Editor's note: Earlier this year, I was delighted to interview David Buss, pioneer of evolutionary psychology about his new book When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault. One of the first psychologists to apply Darwinian insights to humans, his research over the past three decades has focused on psychological sex differences, mating strategies, and sexual conflict. He is the author of several books including The Evolution of Desire, and The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill, and currently runs the Buss Lab at the University of Texas. What follows is a transcript of our discussion, lightly edited for readability.

CLAIRE LEHMANN: Well, it's a pleasure to finally talk to you Professor Buss! A pioneer of evolutionary psychology and sex differences research, how long has it been since you started researching sex differences?

DAVID BUSS: Boy, I think too long, maybe over 30 years. I've been researching sex differences since when I was in graduate school. I had multiple mentors, but one of my mentors was a woman named Jeanne Block. And, she had this theory that the reason that any sex differences existed whatsoever was because parents dressed up girls in pink and boys in blue.

She made a science documentary, The Pinks and the Blues. And, I just remember in graduate school feeling very dubious about these claims. There are sex differences, for example, in rough and tumble play, etc., and these emerge very early in life. Is it really because of parents dressing girls in pink and boys in blue?

So maybe that was the start of my questioning the orthodox interpretation of sex differences—which was largely sex difference denialism back then, and still to this day.

CL: So when did social constructionism become the orthodoxy? Was it around the 1960s or 1970s?

DB: Well, I think that, no. That label, maybe. But the extreme Blank Slatism emerged much earlier, at least in American psychology. So starting in 1920 with Watson, who claimed that if you gave him any child he could turn him into a physicist or a thief. And then B.F Skinner in 1938 who studied pigeons and rats, and then generalized his findings to all organisms. But this Blank Slate view, where humans come into the world equipped with basically nothing, and that the culture and parents write the script, that has been predominant in American psychology and social science for decades and decades. I think going back to those early times.