The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

by Geoffrey Miller

In this brilliantly ambitious and provocative book, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller shows the evolutionary power of sexual choice, and the reasons why our ancestors became attracted not only to pretty faces and bodies, but to minds that were witty, articulate, generous, and concious.

Genres: Psychology, Science, Nonfiction, Evolution, Biology, Anthropology, Sexuality

446 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2000

About the author

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Geoffrey F. Miller, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of New Mexico, is an American evolutionary psychologist, and author of four books.

He's interested in psychology, polyamory, politics, Effective Altruism, existential risk, AI, animal welfare, and science fiction.

Miller is a 1987 graduate of Columbia University, where he earned a BA in biology and psychology. He received his PhD in cognitive psychology from Stanford University in 1993 under the guidance of Roger N. Shepard. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the evolutionary and adaptive systems group in the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the University of Sussex, UK (1992–94); Research Scientist at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research, Munich, Germany (1995–96); Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Economic Learning and Social Evolution, University College London (1996–2000); he has worked at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, since 2001, where he is now Associate Professor. In 2009, he was Visiting Scientist, Genetic Epidemiology Group, Queensland Institute of Medical Research, Brisbane, Australia.

Reviews

[Mario the lone bookwolf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of course, nobody really knows exactly, so that all research can just be based on assumptions, theories, hypothesis,... that are mixed with actual brain science, evolutionary psychology and well, large field studies. Just in theory, because no scientist gets the millions of funding to base her/his ideas on hard, provable facts so that we doubtfully enter the minefield of subjective assumptions.

The subject is fascinating both in humans and animals and how it may evolve in the future with our senses changing and how women's´ minds and their ability to select and choose may develop in combination with AR, VR, genetic testing ("Give me your probe or leave, I won´t waste time dating someone who is a potential horrible genetic match." "Yes, Ma´am." "Don´t call me that and where are you going?" "You said you wanted a sample of..." Not that, you perv idiot, just a saliva sample." "Oh, I see. Well, then..." "Not anymore!") and bio-digital fusion, is interesting.

Most of the book focuses on animal behavior and concludes that it have always been the females who made a species successful in preventing catastrophes by choosing carefully and mindfully. That might have been one of many reasons that evolution pimped brains and upgraded males, but Miller should have clearly differentiated that is was one of many, unknown driving forces and that is is impossible to name a clear favorite. To define horniness as the only motivation for art, science, charity, humor, interest in upbringing, humanities, everything, seems very far-fetched and I would say that many give a f*** (hoho, wordplay alert) and are just interested in the subject itself, not the groupies.

There are some funny theories, not related to this book but worth mentioning in this context, about that nature might tend to make more experiments with the intelligence of males because it might get fatal when women where, well, as dumb as some men. I don´t know any numbers and this is so close to gender racism that there might never be any long-term studies done, but I love the picture of a kind of Gaia entity who orchestrates all evolutions and thinks: "Doesn´t matter if many of the males are too stupid to survive, they aren´t important for the survival of the species, so I will instead fix the minimum intelligence for women to avoid problems." To get highly subjective, I have really met much more stupid men than women and about the same amount of both species, so maybe there is really something behind it, who knows, duh, "look, primary and secondary sexual characteristics, beer, sports and hordes of befriended males with lovely group dynamics, must go, it hardly ever ends in small disasters or world wars if we do that."

To take everything with a grain of salt and to not criticize authors who dare to risk to make hypotheses that could become true is important in this case. The problem might be that there are inherent dangers if one of those ideas gets too much media or even public attention and is misused or misinterpreted for one´s own agenda.

It´s ingenious by Miller to interpret models of society, politics, and economics depending on his thesis, and mind games integrating evolutionary biology and psychology in sociology and history could be played much more often than just the isolated historical, psychological or political interpretations alone. It also shows how unscientific especially political theory and economics are, how weak the foundations must be that it is so easy to reliably question and reinterpret them without the possibility to negate it. An expert can cherrypick parts of those theories and built whatever she/he wants out of them, make epic battle disses or praises. Try to do this with an engine or in medicine, it will explode or kill the patient.

