Sex, Murder and the Meaning of Life

Sex, Murder and the Meaning of Life Plot Summary

Introduction

I still remember the moment when my understanding of human nature shifted dramatically. It was a warm summer evening, and I was sitting on my porch watching people stroll by. A young couple walked hand in hand, laughing at some private joke. Nearby, a mother scolded her child for wandering too far. Two teenage boys playfully shoved each other, competing for attention from a group of girls. In that ordinary scene, I suddenly saw something extraordinary—patterns of behavior that transcended culture and time, connecting us to our evolutionary past. We often think of ourselves as rational beings, making conscious choices based on careful deliberation. Yet beneath our sophisticated reasoning lies a complex web of unconscious motivations shaped by millions of years of evolution. These hidden forces influence whom we find attractive, how we compete for status, why we form alliances, and even our deepest moral intuitions. By understanding these evolutionary underpinnings, we gain profound insights into our behavior—not to reduce ourselves to mere biological machines, but to appreciate the elegant complexity of human nature and perhaps guide our choices more wisely in a world very different from the one our minds evolved to navigate.

Chapter 1: The Mating Game: Beauty, Status, and Attraction

When I was nineteen years old, I took the subway into Greenwich Village, dressed in my finest bell-bottoms and a peacoat. My brilliant plan was to hang around until an attractive young woman started flirting with me. After standing awkwardly for a while with no success, I finally heard the classic pick-up line: "Don't I know you?" To my surprise, it wasn't a braless young hippie with flowing blonde hair who approached me, but a middle-aged man in a conservative suit. It turned out I had briefly met this fellow earlier when he visited the hotel where I worked as a doorman. We had a pleasant conversation, and he explained that standing alone in Greenwich Village was more likely to attract homosexual men looking for a one-night stand than women. He also told me something fascinating—that homosexual men, like heterosexual men, are more proactive than women when searching for new mating opportunities. This casual encounter sparked my curiosity about the similarities and differences in mating strategies across sexual orientations. Years later, I conducted research that revealed striking patterns. Homosexual men share with heterosexual men not only a tendency to be more proactive in seeking partners but also a host of other similarities. Both groups prioritize physical attractiveness in partners and care little about wealth or status. When my colleague Rich Keefe and I studied age preferences, we found that older gay men, like older heterosexual men, are attracted to much younger partners. This creates a challenge for older homosexual men since younger gay men, unlike some younger women, aren't typically attracted to older partners—they prefer young men too. This pattern is puzzling from several perspectives. Homosexual men's attraction to younger partners isn't reinforced through rewards (younger gay men don't encourage it). It doesn't result from adopting societal values (otherwise gay men and straight women would want the same things). And it's not the product of conscious rational decision-making (older homosexual men often complain of loneliness that could be alleviated by pairing with other older men). The similarities between gay and straight men suggest that human mating behavior isn't controlled by a simple on/off switch. Although the switch for sexual orientation differs, most other preference settings remain the same. In most ways, other than the direction of their attraction, homosexual men follow mating strategies that would otherwise lead to reproductive success if their targets were women—they seek young, attractive partners and multiple relationships rather than prioritizing status or wealth in potential mates. These patterns reveal how our minds are modular rather than unitary—composed of different systems that can operate independently. Our sexual preferences aren't simply learned cultural norms but complex psychological mechanisms with deep evolutionary roots, even when they're expressed in ways that don't directly lead to reproduction in today's world.

