This idea popped up again in a 1998 New Yorker article by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. Under the title ‘Boys Will Be Boys’, he used evolutionary psychology to defend US president Bill Clinton, whose affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky had just been made public: ‘Most human drives have ancient Darwinian rationales. A prehistoric man who slept with fifty women could have sired fifty children, and would have been more likely to have descendants who shared his tastes. A woman who slept with fifty men would have no more descendants than a woman who slept with one.’
