Review
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“Quite ingenious stuff…. This is a welcome change
from a lot of evolutionary psychology."–The New York Times Book
Review
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From the Author
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Follow me on twitter @matingmind
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From the Inside Flap
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At once a pioneering study of evolution and an
accessible and lively reading experience, The Mating Mind marks
the arrival of a prescient and provocative new science writer.
Psychologist Geoffrey Miller offers the most convincing-and
radical-explanation for how and why the human mind evolved.
Consciousness, morality, creativity, language, and art: these are
the traits that make us human. Scientists have traditionally
explained these qualities as merely a side effect of surplus
brain size, but Miller argues that they were sexual attractors,
not side effects. He bases his argument on Darwin's theory of
"sexual selection, which until now has played second fiddle to
Darwin's theory of "natural selection, and draws on ideas and
research from a wide range of fields, including psychology,
economics, history, and pop culture. Witty, powerfully argued,
and continually thought-provoking, "The Mating Mind is a landmark
in our understanding of our own species.
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From the Back Cover
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At once a pioneering study of evolution and an
accessible and lively read, The Mating Mind offers the most
convincing -- and radical -- explanation to date for how and why
the human mind evolved. Traditionally, evolutionary theory has
explained intelligence as merely a by-product of surplus brain
size. But psychologist Geoffrey Miller argues that it actively
evolved, like the peacock's tail, for courtship and mating, and
thereby shaped human nature.
Certain traits are attractive because they indicate the overall
fitness of a potential mate. Miller maintains that both human
sexes have evolved many significant ways of displaying fitness
via expressions of creative intelligence such as storytelling,
poetry, art, music, sports, dance, humor, kindness, and
leadership. In support of this provocative thesis, he has
gathered evidence from psychology, economics, history, pop
culture, and Darwin's theory of sexual selection to present an
utterly original synthesis of research.
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About the Author
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Author of The Mating Mind (2001) and Spent: Sex,
Evolution, and Consumer Behavior (2009); co-editor of Mating
Intelligence (2007). Ph.D. from Stanford, B.A. from Columbia.
Evolutionary psychology professor at University of New Mexico;
also worked at University of Sussex, Max Planck Institute for
Psychological Research, University College London, and U.C.L.A.
Researches consumer behavior, sexuality, evolutionary psychology,
behavior genetics, intelligence, personality, creativity, humor,
mental disorders. Published over 40 journal papers, over 60 book
chapters and other publications; has given over 120 invited talks
around the world. Research has been featured in Nature, Science,
Time, Wired, New Scientist, The Economist,The New York Times, The
Washington Post, and Psychology Today, on NPR and BBC radio, and
on CNN, PBS, Discovery Channel, Learning Channel, National
Geographic Channel, BBC, and Channel 4. Follow on twitter
(@matingmind), goodreads, facebook, linkedin.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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Central Park
Central Park divides two of Manhattan's greatest treasure
collections. On the West Side stands the American Museum of
Natural History, with its dinosaur fossils, stuffed African
elephants, dioramas of apes, and displays of ancient human
remains. On the East Side stands the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
with its Rembrandt self-portraits, peacock-shaped sitar, gold
rapiers, Roman temple, Etruscan mirrors, and Jacques Louis
David's Death of Socrates.
These works symbolize our unique human capacities for art, music,
sports, religion, self-consciousness, and moral virtue, and they
have troubled me ever since my student days studying biology at
Columbia University. It was easy enough for me to take a taxi
along the West Seventy-ninth Street transverse (the natural
history museum) to East Eighty-first Street (the Met). It was not
so easy for our ancestors to cross over from the pre-human world
of natural history to the world of human culture. How did they
transform themselves from apes to New Yorkers? Their evolutionary
path seems obscure.
Yet we know there must have been a path. The human mind evolved
somehow. The question scientists have asked for over a century
is: How? Most people equate evolution with "survival of the
fittest," and indeed most theories about the mind's evolution
have tried to find survival advantages for everything that makes
humans unique. To extend the metaphor, one kind of theory
suggests our problem was not following the transverse to a
collection of decorative arts, but traveling a different route to
some useful inventions. Perhaps the human mind evolved for
prowess, symbolized by the Sea-Air-Space Museum on the
aircraft carrier USS Intrepid, docked at Pier 86. Or perhaps our
minds evolved for reciprocal economic advantage, symbolized by
the World Trade Center and Wall Street, or through a thirst for
pure knowledge, as housed in the New York Public Library. The
survival advantages of better technology, trade, and knowledge
seem obvious, so many believe the mind's evolution must have been
technophilic and survivalist.
