Miller - The mating mind: how sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature

Miller is an extremely talented writer, and he has produced a beautifully written book that is a genuine pleasure to read. The strength of this work, however, goes well beyond style. Miller has ambitiously described a scenario that provides insight into a number of puzzles about the human mind.

Science

Fascinating. This book will be intriguing even to readers with only a superficial knowledge of evolutionary biology.

The Washington Post Book World

A brilliant and seductive book. It will sweep you off your feet. And, when you come to earth again, youll find yourself seeing the human mind and its most prized creations with new eyes.

Nicholas Humphrey, New School for Social Research

This elegant, original, and lucid book is beguiling testimony to its own thesis: a fitting new feather in our cultural cap.

Helena Cronin, London School of Economics

Miller is the real thing, and his wonderfully readable book should be read by everyone with a taste for serious ideas.

The Independent (London)

A refined, an intellectually ingenious, and a very civilized discussion of the possible importance of sexual selection for mental evolution.

John Constable, Cambridge University, in Psychology, Evolution, and Gender

Entertaining and wide-ranging.

Nerve

Flies in the face of evolutionary orthodoxyproposed by Stephen Jay Gould and otherswhich suggests that culture evolves on its own, separate from the evolution of the human mind.

The Observer (London)

Witty, well-argued. Ultimately, Miller is arguing for a commonsense view of the evolution of human nature.

The Times (London)

Anyone who thinks evolutionary theory is stuffy should pick up The Mating Mind. Geoffrey Miller sets our usual assumptions about human intelligencethat natural selection alone is responsibleon its head.

Meredith Small, author of Whats Love Got to Do with It?

Erudite, lucid, and ambitious.

Mirabella

Written with grace and wit while conveying a new and world-changing scientific theory Millers prose is as fluent, clever and epigrammatic as a good novelists. At the very least what he has done is to find a place for beauty, waste and extravagance in science.

Matt Ridley, The Sunday Telegraph (London)

Consistently penetrating and ingenious mixing outstanding sober exposition of the mechanisms of sexual selection with speculations about its role in our capacities for morality, language, and creativity that range from deep to wild.

Financial Times

Geoffrey Miller is an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and at UCLA, where he teaches animal communication and marketing. Born in 1965 in Cincinnati, he studied at Columbia University and received a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford University. After moving to Europe, he worked at the Universities of Sussex and Nottingham, at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, and at University College London. He lives with his family in Surrey, England and Los Angeles.

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 2001

Copyright 2000 by Geoffrey Miller

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2000.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:
Miller, Geoffrey F.

The mating mind : how sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature / Geoffrey Miller.1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-81374-9
1. Human evolution. 2. Mate selectionHistory.
3. Intellect. 4. BrainEvolution. I. Title
GN281.4 M53 2000
306.8201dc21 00-22673

Author photograph Jerry Bauer

www.anchorbooks.com

v3.1

For Rosalind

Contents

1

Central Park

Central Park divides two of Manhattans 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 Davids 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 minds 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 military 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 minds 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.