The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology,   ISBN:9780679763994

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It is one of the greatest books i have come across in the 21st century.
it goes that deep into living being.
Fantastic details.
1``

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An excellent Read! I was always fascinated by the subject and now my curiosity is aptly satisfied. What's more is that the vague ideas have turned into questions that I can actually formulate as I continue to look into the subject of Evolutionary Philology, which has, admittedly, captured my mind...

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Despite being written back in 1994, this book holds up remarkably well in terms of modern developments in the field of neuroscience.

Neuroscience is of and concerning the science of human behavior. Unlike predecessor inquiries into human behavior neuroscience operates on the premise that just as external human morphology has been affected by evolution so too has internal human behavior.

Using the life of Charles Darwin himself Robert Wright focuses key areas addressed by neuroscience such as how do we arrive at our mate selections, how do modulate our investment of resources among family and society and how is it that evolution has effected individual human behavior so that it sometimes subliminates itself to the greater good of society.

All these questions were and remain hard ones. It is for this reason that this book excellently brings new students to this exciting field with both the partial illumination of what has been learned and the future promise of what yet remains to be learned.

For those who's interest was piqued by the sections of this book relating to human sexuality and mating I would highly recommend Helen Fisher's Why We Love as well as Matt Ridley's The Red Queen. For those interested in the issues in this book related to reciprocal ultruism I would recommend Matt Ridley's Origins of Virtue, William Poundstone's excellent Prisoner's Dilema as well as Jeffrey Moses' Oneness. For those interested in just subsequent overall treatments I would suggest Steven Pinker's How We Think. And finally for those interested in a fuller discussion of the Sociobiology controversy raised by E.O. Wilson's book of the same name I would recommend Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate.

There's a lot to this book because it's an accurate read of a field for which there is a lot of interesting research. I would highly recommend it.

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I'm a senior anthro student who had to read this for Biobehavioral Anthropology. The book has some interesting ideas and facts about Darwin's life. However it often goes off on a tangent to prove an isolated point and is oddly written (do you want to read an entire book like this in parenthesis)?

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This book has been described as one of the bibles of Evolutionary Psychology, and it is a good one. Of course, to even begin to buy into what Wright is talking about, I suppose you must agree with the fundamental tenets of Darwinian theory. If you reject the Theory of Evolution, this book will quickly lose you and thus is not recommended for anyone looking for a quick explanation of the topic so that they can then throw rocks at it. Since the book frames much of its content around speculations on the life of Charles Darwin, it might be particularly annoying to someone who rejects Evolution. For my part, I thought the technique of viewing Darwin's life through the lens of Evolutionary Psychology was entertaining and I enjoyed those sections. If nothing else, it gave me some biographical background on Darwin that I had never read before.

To me, that the basic tenets of Evolutionary Psychology are true seem stunningly obvious. We can observe birds building nests or our dogs spinning around a few times before laying down and know that this is instinctual behavior. Knowing that humans, too, are animals, it is logical to then wonder whether homo sapiens is also programmed to follow any instincts. And seeing that certain human traits are universal - a smile means the same thing in every culture, the death of a child is devastating everywhere - there is no doubt that humans have certain characteristics hard-wired into them genetically as well.

Wright proceeds to argue that it is now possible for Science to begin making some inroads into figuring out which human behaviors are instinctual/genetic and which are learned. He acknowledges that this is a fuzzy area and with that caveat begins to make some interesting speculations, particularly in the realm of human sexual behavior. I found many of his ideas to be intriguing. I thought others were clearly a stretch, but it was also obvious to me that Wright was not attempting to argue with any degree of certainty that any of his speculations were true. No good scientist would. This is as much a philosophical tome as a scientific one.

Anyone who has read any history knows that Man is not a particularly "moral" animal, and Wright points this out by adding some additional examples to the list. Yet I thought he argues fairly convincingly that what most cultures hold up as "moral" are behaviors that benefit the group, while those things that are generally considered "immoral" are any selfish behaviors that might be considered detrimental to group survival. There is no doubt that if I successfully steal a million dollars it will increase the likelihood of my survival, and that of my family. And yet, if we were all hard-wired to think that way, and none of us cooperated, we would, as a species, quickly perish. So it is not surprising that we began to develop wiring that almost painfully forces us to do things for the common good (as defined by our particular culture) over our own interests. Thus "having a conscience" appears to be one of those things hard-wired into us, though it is hardly a fool-proof mechanism. Since Man is hard-wired by evolution to seek both his own personal survival as well as the survival of the group (most people, anyway), there are going to be times when the two competing drives conflict, causing internal dilemmas of the conscience. This dilemma, of course, is what Kant was rambling on about in his musings on the "Categorical Imperative."

Which just goes to show that the basic precepts of Evolutionary Psychology have been understood for a long time. The only thing that has changed are the terms and definitions. Even someone exclaiming: "The Devil made me do it," is merely expressing how internal selfish drives overrode the newer, less potent drives to hew to social rules.

In a sense, this is a book that should be welcomed by those with a "conservative" viewpoint, because it clearly supports the idea of reinforcing natural tendencies in the plastic human mind to choose the good of the many over the good of the self by imposing training, discipline, and education. But we all already knew that...