For a lay reader looking for an introduction to ev-psych, I advise against Wright’s “The Moral Animal”, suggested in Eliezer’s first comment. It’s been several years since I read it, but I remember it being boring, unenlightening, and bogged down with biographical vignettes of Charles Darwin. It might be a good intro for people who enjoy history and literature more than science texts, but this is pure speculation—I know few of these people and rarely give them books. If you want a light intro without the fluff, I’d suggest “Evolutionary Psychology: An Introduction” by Workman and Reader, a completely nontechnical textbook that actually spends more time explaining ev-psych than trying to convince the reader it’s not an evil, misogynistic pseudoscience. It’s the sort of text high-school (or even middle-school) teachers would use in a parallel universe where “evolutionary psychology” has a redundant adjective.
For a lay reader looking for an introduction to ev-psych, I advise against Wright’s “The Moral Animal”, suggested in Eliezer’s first comment. It’s been several years since I read it, but I remember it being boring, unenlightening, and bogged down with biographical vignettes of Charles Darwin. It might be a good intro for people who enjoy history and literature more than science texts, but this is pure speculation—I know few of these people and rarely give them books. If you want a light intro without the fluff, I’d suggest “Evolutionary Psychology: An Introduction” by Workman and Reader, a completely nontechnical textbook that actually spends more time explaining ev-psych than trying to convince the reader it’s not an evil, misogynistic pseudoscience. It’s the sort of text high-school (or even middle-school) teachers would use in a parallel universe where “evolutionary psychology” has a redundant adjective.