colleagues is often met with "outrage" and viewed as controversial by those who fear misuse of such information about differences between men and women. Truth exists in the world regardless of discovery by scientists, and human behavior existed long before it was ever named as such. Knowledge of what makes us tick helps us to understand ourselves and our relation to each other in the "co-evolutionary spiral." There will always be someone who misuses or exploits new information just as previous information continues to be misused and exploited. This is nothing new and is as much a part of the dark side of human nature as is jealousy. Science cannot hide because some information turned up is psychologically threatening or has the potential to be misused. Buss does a great job ending the book by pointing out that we may gain "emotional wisdom" as a result of scientific discovery.