Chapter 2: Survival Instincts: Violence and Self-Protection

Steve Lowry was one of the fellows who used to sit with me on the Arizona State University campus discussing philosophical issues. At first glance, we appeared similar—both tall, long-haired graduate students in clinical psychology who enjoyed playing guitar and discussing topics like phenomenology and existentialism. But we came from radically different backgrounds. Steve had grown up in an upper-middle-class suburb in Ohio and claimed he had never been in a fistfight. Having grown up in a tough New York neighborhood, I found this hard to believe. There were periods during my childhood when I had a fight every day, surrounded by people tougher than me, with a father in prison and friends who would eventually end up there too. My stepfather Bob had middle-class aspirations and helped get me out of Queens away from the neighborhood ruffians. But Bob had been raised in the same neighborhood, so his parental advice still occasionally involved a punch in the jaw. He was a proud NRA member with a gun rack in the kitchen. When drunk, he would lose his pleasant disposition and threaten to shoot my brother and me if we tried to intervene in his battles with our mother. One evening, my stepfather was especially out of control. He came at me with fists flying, shouting threats. In a scene from the movies, I managed to land a square hit on his jaw that sent him flying across the room, where he fell unconscious. My brother looked at me, pointed to the guns Bob had just been threatening us with, and asked, "Should we kill him?" I actually had to think about it before saying, without complete resolve, "Nah, we'd better not." This background made me no stranger to thoughts of homicide. When my colleague Norbert Schwarz expressed doubt at my assumption that everyone had homicidal fantasies, I thought he was joking. When I surveyed other colleagues, they were split—some claimed they'd never had such thoughts, while others accused them of denial. For experimental psychologists, this kind of disagreement signals an interesting hypothesis waiting to be tested. Working with graduate student Virgil Sheets, I surveyed 760 college students about their violent thoughts. The results were clear: 76 percent of men and 62 percent of women admitted to having homicidal fantasies. These numbers likely underestimate the true incidence, as people tend to give socially desirable answers and selectively forget evidence that they aren't "good." We found interesting patterns in these fantasies. Both sexes primarily targeted men, with 85 percent of men's fantasies and 65 percent of women's involving killing a man. Men were more likely to fantasize about killing strangers (59 percent versus 33 percent for women), while women more often contemplated killing romantic partners (27 percent versus 7 percent for men). Men's fantasies also tended to last longer and involve more detailed planning. These findings reveal how our minds contain built-in threat-detection systems calibrated to potential dangers in our ancestral environment. The tendency for both sexes to target men in violent fantasies reflects real-world patterns where men commit approximately 90 percent of homicides worldwide. Our mental mechanisms don't just randomly generate thoughts but produce specific patterns tied to adaptive challenges our ancestors faced—protecting ourselves from violence, managing relationships, and navigating social hierarchies.

Chapter 3: Social Minds: How We Process Others

To a refugee from New York's icy winters, Arizona State University's sun-soaked campus was paradise. At every opportunity, I would join other psychology students on the main mall to enjoy the blue skies while discussing the week's readings. But meaningful conversation became impossible during the fifteen-minute break between classes, when the mall filled with students—including many beautiful young women dressed as if auditioning for a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Something curious happened as the crowd thinned out. When hundreds of people passed by every few seconds, the crowd seemed mostly composed of fashion models. But when the flow slowed to a dozen per minute, there appeared to be many more average-looking folks. What happened to all the stunning women after classes started? I began to suspect that my friends and I were biasing our estimates. When scanning a large crowd, a man's eyes will fixate on the most physically attractive woman. When she passes, he scans the next few hundred people until his eye catches the next beauty. But when the river of people shrinks to a small stream, you look at each individual and compute a less biased average. It would take two decades and sophisticated eye-tracking equipment before I could test this hypothesis. Years later, my research team acquired a state-of-the-art eye-tracker that allowed us to observe exactly what caught people's attention in crowds. In our laboratory experiments, we showed subjects small groups of faces and tracked where their eyes lingered. Men looking at these simulated crowds spent almost twice as long on beautiful women as on average-looking women and were especially accurate at remembering whether they had seen a particular pretty woman. When viewing men, however, they showed no such bias. Women's attention patterns were more complex. Like men, they spent more time looking at beautiful women and remembered them well. Unlike men, women also looked selectively at handsome men. Surprisingly though, despite this attention, women were unable to remember those good-looking men later—a violation of the usual connection between attention and memory. In further research, we found that when people's attentional capacities were strained by rapidly presented crowds, men overestimated the number of beautiful women present. Women also overestimated gorgeous women but didn't overestimate handsome men. Beautiful women capture everyone's attention and monopolize downstream cognitive processes, while handsome men grab women's eyes but don't hold their minds. These findings reveal how our minds allocate cognitive resources functionally—we pay special attention to people who might be especially relevant to our survival or reproductive success. Our perceptual and memory systems aren't neutral recording devices but specialized tools shaped by evolution to prioritize information most relevant to our ancestral challenges. Understanding these built-in biases helps explain why our subjective experience of the world often differs from objective reality in systematic and predictable ways.

