Recognition of our deeper evolutionary history can greatly affect how we understand human psychology. Consider human mating. Buss has argued that human mating strategies were designed during the Pleistocene to solve adaptive problems that were unique in shaping human evolution. Accordingly, observing that humans pursue both short- and long-term mating (sometimes indulging in brief infidelities in the context of an ongoing mateship), he interprets these behaviors as aspects of an integrated set of psychological adaptations that unconsciously calculate the reproductive benefits of each strategy. When the potential reproductive benefits of a short-term mating opportunity are greater than the potential costs, these adaptations lead to infidelity.

If we recognize that aspects of our psychology are holdovers of prehuman evolutionary history, we get a very different picture. Indeed, because our closest relatives, the chimpanzee and bonobo, are highly promiscuous species, our lineage likely embarked on the uniquely human leg of its evolutionary journey with a mechanism of lust designed to promote promiscuous mating. Psychological characteristics that subsequently emerged during human evolutionary history were built atop that foundation. And we know that some emotional systems subsequently evolved to promote the pair bonding that is ubiquitous among human cultures but absent in our closest primate relatives. We have no reason, however, to think that mechanisms of lust and pair bonding evolved together as parts of an integrated mating strategy. Indeed, they likely evolved as separate systems, at diverse points in our lineage’s evolutionary history, in response to different adaptive demands, to serve distinct purposes. If this alternative interpretation of human mating psychology is correct, we are not “of one mind” about our sexual relationships. Rather, we possess competing psychological urges. We are pushed toward promiscuity by evolutionarily ancient mechanisms of lust and toward long-term pair bonds by more recently evolved emotional systems. Rather than being driven by an integrated Pleistocene psychology that unconsciously calculates which urge to pursue when, we are torn by independently evolved emotional mechanisms.

   
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