The notion is that the ideal strategy for men is to have sex with as many women as possible, in order to get their genes into the next generation, while the ideal strategy for women is to commandeer a man's wealth to provide the resources to keep the kid alive, and this idea has been widely ballyhooed. In this view, monogamy is a perpetual tussle between these competing interests -- if only we would admit it to ourselves.
Several years ago, an article by Lance Morrow in "Time" asserted that insights from animal behavior show that "females organize their lives around the getting of resources (food, shelter, nice things) while males organize themselves around the getting of females." Oddly, it does not appear that Morrow himself roams the streets, hungry and homeless, looking for women.
In "Woman: An Intimate Geography," by Natalie Angier, several chapters grapple with received wisdoms of evolutionary psychology. Angier casts substantial doubt on the idea that women evolved to nab rich guys. She argues that in the hunter-gatherer societies in which our tastes are presumed to have evolved, there often are no rich guys. Everyone is equally poor. Nor do women rely on men to provision them -- everybody works. As for our earlier ape ancestors, again females were probably self-supporting. The idea that nobody eats until he brings home the bacon is a new one, evolutionarily speaking.
In the hunt for data to support the idea that men only care about sex and women couldn't care less, there have been many idiot surveys, including the classic, endlessly reported one in which two charming experimenters, male and female, approached people of the opposite sex on a college campus and asked them to have sex. None of the women agreed to have sex with the male experimenter. Three quarters of the men said they would have sex with the female experimenter. Therefore, men are naturally sexually indiscriminate and women are naturally "coy." We have our proof!
The experimenters appear to have forgotten that people don't always tell inquisitive strangers what they're thinking, as pollsters have found to their regret. Experimenters can't know if people would really have had sex with them until they actually put down the clipboard and try, and that's apparently a test few researchers follow through on. Or if they do, they're not telling.
Angier also points out that random strangers requesting sex are apt to seem, and be, more physically dangerous to women than to men. So that even if a lady can think of no better study break than anonymous sex with Clipboard Boy, she may regretfully decline.
As more and more researchers are pointing out flaws in the views of gender originally presented by evolutionary psychology, it's annoying to note that the revisionism is mostly coming from women. This is supposed to be science, tested with actual data. Why do the women have to be the ones to point this stuff out? Significantly, a lot depends on where you stand, and sex roles appear more inevitable to the male evolutionary psychologists who first propounded their genetic immutability.
The other big trend in evolutionary psychology, which also comes from studying non-human primates, is about peacemaking and cooperation. Aggression, while real, isn't the entire story. Nature is red in tooth and claw, but it turns out there are also plenty of hugs to go around.
When Frans de Waal first noticed how hard chimpanzees and other (captive) primates work to keep things from getting out of hand in their groups, he was astonished to find that he was in unknown territory. Much had been written about violence and aggression of all kinds, but very little about how social animals go about the vital task of getting along.
De Waal, the author of "Peacemaking Among Primates," initially had difficulty getting other primatologists to pay attention. They didn't even like the words. "Reconciliation" seemed to de Waal like a good word for the friendly overtures made to each other by apes who had been fighting minutes before, often promoted by a third ape with an interest in group harmony. "Couldn't you call it 'first post-aggression contact'?" colleagues pleaded. Similarly, de Waal notes, Barbara Smuts was reproached for writing of "friendship" in baboons.
De Waal's latest book, "Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals," describes some interesting research into the mutability of monkey nature. He tells of an experiment with rhesus monkeys and stump-tailed monkeys, species with different calls, gestures and styles. Stump-tails are more peaceable than rhesus, less obsessed with hierarchy and who sits where, and, having apparently read de Waal, they are very into reconciliation. After fights they reconcile three times as often as rhesus, and they have a big repertoire of reassuring gestures.