This is an amazingly compact summary of how psychology has alternately embraced and ignored developments in evolutionary theory over the past two centuries. The compactness is largely due to the superb writing, which often effortlessly compresses three points into a single short sentence. So good is the writing that when I tried to isolate extracts to illustrate this they started running into one another! Uncompressed, from another pen, I think this book could easily have run to 400 pages.



I found this book unusual in focusing on psychology alone. The familiar stages in its history took on a wholly new coloring when seen as either the embrace, or more interestingly the denial, of evolutionary theory. I've not seen the two stitched so tightly together, distinct from social science in general and social issues such as racism and eugenics.



The author boldly brings his account up close to the present, facilitating the weighing of how new developments in evolutionary theory such as evolutionary psychology contribute to psychology itself.

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