Chapter 4: Deep Rationality: The Logic Behind Irrational Choices

Almost four decades have passed since I was that long-haired graduate student who walked into a bookstore to avoid studying for his doctoral qualifying exams. Although I still like to think of myself as a young rebel, I now see a "distinguished" gray-haired fellow looking back at me in the mirror. Some of my once-youthful graduate student fellows have retired. But not me—my retirement account is so thin that if I were to quit working in the next few years, I would either have to move to Ecuador or turn to panhandling. Although I have underfunded my retirement account, I've spent well over half a million dollars on my two sons. From an economic perspective, this feature of my money handling has been decidedly irrational. For my older son Dave, I could have insisted he attend ASU where he was offered free room, board, and tuition. Instead, I agreed to shell out tens of thousands of dollars so he could attend NYU's film school. Since then, I've given him additional tens of thousands for graduate school, a house down payment, and help with his children's expenses. Besides financial resources, I've contributed many hours helping Dave care for his children. Time is money; during those hours, I could have been tending to retirement investments. How do I feel about all that spent money and time? From a purely rational economic perspective, I should be sending both sons a monthly bill and making angry calls when they fall behind on payments. But I don't feel anger or resentment toward my sons. Instead, I feel guilty that I cannot do more. Besides my "irrational" contributions to my children, I've given thousands to environmental organizations, gun violence prevention, and healthcare reform advocacy. I've been teaching my younger son to be generous toward others, recently giving him a dollar to put in a Salvation Army kettle before we bought an anonymous Christmas gift for a poor family at his school. Does this generosity make me a saint? Has my fistfighting sex-obsessed younger self magically transformed? Not quite. My apparently selfless behaviors are, from an evolutionary perspective, at least as self-serving as my seemingly selfish ones. And yours are too. On the classic model of rational man, humans are reasonably well-informed decision-makers who make choices designed to maximize their "utility" or expected satisfaction. But behavioral economists have challenged this view, demonstrating people's tendencies to use simplistic and irrational biases. They distinguish between "Econs," who make deeply reasoned decisions after considering all relevant information, and "Humans," who make less omniscient decisions informed by limited cognitive heuristics. But this view only captures part of the truth. Although we don't systematically calculate all potential costs and benefits before making choices, our biases reflect the influence of functionally relevant motivations. Our failures to make simplistically "selfish" choices reflect what I call "deep rationality"—decision-making designed not to maximize immediate personal reward but long-term genetic success. From an evolutionary perspective, investing in my children makes perfect sense. My genes would gain no benefit if I made the more "selfish" decision to stop investing in my sons and grandchildren so I could retire early and buy a fancy recreational vehicle. What appears irrational in terms of personal financial optimization is deeply rational when viewed through the lens of inclusive fitness—the evolutionary currency that truly matters.

Chapter 5: Emergent Complexity: From Individual Biases to Social Order

Every day before school, my little brother and I donned identical blue pants, white shirts, and blue ties—the uniform marking us as students at St. Joseph's Catholic elementary school. There was also a public school on our block, P.S. 70, but our mother didn't even like us playing in the schoolyard there. What troubled her wasn't just that the public school kids were rowdier than the nun-fearing youngsters at St. Joseph's, but that the schoolyard was a hangout for the Garrisons, a gang of teenage hooligans who wore leather jackets and tight jeans. By the time I started high school, the Garrisons were gone, several to prison. But there was a new generation of troublemakers hanging out in P.S. 70's schoolyard. Although several had been my childhood playmates, I joined a different crowd—teenagers who had graduated from St. Joseph's and gone on to Catholic high schools. My parents disapproved of this new group too, hoping I would instead hang out with fellow students from Regis, an elite Jesuit school in Manhattan. My new associates, who called themselves the Forty-sixth Street Boys, weren't Regis intellectuals but mostly students from lower-tier Catholic high schools. Some had even dropped out to attend Bryant High, where students sniffed glue in the restrooms and a full-time policeman patrolled the grounds. Rather than spending time in the library, the Forty-sixth Street Boys hung around the park smoking cigarettes, flirting with girls, and listening to doo-wop music. Looking back, I see my parents were absolutely right—the Forty-sixth Street Boys were a terrible influence. They ridiculed me for attending Regis, bullied me mercilessly, and called me a "punk" when I backed away from fights with guys like Martie Magno, who was built like Al Capone and pounded opponents' heads against the pavement. Although I was at the bottom of this hierarchy, I continued striving for their acceptance instead of hanging out with other intellectually-inclined students. I stopped studying and was expelled from Regis, hoping the tough guys would stop treating me like a nerd. My expulsion wasn't the end of my downward slide. Within six months, I was expelled from another Catholic high school and ended up at Bryant High alongside the glue-sniffers. My parents moved the family to Long Island, partly to get me away from the neighborhood before I followed my biological father's path to Sing Sing prison. Years later, I came to understand how social influence works through a scientific revolution called complexity theory. This approach helps explain how individual decisions feed into networks of social influence, connecting us not only to immediate neighbors but to strangers halfway around the world. All human beings are interconnected in a complex web, like millions of ants in a giant colony. One key insight from complexity theory is self-organization—order often emerges spontaneously from randomness, maintained not by some overseeing authority but by simple, self-centered interactions between local players. Using computer simulations, researchers have shown how neighborhoods can shift from mixed opinions to uniform consensus through simple majority-rules decisions, and how small differences in initial conditions can lead to dramatically different outcomes. What's most fascinating is that there is no Big Brother or central decision-maker running the show. The emergent aggregate is more powerful and immensely more complex than any single individual. The military-industrial complex, the world economy, public opinion—it's all us. The reason it doesn't seem that way is that human society is like a giant ant colony: a product of many little brains making many little decisions in response to narrow local inputs. By understanding these dynamics, we gain insight into how simple selfish biases inside our individual heads combine to create complex and ordered patterns at the societal level—from fashion trends to political movements to economic markets.