Ever since the Darwinian revolution, this survivalist view has
seemed the only scientifically respectable possibility. Yet it
remains unsatisfying. It leaves too many riddles unexplained.
Human language evolved to be much more elaborate than necessary
for basic survival functions. From a pragmatic biological
viewpoint, art and music seem like pointless wastes of energy.
Human morality and humor seem irrelevant to the business of
finding food and avoiding predators. Moreover, if human
intelligence and creativity were so useful, it is puzzling that
other apes did not evolve them.
Even if the survivalist theory could take us from the world of
natural history to our capacities for invention, commerce, and
knowledge, it cannot account for the more ornamental and
enjoyable aspects of human culture: art, music, sports, drama,
comedy, and political ideals. At this point the survivalist
theories usually point out that along the transverse lies the
Central Park Learning Center. Perhaps the ornamental frosting on
culture's cake arose through a general human ability to learn new
things. Perhaps our big brains, evolved for technophilic
survivalism, can be co-opted for the arts. However, this
side-effect view is equally unsatisfying. Temperamentally, it
reflects nothing more than a Wall Street trader's contempt for
leisure. Biologically, it predicts that other big-brained species
like elephants and dolphins should have invented their own
versions of the human arts. Psychologically, it fails to explain
why it is so much harder for us to learn mathematics than music,
surgery than sports, and rational science than religious myth.
I think we can do better. We do not have to pretend that
everything interesting and enjoyable about human behavior is a
side-effect of some utilitarian survival ability or general
learning capacity. I take my inspiration not from the Central
Park Learning Center on the north side of the transverse but from
the Ramble on the south side. The Ramble is a 37-acre woodland
hosting 250 species of birds. Every spring, they sing to attract
sexual partners. Their intricate songs evolved for courtship.
Could some of our puzzling human abilities have evolved for the
same function?
A Mind for Courtship
This book proposes that our minds evolved not just as survival
machines, but as courtship machines. Every one of our ancestors
managed not just to live for a while, but to convince at least
one sexual partner to have enough sex to produce offspring. Those
proto-humans that did not attract sexual interest did not become
our ancestors, no matter how good they were at surviving. Darwin
realized this, and argued that evolution is driven not just by
natural selection for survival, but by an equally important
process that he called sexual selection through mate choice.
Following his in, I shall argue that the most distinctive
aspects of our minds evolved largely through the sexual choices
our ancestors made.
The human mind and the peacock's tail may serve similar
biological functions. The peacock's tail is the classic example
of sexual selection through mate choice. It evolved because
peahens preferred larger, more colorful tails. Peacocks would
survive better with shorter, lighter, drabber tails. But the
sexual choices of peahens have made peacocks evolve big, bright
plumage that takes energy to grow and time to preen, and makes it
harder to escape from predators such as tigers. The peacock's
tail evolved through mate choice. Its biological function is to
attract peahens. The radial arrangement of its yard-long
feathers, with their iridescent blue and bronze eye-spots and
their rattling movement, can be explained scientifically only if
one understands that function. The tail makes no sense as an
adaptation for survival, but it makes perfect sense as an
adaptation for courtship.
The human mind's most impressive abilities are like the peacock's
tail: they are courtship tools, evolved to attract and entertain
sexual partners. By shifting our attention from a
survival-centered view of evolution to a courtship-centered view,
I shall try to show how, for the first time, we can understand
more of the richness of human art, morality, language, and
creativity.
A 1993 Gallup Poll showed that almost half of all Americans
accept that humans evolved gradually over millions of years. Yet
only about 10 percent believe that natural selection, alone and
unguided, can account for the human mind's astounding abilities.
Most think that the mind's evolution must have been guided by
some intelligent force, some active designer. Even in more
secular nations such as Britain, many accept that humans evolved
from apes, but doubt that natural selection suffices to explain
our minds.
Despite being a committed Darwinian, I share these doubts. I do
not think that natural selection for survival can explain the
human mind. Our minds are entertaining, intelligent, creative,
and articulate far beyond the demands of surviving on the plains
of Pleistocene Africa. To me, this points to the work of some
intelligent force and some active designer. However, I think the
active designers were our ancestors, using their powers of sexual
choice to influence—unconsciously—what kind of offspring they
produced. By intelligently choosing their sexual partners for
their mental abilities, our ancestors became the intelligent
force behind the human mind's evolution.
