The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature by Geoffrey Miller Page B
Authors: Geoffrey Miller
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goods" that advertise one's wealth and rank in comparison to sexual rivals. In the other human sciences as well—archeology, political science, sociology, linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, education, and social policy—there was a blind spot where the theory of sexual selection should have been.
When these sciences did try to trace the evolutionary roots of human behavior, they have usually come up with theories based on "survival of the fittest" and "the goods of the species." Mate choice was simply not on the intellectual map as an evolutionary force. Darwin's broader vision, in which most of nature's ornamentation arises through sexual courtship, was never used to explain the ornamental aspects of human behavior and culture.
For example, without sexual selection theory, 20th-century science had great difficulty in explaining the aspects of human nature most concerned with display status, and image. Economists could not explain our thirst for luxury goods and conspicuous consumption. Sociologists could not explain why
men seek wealth and power more avidly than women. Educational psychologists could not explain why students became so rebellious and fashion-conscious after puberty Cognitive scientists could not fathom why human creativity evolved. In each case, apparent lack of "survival value" made human behavior appear irrational and maladaptive.
More generally, the sciences concerned with human nature have often lamented their incompleteness, fragmentation, and isolation. People are certainly complicated entities to study, but other sciences such as organic chemistry climate modeling, and computer science have coped with high degrees of complexity. The limited success of the human sciences may not have resulted from the complexity of human behavior, but from overlooking Darwin's crucial insight about the importance of sexual competition, courtship, and mate choice in human affairs.
Today, evolutionary biology is proclaiming that the old map of evolution was wrong. It put too much weight on the survival of the fittest and, until the 1980s, virtually ignored sexual selection through mate choice. Yet in the human sciences we are still using the old map, and we still do not know where we came from, or where we are going. The next few chapters offer a new map of evolution to help us find our way.
3
The Runaway Brain
The worlds of academia, high fashion, religion, and modern art produce sublime wonders, and sometimes monstrous absurdities. They can afford such creative freedom because their systems of self-regulation and self-perpetuation are insulated from the mundane pragmatics of the outside world. Their autonomy endows them with liberty and creative power. They are free to evolve under their own momentum, along lines of their own choosing, without having to justify themselves at every step to outside critics.
Sexual selection can work similarly. One of sexual selection's central processes allows species to evolve in arbitrary directions under their own momentum. We shall see how this process, Fisher's runaway process, can provide a pretty good first model for how the human mind evolved.
Evolution's Autarch
Under natural selection, species adapt to their environments. When the environment refers to a species' physical habitat, this seems simple enough. If a species lives in the Arctic, it had better evolve some warm fur. Under sexual selection, species adapt too, but they adapt to themselves. Females adapt to males, and males adapt to females. Sexual preferences adapt to the sexual ornaments available, and sexual ornaments adapt to sexual preferences.
This can make things quite confusing. In sexual selection, genes do not code just for the adaptations used in courtship, such as sexual ornaments. They also code for the adaptations used in mate choice, the sexual preferences themselves. What the physical
environment is to natural selection, sexual preferences are to sexual selection. They are not only the
When these sciences did try to trace the evolutionary roots of human behavior, they have usually come up with theories based on "survival of the fittest" and "the goods of the species." Mate choice was simply not on the intellectual map as an evolutionary force. Darwin's broader vision, in which most of nature's ornamentation arises through sexual courtship, was never used to explain the ornamental aspects of human behavior and culture.
For example, without sexual selection theory, 20th-century science had great difficulty in explaining the aspects of human nature most concerned with display status, and image. Economists could not explain our thirst for luxury goods and conspicuous consumption. Sociologists could not explain why
men seek wealth and power more avidly than women. Educational psychologists could not explain why students became so rebellious and fashion-conscious after puberty Cognitive scientists could not fathom why human creativity evolved. In each case, apparent lack of "survival value" made human behavior appear irrational and maladaptive.
More generally, the sciences concerned with human nature have often lamented their incompleteness, fragmentation, and isolation. People are certainly complicated entities to study, but other sciences such as organic chemistry climate modeling, and computer science have coped with high degrees of complexity. The limited success of the human sciences may not have resulted from the complexity of human behavior, but from overlooking Darwin's crucial insight about the importance of sexual competition, courtship, and mate choice in human affairs.
Today, evolutionary biology is proclaiming that the old map of evolution was wrong. It put too much weight on the survival of the fittest and, until the 1980s, virtually ignored sexual selection through mate choice. Yet in the human sciences we are still using the old map, and we still do not know where we came from, or where we are going. The next few chapters offer a new map of evolution to help us find our way.
3
The Runaway Brain
The worlds of academia, high fashion, religion, and modern art produce sublime wonders, and sometimes monstrous absurdities. They can afford such creative freedom because their systems of self-regulation and self-perpetuation are insulated from the mundane pragmatics of the outside world. Their autonomy endows them with liberty and creative power. They are free to evolve under their own momentum, along lines of their own choosing, without having to justify themselves at every step to outside critics.
Sexual selection can work similarly. One of sexual selection's central processes allows species to evolve in arbitrary directions under their own momentum. We shall see how this process, Fisher's runaway process, can provide a pretty good first model for how the human mind evolved.
Evolution's Autarch
Under natural selection, species adapt to their environments. When the environment refers to a species' physical habitat, this seems simple enough. If a species lives in the Arctic, it had better evolve some warm fur. Under sexual selection, species adapt too, but they adapt to themselves. Females adapt to males, and males adapt to females. Sexual preferences adapt to the sexual ornaments available, and sexual ornaments adapt to sexual preferences.
This can make things quite confusing. In sexual selection, genes do not code just for the adaptations used in courtship, such as sexual ornaments. They also code for the adaptations used in mate choice, the sexual preferences themselves. What the physical
environment is to natural selection, sexual preferences are to sexual selection. They are not only the
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