Chapter 6: Finding Meaning: Evolution and the Fulfilling Life

After I had written several chapters for a book, I learned I was going to be featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show. I had appeared in a documentary called Science of Sex, and I guessed Oprah or one of her assistants had seen it and thought the topic would interest her audience—people who tune in to hear how to overcome everyday problems, have satisfying relationships, and live more fulfilling lives. As I pondered what insights I might share, I was making lunch for my younger son to take to preschool and calculating how I might squeeze in time with my older son and his two kids before getting to work. I had a backlog of tasks—editing a book, writing research papers, reviewing journal articles, writing recommendation letters, making decisions about grants—not to mention personal obligations like overdue taxes and home repairs. With all I had going on, I should have been miserably anxious, but surprisingly, I felt rather calm and focused—enjoying the simple act of spreading cashew butter on wheat bread, carefully trimming the crust to my son's precise specifications. It struck me that whatever else has happened in my life, my children's needs have always trumped all other demands. Unlike many other things I've done to seek pleasure, time spent with either of my sons has never given me the slightest hangover of regret. Although responding to their needs hasn't always made me euphorically happy, it's the one thing that reliably makes me feel truly fulfilled. I shouldn't have been surprised, given what I know about evolution and behavior. Human beings aren't ultimately designed to seek ecstatic happiness from dawn to dusk but to be linked into a supportive web with other humans. Two bedrock principles of evolutionary biology—kin selection and reciprocal altruism—explain why we're driven to care for family members and do favors for friends and coworkers. Even sexual selection and differential parental investment, typically considered in relation to showing off and having sex, are intimately connected to the process of qualifying to be a parent. This doesn't mean we should all ignore overpopulation and have many children, or make hundreds of superficial social media connections. Rather, it suggests we might find fulfillment by enjoying the natural pleasures of caring for the intimate associates we already have. We can regard time spent with family and friends as a distraction from life's central tasks, or we can slow down and let our brain's social mechanisms savor these experiences. The worst advice I ever received came during my divorce from my first wife: "You've got to do what's right for you." I heard it repeatedly from different people, and even then wondered how doing what was right for me could also be right for my young son. Like many others, I learned the hard way that the mantra should have been "You've got to do what's right for those you love." Research in positive psychology supports this insight. Although family members and friends can often be demanding and annoying on a moment-to-moment basis, people who spend time doing nice things for loved ones are ultimately less depressed and more fulfilled. In one study published in Science, researchers found that people who spent their salary bonuses on others were happier than those who spent it on themselves. In an experiment, students given money to spend on someone else reported greater happiness than those who spent it on themselves, regardless of the amount.

Summary

Throughout human history, we've struggled to understand our own nature. Are we rational beings making conscious choices, or creatures driven by unconscious forces? The evidence reveals we're both—our minds contain sophisticated reasoning abilities alongside ancient motivational systems shaped by millions of years of evolution. These systems aren't arbitrary or irrational but deeply rational, designed to solve problems our ancestors faced repeatedly: finding mates, protecting ourselves from threats, forming alliances, caring for kin, and navigating complex social hierarchies. Understanding these evolutionary underpinnings offers profound insights for our daily lives. First, recognize that what feels like personal happiness may not always align with deeper fulfillment—our minds evolved to seek reproductive success, not subjective well-being. The activities that bring lasting satisfaction often involve caring for others, especially family members and close friends. Second, be aware of how your perceptions and judgments are systematically biased by evolved mechanisms—from overestimating the prevalence of attractive people to making economic decisions that seem irrational but serve deeper evolutionary goals. Finally, appreciate how your individual choices connect to larger social patterns through complex networks of influence. By understanding the hidden forces that shape our behavior, we gain not only self-knowledge but also compassion for others and wisdom to guide our choices in a world very different from the one our minds evolved to navigate.

About Author

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Douglas T. Kenrick

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