Tuesday, April 27, 2010

It's amusing to behold unholy alliances between my enemies

Obligatory acknowledgment of Elizabeth Nolan Brown's nice piece in Doublethink attacking the unholy alliance between socially conservative women and the pick-up artist movement. Her explanation for this seemingly bizarre phenomenon -- that the enemy of my enemy is my friend -- is quite sensible. See my own take on Allen's piece when it first came out.

I'm reminded again of the Tyler Cowen question, "What book would you like to read that doesn't exist?" I would love to read a book by an actual evolutionary biologist examining the PUA movement's use of evolutionary biology concepts. Also, containing some history on how this particular popularization of evolutionary biology arose. Perhaps a book might be a bit much -- I don't know -- but a long New York Times magazine article by someone like Steven Pinker on this topic would still be great. My gut feeling is that the Roissys of the world may not know their science as well as they think they do, but I'd love to read a real expert holding forth on these questions.

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