This article was taken from the May 2013 issue of Wired magazine.
Scientists engaged with the media quickly learn that they can't control how their research is used. A few years ago I was astonished to find that many members of the "seduction community" had read my book The Mating Mind, about how sexual choices shaped our evolution. In their acronym-heavy quest for sexual self-transformation by becoming "pick-up artists" (PUAs), these men had become avid consumers of my field, evolutionary psychology (EP).
Neil Strauss's 2005 book The Game listed a few ways in which EP was influencing PUAs, by framing male/female dynamics in a Darwinian context. David DeAngelo, a dating specialist, told me that: "Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene and Matt Ridley's The Red Queen were the 'gateway drugs' to EP for me. It became clear that animals go through mating rituals, and that humans have one as well. This led to unlocking some of the reasons why men who were successful at attracting women were able to do it with such counterintuitive approaches."
Read more at Wired.