Evolutionary Psychology Turns Dionysian
The time is ripe for more ambitious theories of human nature. Our
species has never been richer, better educated, more numerous, or
more aware of our common historical origin and common planetary
e. As our self-confidence has grown, our need for comforting
myths has waned. Since the Darwinian revolution, we recognize
that the cosmos was not made for our convenience.
But the Darwinian revolution has not yet captured nature's last
citadel—human nature. In the 1 990s the new science of
evolutionary psychology made valiant attempts. It views human
nature as a set of biological adaptations, and tries to discover
which problems of living and reproducing those adaptations
evolved to solve. It grounds human behavior in evolutionary
biology.
Some critics believe that evolutionary psychology goes too far
and attempts to explain too much. I think it does not go far
enough. It has not taken some of our most impressive and
distinctive abilities as seriously as it should. For example, in
his book How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker argued that human art,
music, humor, fiction, religion, and philosophy are not real
adaptations, but biological side-effects of other evolved
abilities. As a cognitive scientist, Pinker was inclined to
describe the human mind as a pragmatic problem-solver, not a
magnificent sexual ornament: "The mind is a neural computer,
fitted by natural selection with combinational algorithms for
causal and probabilistic reasoning about s, animals, objects
and people."
Although he knows that reproductive success is evolution's bottom
line, he overlooked the possible role of sexual selection in
shaping conspicuous display behaviors such as art and music. He
asked, for example, "If music confers no survival advantage,
where does it come from and why does it work?" Lacking any
manifest survival function, he concluded that art and music must
be like cheesecake and pornography—cultural inventions that
stimulate our tastes in evolutionarily novel ways, without
improving our evolutionary success. His views that the arts are
"biologically frivolous" has upset many performing artists
sympathetic to evolutionary psychology. In a televised BBC debate
following the publication of How the Mind Works, the theatrical
director and intellectual polymath Jonathan Miller took Pinker to
task for dismissing the arts as non-adaptations without
considering all their possible functions. One of my goals in
writing this book has been to see whether evolutionary psychology
could prove as satisfying to a performing artist as to a
cognitive scientist. It may be economically important to consider
how the mind works, but it is also important to consider how the
mind mates.
The view of the mind as a pragmatic, problem-solving survivalist
has also inhibited research on the evolution of human creativity,
morality, and language. Some primate researchers have suggested
that human creative intelligence evolved as nothing more than a
way to invent Machiavellian tricks to deceive and manipulate
others. Human morality has been reduced to a tit-for-tat
accountant that keeps track of who owes what to whom. Theories of
language evolution have neglected human storytelling, poetry,
wit, and song. You have probably read accounts of evolutionary
psychology in the popular press, and felt the same unease that it
is missing something important. Theories based on the survival of
the fittest can nibble away at the edges of human nature, but
they do not take us to the heart of the mind.
Moreover, the ritual celibacy of these survivalist doctrines
seems artificial. Why omit sexual desire and sexual choice from
the pantheon of evolutionary forces that could have shaped the
human mind, when biologists routinely use sexual choice to
explain behavioral abilities in other animals? Certainly,
evolutionary psychology is concerned with sex. Researchers such
as David Buss and Randy Thornhill have gathered impressive
evidence that we have evolved sexual preferences that favor
pretty faces, fertile bodies, and high social status. But
evolutionary psychology in general still views sexual preferences
more often as outcomes of evolution than as causes of evolution.
Even where the sexual preferences of our ancestors have been
credited with the power to shape mental evolution, their effects
have been largely viewed as restricted to sexual and social
emotions—to explain, for example, higher male motivations to take
risks, attain social status, and demonstrate athletic prowess.
Sexual choice has not been seen as reaching very deep into human
and communication, and sexuality is typically viewed as
irrelevant to the serious business of evolving human intelligence
and language.