It´s so funny that we eliminated natural selection and that now everybody is lying even more, because an ape or primitive human couldn´t fake smartness, success, etc. or get detailed tutorials by nasty pick-up artists and immoral personal coaches. No wonder women had to develop defense mechanisms against so much deception, falsehood, and virility. The best and most valid security for a women might be, as mentioned, gene tests, as long as males don´t have the option to manipulate their saliva, blood, etc. to seem fitter, but the evolutionary arms race of males trying to fake and delude women into mating may go on forever until we evolve into entities. And it might even continue then when it comes to creating new AIs. Why does anything in my reviews has to evolve to transhuman, superhuman, immortal status...

I am highly biased and tend to jay to evolutionary and to meh at psychology, but try to stay objective.
I truly don´t write far too wordy and adjectively reviews to seem smart and attractive to potential female mating partners. Damn it, Miller debunked me. Sigh. By the way, now that it doesn´t matter anymore, I am a 35 year old Austrian...

A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mating_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

One way of looking at this book is that it claims women have been selectively breeding men for the last few hundred thousand years. They've prioritized intelligence, creativity, sensitivity and good parenting skills. And they've done a fine job. As Miller says, in an early chapter: a human male is about 100 times more likely to kill his stepchild than his biological child. Almost unbelievably good news for human stepchildren, if you for instance compare with male lions, who routinely kill the previous litter when they take a new mate. I happen to be male, but since exactly half of my ancestors are women, I don't see why I'm obliged to favor one side over the other. Thus, without being a gender traitor, I must say that, if Miller is correct, I'm entirely with the chicks. Unfortunately, I felt that his analysis was on the speculative side, with little hard evidence to back it up. A pity - I would so like to believe it was true.

Of course, if Miller's theories are correct, it follows that he wrote the book mainly to impress potential mates, so it doesn't entirely matter whether it's correct or not. I'm curious to know whether female readers were turned on by his arguments. Ladies, what are your honest thoughts on this?

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my youth, while contemplating one of my numerous failed attempts to construct a robot capable of flinging medical waste into the neighbor’s yard, (inspired, like all good zoomers, by the show BattleBots), I sat despondent on a cockeyed swing in the local park. There was a knot in the left chain that wouldn’t go away despite all my twisting. If I worked below the knot to unwind it, it would travel upward, if I started from above, it would proceed down, never going away. I was trapped within a conceptual framework, whether due to the frustrations of my repurposed DVD player with miniature biohazard trebuchet, or lack of similar torsional oddities in other parts of my life, I could only focus on the chain. My hands stained with rust and my heart encumbered by the logistical nightmare of attempting to break the hegemony of reigning bot archetypes (wedge, drum, spinner, flipper, and crusher.) by pivoting away from melee to attack the pilots with salvos of infectious/hazardous materials, I capitulated to the capricious forces which entangle our lives and swung hopelessly askew. It was then that a boy from my school, (Nicolas Cage, forthwith truncated to Nic Cage, or Nicky Wicky at my discretion.) noticing my disgruntled trajectory and constant fidgeting, approached me shyly and offered to fix my swing. Wordless I stood and gave him access, sure that he would encounter the same infinite regress of bundled links. But he did something which shocked me, He took hold of the seat and flipped it over several times, the kinks magically dissolving with every turn until everything was right with the world. It was then that I knew what it meant to have a crush. Blushing, I asked (in monstrously affected transatlantic Buckleyesque), “Perhaps you could assist me with a project?” And although he turned out to be a shit roboticist, he did prove fearless in the procurement of toxic waste, and later went on to star in such films as: The Wicker Man, and Left Behind.

