It is so easy to be swept up in the stories being told by evolutionary psychologists and nativists about human behavior. But as a dog lover, it is also easy to think that we know more than we do about why different breeds (for example, herding dogs, pointers) behave in the way that they do. This book blew away my assumptions and opened my eyes to these issues with real stories about real research. Great!

This book tries to clear away lots of "bedtime stories for adults" and to return the inquiry into the origins of behavior to a scientific basis. Science should have both an empirical basis, and predictive power. The nativists theories, as described by Blumberg, have neither characteristic -- they are based on over-interpretation and extrapolation from poorly designed experiments.

I largely agree with the Publisher's Weekly review. The highlight of this book for me is the contrast the author draws between many well designed experiments whose goal is to gain a detailed mechanistic understanding of the roots of behavior, and the overreaching of the nativist school. The detailed description of experimental design is also one of the highlights of the author's previous book, Body Heat, that I also heartily endorse.