Book Review: Male Aggression and Female Peace-Making

Abstract

Reviews the book, Sex and war: How biology explains warfare and terrorism and offers a path to a safer world by Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden (2008). This book present a firsthand account of war through a scientific lens. This comprehensive volume argues that humans raping, torturing, and killing other humans reflects an innate male predisposition, and provides evidence to support this claim from fields as diverse as biology, political science, sociology, history, archeology, medicine, and evolutionary psychology. This book not only delves into the deepest recesses of human behavior to explain warfare and terrorism, but also provides hope in the prevention of these deadly endeavors. On the whole, this book is insightful, engaging, and well-researched. It offers 554 references for the reader to pursue further readings. The footnotes are actually as interesting as the main text. It does a good job of balancing a factual look at a global problem with a human touch. Indeed, a primary strength of this book lies in its stories, which the authors skillfully use to piece together a well-articulated volume on applied evolutionary psychology. This book is about real life and it provides a compelling analysis of the kinds of stories seen in the news, alongside more personal stories revealed by the authors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)