A fascinating, if highly speculative, account of human intelligence and creativity. Arguing persuasively at times that the adaptationist/survivalist view of our brainy endowments is asking too much of environmental challenges, and that we should instead consider our explosive cognitive growth and subsequent proliferation of creative artifacts to be the result of sexual selection. According to Miller, the fulcrum of this entire operation is the shrewdness with which the females of the species select for those traits which render them sufficiently hornt-up to accept the ‘ole gamete Gatling gun. The theory goes that female ‘metes, being morphologically distinct and extremely limited/costly when compared to the endless buckshots of baby batter a stud is capable of unloading (see; Prince, Genghis Khan, Peter North, etc.), causes those possessed with ovums & ovens to shoulder the onus (i.e. the triple O’s of triple X) of perpetuating the species along lines which they find fashionable. And, over the course of evolutionary history, much like female peacocks saddled the males of their species with a conspicuous display of genetic fitness (i.e. ornate plumages of considerable aerodynamic drag which invite predators to sink their fangs/claws into their iridescent asses) waifus selected for more perspicacious pricks, and ever more complex ways of displaying this savvy (i.e. art, music, poetry, hand axes, and yodeling). And so, with males off to sexually outcompete their rivals by factoring larger primes, women, at ground zero of the cocktail chatter conflagration they’ve catalyzed, find themselves caught in the blast and propelled towards ever greater methods of discernment, (i.e. the intelligence required to suss out those who are genuinely intelligent from pretentious twats who inflate onion sacks with self aggrandizement), with the result being mutual cortical hypertrophy.

Miller also suggests that theories of kin selection/reciprocal altruism, while up to the task of explaining cooperation among blood relatives is insufficient to explain this behavior across groups. He proposes, as you may have anticipated, that females selected for kindness/generosity in males and thus lubed the way for deeper ethical penetrations. (And here I must note, at least anecdotally, that my personal history casts some suspicion on this theory of the moral sentiments, although I’m willing concede that this could be the result of an imprudent decision making algorithm.)

As someone with more than a passing interest in evolutionary psychology, this was highly enjoyable. Even though much of the author’s conclusions are tentative, I find they still merit my continued consideration, and if someone can motivate me to reconsider axiomatic propositions then they’ve succeeded in writing something of durable worth. Whether science fully vindicates these conjectures or not, I agree with the assertion that attempting to explain the problems illustrated in this book, with recourse only to natural selection, makes for some rather mystifying contortions, and that sexual selection proves far more parsimonious in many of these instances.

[Jonatron · Rating 3 out of 5]

First off, I found this book very hard to read. Not because I'm illiterate, but because it just wasn't enjoyable. I've finally just finished it, 14 months after buying it, because I never felt like picking it up and reading another chapter. It feels as though he just restates the same ideas over and over again with too many words. (Though I suppose verbosity might be a good way to impress certain potential mates.)

Despite the praise of science and the chapter's worth of references in the back, it felt less like a scientific exploration and more like a speculative argument, stating the conclusion first and then rounding up a bunch of evidence to back it up. I guess any evolutionary psychology book is going to sound mostly speculative, though.

Though not engrossing, I didn't find much to disagree with. Simply put, he argues that most of the evolved behaviors that are unexplainable by kin selection or reciprocity can actually be explained by runaway sexual selection, in the same way as handicap fitness indicators in other animals like peacocks or bowerbirds. It takes a lot of energy, health, and control of natural resources to create art (or make money to buy art), learn a large vocabulary, write fiction, practice religion, give to charity, and so on, yet none of these things provide much of a direct survival benefit. The conclusion is that they serve mostly to impress potential mates and compete against other suitors.

For example, he points out the way very rich and powerful people will volunteer their time to work at a soup kitchen for a day, when they could have used that time to earn money and pay a hundred other people to work in the soup kitchen for them. The primary reason for charity is to show off your helpfulness to potential mates, not to actually maximize the altruistic benefit to other people.

In the conclusion, he talks about how science is a subversion of these natural instincts to push them towards other ends. This is a very useful idea, as is the idea of consciously manipulating equilibrium selection to push society towards a more desirable equilibrium, which I've also had kicking around in my head for a while, but didn't have a name for until now.

His glossary definition of "marriage" is amusing: "A socially legitimated sexual relationship in which sexual fidelity and parental responsibilities are maintained through the threat of social punishment."

Other favorite quotes: "Existing political philosophies all developed before evolutionary game theory, so they do not take equilibrium selection into account. Socialism pretends that individuals are not selfish sexual competitors, so it ignores equilibria altogether. Conservatism pretends that there is only one possible equilibrium—a nostalgic version of the status quo—that society could play. Libertarianism ignores the possibility of equilibrium selection at the level of rational social discourse, and assumes that decentralized market dynamics will magically lead to equilibria that yield the highest aggregate social benefits. Far from being a scientific front for a particular set of political views, modern evolutionary psychology makes most standard views look simplistic and unimaginative."

