Unfit professor of literature in his late 30's starts MMA training, goes a proper fight in the end. A very simple plot, but it works. Gottschall is prone to overgeneralizations, but that does not concern the essence of the book. The book is a good introduction to MMA for people who do not know much about it. Recommended. ( )

I spent a lot of this book being glad that I am a single woman. I can't say that people like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mike Tyson strike me as attractive.

I found the parts where he discussed how useless certain martial arts are unless one is fighting by the same conventions very interesting. Malcolm Gladwell comment in his book David and Goliath that the real reason that David won is that he didn't fight Goliath on the expected terms.

I think that Gottschall's statistical arguments would be improved if he also had within group statistics. That is, while men as a whole may enjoy fighting more than woman, is the inclination to fight evenly spread among men and if not, why not? How about fighting among women? I can see intellectually why it would be a good thing to be able to fight, but I don't actually want to hit someone. My judo matches always ended in a draw, because I couldn't bear to throw my opponent. Had I had a more aggressive opponent, that might have changed.

To each his own, so long as it doesn't lead to aggression outside the cage or ring. It does bother me a bit that when Mike Tyson bit off part of Evander Holyfield's ear, people argued that professional fighting made him unable to control himself, so he wasn't entirely to blame. ( )

I regularly watch mixed martial arts fights so I was intrigued by the premise of this book which offered an insight into why we fight. But I was ultimately disappointed because the author, after positing many possible reasons why we watch fight - attracting women, preparation for war, signalling to avoid bigger fights - seems to debunk each (or at least that was my impression) so that I don't really know if there is a grand unifying theory as to why we fight. Perhaps such a thing just doesn't exist. ( )