CoursesCourse 9
Sex, love, and romantic relationships
Evolution shaped our bodies, and perhaps some of our wants. This course asks what evolutionary psychology can tell us about sex, attraction, marriage, and love, what it cannot, and where its claims are still disputed.
Start lesson 1Lessons
- 1 Why do we want what we want?Charles Darwin once made a list to decide whether to marry. Evolutionary psychology asks where the wants behind a list like that came from, and how to tell a tested explanation from a good story.
- 2 Why there are two sexesSex is costly, and some animals do without it. How it began, what makes a male and a female, and why a clownfish can change from one to the other.
- 3 Choosing a partnerDarwin said a peacock’s feather made him sick. His idea of sexual selection asks who chooses whom, and what studies of attraction really show.
- 4 Passion, companionship, and what to keepWhy do people marry? Passionate love burns and companionate love lasts, and an account of where our wants came from is not a guide to how to live.
You’ll be able to
- Explain what evolutionary psychology claims about human nature, and use a short list of questions to tell a tested explanation from a good story.
- Describe why sexual reproduction exists, what makes an animal male or female, and how varied sex is in nature.
- Summarize what studies find about mate choice and attraction, from the costs of reproduction to proximity, looks, and similarity, and where the findings are contested or come only from some societies.
- Tell passionate love from companionate love, compare arranged and chosen marriage, and explain why an account of where our wants came from is not a guide to how to live.
About this course
This course covers 性，爱与浪漫关系 (Sex, Love, and Romantic Relationships), the part of psychology that asks where our sexual and romantic wants come from. It continues from Course 8, The journey of life, which followed the history of life from fish to humans and asked whether humans were ever the goal. Here we ask what that history can and cannot tell us about the most human of subjects.
The argument and examples lead. Around them we add what a reader needs to weigh them: background from biology and history, the views of critics where the science is disputed, and findings from China and the United States side by side. Evolutionary psychology is a contested field, and in several places we have replaced a claim that was too sure of itself with what the studies actually found. Each lesson says which parts are well established, which are disputed, and which are the course’s own additions.