Donald Symons

Donald Symons (born 1942) is an American anthropologist best known as one of the founders of evolutionary psychology, and for pioneering the study of human sexuality from an evolutionary perspective. His 1979 book, The Evolution of Human Sexuality, is considered by many evolutionary psychologists to be one of the classics in the field and was instrumental in helping to launch an evolutionary perspective on human behavior. His most recent work, with Catherine Salmon, is Warrior Lovers, an evolutionary analysis of slash fiction.

He is presently Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.[1]

Selected publications

• Symons, D. (1978) Play and Aggression: A Study of Rhesus Monkeys. Columbia University Press
• Symons, D. (1979) The Evolution of Human Sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195029070
• Symons, D. (1987) "If we're all Darwinians, what's the fuss about?" in Crawford, Smith & Krebs, Sociobiology and Psychology, 121—146.
• Symons, D. (1989) "A critique of Darwinian anthropology," in Ethology and Sociobiology, 10: 131—144.
• Symons, D. (1990) "Adaptiveness and adaptation," in Ethology and Sociobiology, 11: 427—444.
• Symons, D. (1992) "On the use and misuse of Darwinism in the study of human behavior" in Barkow, J., Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (eds) (1992) The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (New York: Oxford University Press)
• Symons, D. (1993) "The stuff that dreams aren't made of: Why wake-state and dream-state sensory experiences differ." Cognition, 47: 181-217.
• Salmon, C. and Symons, D. (2003) Warrior Lovers. Yale University Press.