What is the function of pain? Is everybody homosexual? Do we discriminate against our children? Why are young prostitutes more successful than older ones? Why do appreciative audiences all over the world clap their hands? And were we once all black?
A serious study tempered with humour and self-effacement, this book makes the connection between insights from Darwin’s theory of evolution and our everyday behaviour. Nelissen’s starting points are observations on the street, in the train, during meetings or family gatherings, or gleaned from newspapers and other media. After posing leading questions and finding apposite answers he goes on to make clear and credible the idea that our distant ancestors’ genes still lie at the root of the decisions we make and the things we do.
Darwin in the Supermarket or how evolution influences our behaviour daily' is made up of short texts, distilling the science into manageable portions. The author continually speaks to his readers and integrates their responses into his text by concurring with or contradicting them. This rhetorical strategy makes what he writes all the more convincing.
Mark Nelissen is a professor emeritus in behavioural biology at the university of Antwerp. He taught Human Behaviour: behavioural biology and evolutionary psychology, biological anthropology, cellular biology and animal welfare. He is a member of, among others, the European Society of Human Ethology, the International Primatological Society, the Human Evolution and Behavior Network and the American Anthropological Association. He has made it his personal mission to spread the insights of Darwinism with as many people as he can.
His book, Darwin in the supermarket, was published in Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Korean and Chinese. Finally, I'm old! was published in Korean.
* The website www.colibri.bg is optimized 