"Scientific theories never dictate human values, but they can often cast new light on ethical issues. From a sexual selection viewpoint, moral philosophy and political theory have mostly been attempts to shift male human sexual competitiveness from physical violence to the peaceful accumulation of wealth and status. The rights to life, liberty, and property are cultural inventions that function, in part, to keep males from killing and stealing from one another while they compete to attract sexual partners."

[J.D. Steens · Rating 2 out of 5]

Miller argues that most of what we see as distinctively human (i.e., products of our mind) are derived from females selecting intelligent males. Mind, Miller says in short, is a "sexual ornament." Miller does not discount adaptationist theory. Even though many of our traits evolved through sexual selection, they still had to pass the survival test (not be harmful for survival) and many, in fact, were later adapted for survival functions.

Miller says that women selected intelligent males for mating purposes and thereby created the human mind as we know it. His approach is to work backwards from today and then explain how certain traits came to be. He says that women liked good story tellers, art and music, "a wide vocabulary" and "poetic language," wit and imagination and that males therefore adopted these capacities in abundance. All in all, females found creative males "delightful." This is all a bit much, suggesting male serenades and harps and flutes, and males and females having fine cocktail conversation in the cave, over drinks with lifted little fingers.

Miller says that life back then was not at all red in tooth and claw: "It is a mistake to envision our hominid ancestors as bedraggled, dirty, shuffling, sniffling, unhealthy cave-dwellers. They lived outside on a sort of perpetual camping trip, and got a lot of exercise." This sounds like Rousseau's vision of an idyllic past, but the basis for this picture is not evident. With that type of harmonic backdrop, it allows the author to argue that women back then checked out - at least in tropical climes - the males and selected those with large (relative to other primates) penises for mating purposes. Miller goes on to say that "Some studies have shown that when a woman returns home from a long trip, her partner tends to produce a much larger ejaculate than normal, as if to overwhelm any competitor's sperm that may have found its way into his unwatched partner's vagina." That explanation may be overthought. Perhaps after a long abstinence, the male is overly horny. If penises and sperm are not good enough, males can impress the females with their art, presuming that women didn't do artwork themselves, like baskets and beads and necklaces (as that would have no role in a female sexual selection theory). Miller then explains away the "handaxe" that dominated hominid tools for well over a million years, because he says the so-called "killer frisbee hypothesis" for killing large animals has "not fared well," although we don't know why it's "not fared well." Rather, Miller theorizes, it was an art object, a "sexual attractant." Males are all about marketing themselves, he says. If not art, they engage (today) in "ruthless sexual competition" like mountain climbing, to impress women. That observation might catch a mountain climber who engages in his or her life and death challenges as more than slightly off beat, but Miller explains that objection away by stating that males do these competitions without really knowing why, because "Evolution does that for us."

Miller argues that the adaptionist perspective cannot explain the higher human products of consciousness such as creative art and language. I don't know where that observation that comes from. Consciousness provides a significant advantage for survival - learning from experience, predicting the future and coordinating means and ends. Once consciousness moves into the abstract and representational realm, then creativity - once basic needs are met - can be applied to those finer things of life that Miller emphasizes. In other words, and similar to Pinker (?), the distinctive mental traits that Miller writes about can reasonably be viewed as byproducts of a brain that was designed for survival. Miller emphatically disagrees with this perspective, however.

Miller's thesis is that intelligence attracts intelligence and this explains the progressive development of the human mind, save, perhaps, for the few hunter-gatherers that remain today. Relative to other animals, the human mental capacity is significant, but that is a different matter than stating that all humans are equally intelligent or that other functions, such as raw physical attraction, might override the finer impulses that Miller writes about.

Moving beyond the intelligence thesis itself, Miller also argues that females selected males for their kindness and this is the basis for trust and our morality. Miller rightly criticizes kin selection theory when it extends itself in a sloppy seconds sort of way to explain reciprocal altruism. Miller says that kin selection violates its own principles in doing that. While he says that kin selection theory explains altruism toward blood relatives, it cannot jump the blood line to non-kin. Rather, he argues that women select for kindness. Waitresses know more about human kindness than most moral philosophers he asserts, as if quid pro quo tipping for service or making an impression on attractive waitresses represents the full domain of kindness. He also quotes a woman who expressed sexual admiration for Rockefeller's charity donations, but Miller says nothing about Rockefeller's extreme status and wealth as an alternative explanation for the attraction, something put there by evolution but something which she may not have been aware of or something she would have been able to comment on if she was aware of it. But on this subject of morality and human kindness, Miller might go back to the first section of Darwin's "Descent" which does a hefty job of explaining that the origin of our social instincts has everything to do with individual survival depending on being a member of a group.

