Bonded by Evolution

What We’ve Got Wrong About Love and Connection

De: Paul Eastwick

Narrado por: Paul Eastwick

Brought to you by Penguin.

A ground-breaking look at the science of love and connection – and an urgent corrective to some of our most fundamental assumptions about attraction.

We’re told that what men and women desire from relationship is different and at odds – he’s looking for novelty, she’s looking for commitment; he’s concerned with looks, she’s concerned with status. We’re told that we live in a hierarchy of romantic inequality, in which desirability is predetermined by a narrow set of characteristics and where some people are marriage material while others are wired for promiscuity. Such ideas have their roots in a branch of science called evolutionary psychology, and over the past few decades its ideas have permeated our culture and fuelled a narrative that inspires despair and anxiety – and, in its most extreme form, misogyny and violence.

But this narrative is unscientific. The truth about human attraction – and the way evolution plays out in our romantic lives – is much more interesting and optimistic.

Bonded by Evolution offers a radical new picture of the roots of enduring chemistry. Distilling evolutionary biology, anthropology and psychology and informed by his pathbreaking research and original experiments at the Attraction and Relationships Research Laboratory in California, psychology professor Paul Eastwick reveals how attraction is best depicted as a process of finding – and, often, creating – a compatible relationship. Once we understand how ancestral humans sought compatible partners in small networks, we can build a clearer – and brighter – picture of how attraction, sex and relationships really work.

© Paul Eastwick 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Reseñas de la Crítica

One of the most joyfully uplifting antidotes to 21st-century gloom, and a call for the rising numbers of single young people to get off their phones and back out there in the real dating world.

His new book Bonded By Evolution dismantles myths round sex-based age gaps (women are just as inclined as men to desire younger partners, apparently) and makes the case that men find ambition and high earnings desirable in women – even though the likes of Andrew Tate would have people believe career women are an abomination. Eastwick’s main observation is that the best data arises from watching how men and women interact in real life, rather than mining information from dating sites and swipes.

I was fascinated by our piece this week about Paul Eastwick’s new book, Bonded by Evolution, which explores how what we think we want from a heterosexual romantic relationship (to nutshell it: women, power; men, youth) is not actually the case. There are similar crossed wires in the way we think about fashion.