Welcome to the After-On podcast. I'm your host, Rob Reed.

And this is a series of conversations with thinkers, founders, and scientists.

Take a little time and stretch out because these talks are unhurry and meant to bring you

to a top percentile understanding of something important.

Also, whether you're ready to start up score ideas, a techie or a lit major, take your

time, engage your mind, and you'll be glad you did it.

Especially this week when we'll be talking to...

Born athologist and evolutionary heretic Richard Prum.

Richard is the author of an extraordinary book called The Evolution of Beauty.

Just in April, it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category of General Nonfiction.

It didn't win, but it was one of just two finalists, and the Pulitzer is pretty much

the highest award in American literature.

His book was also listed by The New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2017.

I believe these distinctions were richly deserved, and I say this as a pretty heavy consumer

of books on Darwinian forces.

I've just always been fascinated by evolutionary biology, and also the related field of evolutionary

psychology, which tries to explain how hundreds of thousands of years of selection pressure

have hardwired human minds to have certain perspectives, dispositions, and behaviors.

One's that made sense when our ancestors were struggling to survive in caves and roaming

the savanna, but can be extremely maladaptive in the modern world, like cravings for fatty

foods which were extremely rare gold mines of precious calories in the ancient past,

but are cheap and ubiquitous today, and deadly in quantities that no ancient human ever

...