Miller's revitalization of Darwin's theory of sexual selection is eye opening. In many ways, it is a breath of fresh air as it gets the reader to think out of the box when it comes to evolutionary theory. Although Miller does not go this far, there's even a hint of a challenge to the standard mantra that evolution's "goal" is to move genes into the next generation. If sexual attraction is the driver for many of our distinctive traits, and so long as what we come up with in that regard is not harmful to survival, then reproduction of our genes might be but a byproduct of a far more immediate, tangible and arbitrary process.

[Jrobertus · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most important books I have read. The concept of sexual selection was proposed by Darwin himself, and he spent more time on it than on natural selection. His inspired insights have lain fallow for a century, but this book brings the matter up with panache. Miller makes a compelling case that much of human speech, artistic drive, morality, and wit resulted from sexual selection. By mechanisms similar to those clearly identified in other species, much of our mental activity serves as a general fitness display for mate choice. In addition to its high impact on my world view, this book is written for a popular audience and has a nice, engaging, style.

[Jeroen · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to know how sexual selection produces diversity and, in the case of the human species, our consciousness... Brilliant... For me it was the final piece in the puzzle for understanding human behaviour... And NO don't tell me Freud already said something about the importance for sexuality for human behaviour... First of all he said so much nonsense that there will always be something for someone to find... And second, his blabbering about sexuality doesn't even come close to the ray of light this book shines on the subject...

[Jurij Fedorov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trully a great book. If you like philosophy and evolutionary psychology then this is a must read. I would recommend it for anyone with the intelligence and knowledge to understand it. It's not popular literature so don't think you can read it in one week. You have to think, read, think, read and repeat. Miller has created a timeless classic that is even more relevant today than it was in 2001. If you like intelligent books and like science and academia you will definitely love this one. Every second page is an intelligent mind blow.

[aarti · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were many ideas expressed in this book that were new to me.

The one that made the most impression was his theory that human nature has evolved due to a female's mate choice not the male's. Moral vision, language skills, humor, altruism are fitness indicators. He warn's that this is not a theory of "subconscious motivation"(what can drive us) but evolutionary function( how it works). This is easy to confuse. His statement "Human altruism is not an evolutionary paradox. It is a sexual ornament", was powerful in explaining this idea.

Toward's the end he also mentions playfulness/unpredictability as a fitness/youth indicator and talks a bit about game theory. I was hoping he would go further into it, and wasn't quite clear where he was taking this idea.

It was good that he acknowledged that he may be biased in his views since he is writing from a male perspective, as I found some of his views on females traditional and simplistic. He repeats a lot. I wished the book was more concise.

[Maher Razouk · Rating 5 out of 5]

تطورت اللغة لتكون أكثر تفصيلاً من اللازم لوظائف البقاء الأساسية. من وجهة نظر بيولوجية عملية ، يبدو أن الفن والموسيقى مضيعة للطاقة لا طائل من ورائها. يبدو أن الأخلاق الإنسانية وروح الدعابة ليست ذات صلة بمهمة العثور على الطعام وتجنب الحيوانات المفترسة. علاوة على ذلك ، إذا كان الذكاء والإبداع البشري مفيدان للغاية ، فمن المحير أن القردة الأخرى لم تطورهم!!!
حتى لو كانت نظرية البقاء على قيد الحياة يمكن أن تأخذنا من عالم التاريخ الطبيعي لقدراتنا على الاختراع والتجارة والمعرفة ، فإنه لا يمكن أن تفسر أكثر من الزينة والجوانب الممتعة للثقافة الإنسانية: الفن والموسيقى والرياضة والدراما ، الكوميديا ​​والمثل السياسية.
من الناحية البيولوجية ، تتنبأ أن الأنواع الأخرى ذات الأدمغة الكبيرة مثل الفيلة والدلافين يجب أن تكون قد اخترعت نسخها الخاصة من الفنون البشرية. من الناحية النفسية ، فشلت في تفسير سبب أن تعلم الرياضيات بالنسبة لنا أصعب من الموسيقى والجراحة أصعب من الرياضة والعلوم العقلانية أصعب من الإيمان بالأساطير الدينية.