In reaction to these limitations, I came to believe that the
Darwinian revolution could capture the citadel of human nature
only by becoming more of a sexual revolution—by giving more
credit to sexual choice as a driving force in the mind's
evolution. Evolutionary psychology must become less Puritan and
more Dionysian. Where others thought about the survival problems
our ancestors faced during the day, I wanted to think about the
courtship problems they faced at night. In poetic terms, I
wondered whether the mind evolved by moonlight. In scientific
terms, sexual selection through mate choice seemed a neglected
factor in human mental evolution. Through ten years of
researching sexual selection and human evolution, since the
beginning of my Ph.D., it became clear to me that sexual
selection theory offered valuable intelligence about aspects of
human nature that are important to us, and that cry out for
evolutionary explanation, but that have been ignored, dismissed,
or belittled in the past.
Trying a Different Tool
The human brain and its diverse capacities are so complex, and so
costly to grow and maintain, that they must have arisen through
direct selection for some important biological function. To date,
it has proven very difficult to propose a biological function for
human creative intelligence that fits the scientific evidence. We
know that the human mind is a collection of astoundingly complex
adaptations, but we do not know what biological functions many of
them evolved to serve.
Evolutionary biology works by one cardinal rule: to understand an
adaptation, one has to understand its evolved function. The
analysis of adaptations is more than a collection of just-so
stories, because according to evolutionary theory there are only
two fundamental kinds of functions that explain adaptations.
Adaptations can arise through natural selection for survival
advantage, or sexual selection for reproductive advantage.
Basically, that's it.
If you have two tools and one doesn't work, why not try the
other? Science has spent over a century trying to explain the
mind's evolution through natural selection for survival benefits.
It has explained many human abilities, such as food preferences
and fear of snakes, but it consistently fails to explain other
abilities for decorative art, moral virtue, and witty
conversation. It seems reasonable to ask whether sexual selection
for reproductive benefits might account for these leftovers. This
suggestion makes sexual selection sound like an explanation of
last resort. It should not be viewed that way, because sexual
selection has some special features as an evolutionary process.
As we shall see, sexual selection is unusually fast, powerful,
intelligent, and unpredictable. This makes it a good candidate
for explaining any adaptation that is highly developed in one
species but not in other closely related species that share a
similar environment.
What Makes Sexual Selection So Special?
In the 1930s, biologists redefined natural selection to include
sexual selection, because they did not think sexual selection was
very important. Following their precedent, modern biology
textbooks define natural selection to include every process that
leads some genes to out-compete other genes by virtue of their
survival or reproductive benefits. When one biologist says
"evolution through natural selection," other biologists hear
"evolution for survival or reproductive advantage." But
non-biologists, including many other scientists, still hear
"survival of the fittest." Many evolutionary psychologists, who
should know better, even ask what possible "survival value" could
explain some trait under discussion. This causes enormous
confusion, and ensures that sexual selection continues to be
neglected in discussions of human evolution.
In this book I shall use the terms "natural selection" and
"sexual selection" as Darwin did: natural selection arising
through competition for survival, and sexual selection arising
through competition for reproduction. I am perfectly aware that
this is not the way professional biologists currently use these
terms. But I think it is more important, especially for
non-biologist readers, to appreciate that selection for survival
and selection for attracting sexual partners are distinct
processes that tend to produce quite different kinds of
biological traits. Terms should be the servants of theories, not
the masters. By reviving Darwin's distinction between natural
selection for survival and sexual selection for reproduction, we
can talk more easily about their differences.
One difference is that sexual selection through mate choice can
be much more intelligent than natural selection. I mean this
quite literally. Natural selection takes place as a result of
challenges set by an animal's physical habitat and biological
niche. The habitat includes the factors that matter to farmers:
sunlight, wind, heat, rain, and land quality. The niche includes
predators and prey, parasites and germs, and competitors from
one's own species. Natural selection is just something that
happens as a side-effect of these factors influencing an
organism's survival chances. The habitat is inanimate and doesn't
care about those it affects. Biological competitors just care
about making their own livings. None of these selectors cares
whether it imposes evolutionary selection pressures that are
consistent, directional, efficient, or creative. The natural
selection resulting from such selectors just happens,
willy-nilly.
Sexual selection is quite different, because animals often have
very strong interests in acting as efficient agents of sexual
selection. The genetic quality of an animal's sexual partner
determines, on average, half the genetic quality of their
offspring. (Most animals inherit half their genes from mother and
half from her.) As we shall see, one of the main reasons why
mate choice evolves is to help animals choose sexual partners who
carry good genes. Sexual selection is the professional at sifting
between genes. By comparison, natural selection is a rank
amateur. The evolutionary pressures that result from mate choice
can therefore be much more consistent, accurate, efficient, and
creative than natural selection pressures.
As a result of these incentives for sexual choice, many animals
are sexually discriminating. They accept some suitors and reject
others. They apply their faculties of perception, ,
memory' and judgment to pick the best sexual partners they can.
In particular, they go for any features of potential mates that
signal their fitness and fertility.
In fact, sexual selection in our species is as bright as we are.
Every time we choose one suitor over another, we act as an agent
of sexual selection. Almost anything that we can notice about a
person is something our ancestors might have noticed too, and
might have favored in their sexual choices. For example, some of
us fall in love with people for their quick wits and generous
spirits, and we wonder how these traits could have evolved.
Sexual choice theory suggests that the answer is right in front
of us. These traits are sexually attractive, and perhaps simpler
forms of them have been attractive for hundreds of thousands of
years. Over many generations, those with quicker wits and more
generous spirits may have attracted more sexual partners, or
higher-quality partners. The result was that wits became quicker
and spirits more generous.
Of course, sexual selection through mate choice cannot favor what
its agents cannot perceive. If animals cannot see the shapes of
one another's heart ventricles, then heart ventricles cannot be
directly shaped by sexual selection—vivisection is not a
practical method for choosing a sexual partner. A major theme of
this book is that before language evolved, our ancestors could
not easily perceive one another's thoughts, but once language had
arrived, thought itself became subject to sexual selection.
Through language, and other new forms of expression such as art
and music, our ancestors could act more like psychologists—in
addition to acting like beauty contest judges—when choosing
mates. During human evolution, sexual selection seems to have
shifted its primary target from body to mind.
This book argues that we were neither created by an omniscient
deity, nor did we evolve by blind, dumb natural selection.
Rather, our evolution was shaped by beings intermediate in
intelligence: our own ancestors, choosing their sexual partners
as sensibly as they could. We have inherited both their sexual
tastes for warm, witty, creative, intelligent, generous
companions, and some of these traits that they preferred. We are
the outcome of their million-year-long genetic engineering
experiment in which their sexual choices did the genetic
screening.
Giving so much credit to sexual choice can make sexual selection
sound almost too powerful. If sexual selection can act on any
trait that we can notice in other individuals, it can potentially
explain any aspect of human nature that scientists can notice
too. Sexual selection's reach seems to extend as far as
psychology's subject matter. So be it. Scientists don't have to
play fair against nature. Physics is full of indecently powerful
theories, such as Newton's laws of motion and Einstein's theory
of general relativity. Darwin gave biology two equally potent
theories: natural selection and sexual selection. In principle,
his two theories explain the origins of all complexity,
functionality, diversity, and beauty in the universe.
Psychologists generally believe that so far they have no theories
of comparable power. But sexual selection can also be viewed as a
psychological theory, because sexual choice and courtship are
psychological activities. Psychologists are free to use sexual
selection theory just where it is most needed: to explain mental
abilities that look too excessive and expensive to have evolved
for survival.
This sexual choice view also sounds rather circular as an
explanation of human mental evolution. It puts the mind in an
unusual position, as both selector and selectee in its own
evolution. If the human mind catalyzed its own evolution through
mate choice, it sounds as though our brains pulled themselves up
by their own bootstraps. However, most positive-feedback
processes look rather circular, and a positive-feedback process
such as sexual selection may be just what we need to explain
unique, highly elaborated adaptations like the human mind. Many
theorists have accepted that some sort of positive-feedback
process is probably required to explain why the human brain
evolved to be so large so quickly. Sexual selection, especially a
process called runaway sexual selection, is the best-established
example of a positive-feedback process in evolution.
Positive-feedback systems are very sensitive to initial
conditions. Often, they are so sensitive that their outcome is
unpredictable. For example, take two apparently identical
populations, let them undergo sexual selection for many
generations, and they will probably end up looking very
different. Take two initially indistinguishable populations of
toucans, let them choose their sexual partners over a thousand
generations, and they will evolve beaks with very different
colors, patterns, and shapes. Take two populations of primates,
and they will evolve different hairstyles. Take two populations
of hominids (bipedal apes), and one may evolve into us, and the
other into Neanderthals. Sexual selection's positive-feedback
dynamics make it hard to predict what will happen next in
evolution, but they do make it easy to explain why one population
happened to evolve a bizarre ornament that another similar
population did not.
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