أعتقد أننا يمكن أن نفعل ما هو أفضل من ذلك ؛ لا يتعين علينا التظاهر بأن كل شيء مثير للاهتمام وممتع حول السلوك البشري هو أحد الآثار الجانبية لبعض القدرة النفعية على البقاء . لم أستلهم كلامي هذا من مركز سنترال بارك التعليمي على الجانب الشمالي ولكن من رامبل على الجانب الجنوبي. رامبل عبارة عن غابة مساحتها 37 فدانًا تضم ​​250 نوعًا من الطيور. كل ربيع يغنون لجذب الشركاء الجنسيين. تطورت أغانيهم المعقدة للتودد مع الزمن. هل يمكن أن بعض قدراتنا البشرية المحيرة قد تطورت للقيام بنفس الوظيفة؟
.
Geoffrey Miller
The Mating Mind
Translated By #Maher_Razouk

[Ted · Rating 2 out of 5]

An incredibly passionate defense of Afrocentrism.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am always impressed when very smart people in very technical fields can effectively explain their work to the rest of us. Miller does this, and he does it in an entertaining (and sexy) way.

What I was most impressed with was how compelling this book was, even when laying a foundation that included some things I already knew. Parts of the book even read like fiction, where I was intrigued to turn the page and find out where we were headed next. Miller does a very good job of explaining concepts in a clear and engaging manner, and his own excitement for the topic really comes through.

Substantively, I'd say it felt like the first 2/3 of the book or so are setting up a foundation, while only the last 1/3 offers Miller's thesis/new ideas. My only criticism is that by the time we did get to the chapters on art, morality, and creative intelligence, it felt a little anti-climactic. However, this is largely because he had done such a good job in the set-up that I could anticipate exactly how it would be applied to each of these three areas. For the record, I would consider that a success. I was interested throughout the book, I felt persuaded (if not actually convinced) by the arguments, and I could follow Miller's logic as he constructed his theory.

This book has everything from the basics of natural selection, to a (possible) explanation of the evolution of human sex organs, to a theory of sports and creativity as a mating tool. I don't know much about evolutionary psychology and its place in the science world, but this book makes me want to know more.

[Natalie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got about 100 pages in. I just couldn't force myself to finish this before it's due at the library.

Maybe I just wasn't in the right frame of mind to read this. But it just kept on getting frustrating. Miller kept on explaining and seemingly trying to prove a theory just to say "but that's probably not right, so here, let me convince you of another theory just to say it's probably not right either."

[Blerina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have always been interested in psychology alone and watched more than read on evolution (David Attenborough's life series and the planet earth documentary series), but this book brings these two sciences together in a way that now I can hardly think of each of one separately. I'm new to evolutionary psychology but after reading this book this science sure tops my list of interests.
Geoffrey Miller focuses on Darwin's sexual selection theory, how sexual preferences have driven the species to produce costly ornamentation of no survival relevance, which would be fitness indicators to attract a mate and procreate. The phenomena is explained by many examples from birds, primates and humans such as the Peacock's tail, the Bird of Paradise plumage and dancing skills, a nightingale's 1000 song repertoire, large vocabularies in humans, poetry, art and science, conspicuous charity and conspicuous consumption as wealth-indicators and displays to intimidate competitors.
There are some lines of crude truth in the book that may come up as very cold, however they are indeed true, such as this "Survival without reproduction means evolutionary oblivion". This almost makes me drop out of my master course, forget about my future phd and go find someone to mate with so that I make sure my genes will not just die with me and my credentials. But then again, this paragraph keeps me still "Science is not asexual or passionless, but neither is it a result of some crudely sublimated sex drive. Rather, it is one of our most sophisticated arenas for human courtship, which is the most complex and conscious form of matting that has ever evolved on our planet."
I loved this book, read it.

[Angie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a layman’s Anthropology book delving into the idea that mate selection could explain all of those inexplicable bits of human behavior like art, music, and language. Maybe humans all those 100’s of thousands of years ago preferred to mate with people who showed a special flair for these qualities just like peahens prefer to mate with peacocks with the most elaborate tails. It was a very interesting read, but I think I’d prefer a concise essay hitting the highpoints. In book form, it got a little long and overly detailed for my taste.

[Ushan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The human mind has many unique properties. Miller claims that they are due to sexual selection: they are useless for survival in the human ancestral environment, but useful for mate choice; women chose men with the best brains to have sex with and have children by. I don't believe it; the hunters-gatherers whose lifestyles were recorded by ethnologists in the 20th century made full use of their minds for everyday survival. It takes brains to prepare curare and make curare-tipped darts and a blowgun, not to mention discover the poison and invent the weapon (and the ancestors of Amazonian Indians, like those of all other American Indians, came from icy Beringia). In modern times, the men who use their brains the most, which is to say the nerds, are not the ones who enjoy the best sexual and reproductive success; were things different in ancient times?

[Lisa Ramtzen · Rating 5 out of 5]

By now a classic and an essential read for anyone interested in psychology and particularly in evolutionary psychology. Very well written and entertaining, but perhaps not suited for readers unfamiliar with psychology and biology.

[Anatoly Bezrukov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Эталонный научный бестселлер.
Небесспорная, но детальнейшим образом проработанная коцепция, согласно которой на разум и большинство его проявлений (речь, мораль, остроумие, креативность, склонность к искусству и т.п.) - это следствие не естественного, а полового отбора (когда отбор производится не в пользу того, кто лучше приспособлен к выживанию, а в пользу того, кто лучше приспособлен к поиску и завоеванию полового партнёра и, как следствие, к передаче своих генов потомству).
Местами, на мой вкус, немного затянуто: мысль уже понятна, ты с ней согласен, но нет, автор пытается привести всё новые и новые аргументы. С другой стороны, такая дотошность обусловлена научной добросовестностью, и это хорошо.
В некоторых местах (и я всегда это ценю в подобных книгах) удовольствие получаешь не столько от интересных выводов, сколько от самого хода мысли и способа её изложения. Побольше бы таких книг.

[John]

When I mentioned I was reading Geoffrey Miller's book, the response of one well-read friend was "oh, that guy's an [EXPLETIVE DELETED]." Well, he may be, but even if he is, he's an [EXPLETIVE DELETED] who is capable of interpreting the evidence on sexual selection in a way that will enhance your appreciation of evolution, life on earth, and even your own lived experience.

Forget about his behavior on social media, this is Miller in his own field and he's making it accessible to you, the non-specialist. Every field should have a Geoffrey Miller, deftly laying out the questions and the changing answers from each generation of researchers, while also showing significant historical nuance in situating the changing picture of sexual selection across decades of changing society. But what am I saying? Most of the resistance comes from something that hasn't changed: male ego. The idea that females are choosy and that this has an impact on evolution was something even Darwin was careful to introduce, as Miller shows. He also shows how the insights of sexual selection are forgotten and rediscovered, time and again in the history of modern science, all while laying out the science.

Some readers might want Miller to just give us the most recent version, perhaps a Skinner-Box world where most inferior males might as just well accept their fate. But life, and science, are not so simple. Instead, Miller tests out each idea, "steel-manning" instead of straw-manning, testing it at its strongest, and takes the reader along to the next big discovery that may render the last argument useless and false.

But your time was not wasted. You are learning to think like Miller, and Miller thinks like a teacher.

The result is a back and forth between examples of the biological world and fallible humans trying to grasp it. Miller is thorough. Some readers might find him repetitive. But some ideas bear repeating before they are absorbed. Miller's own limitations are on display, about a third of the way in, in a spectacular instance of dramatic irony, as he wonders why common social values seem to be at odds with the practices of a successful sexual competitor. Either Miller's time in the library, or his own personal affinity for the values of sexual selection, have left him unable to recognize the social imperative of reducing the vary frictions produced by the sexual selection as he himself describes it. As Rodney Hilton explained, the boundaries of society are the fruits of conflict, not concord, and traditional societies are loathe to reopen old conflicts because they remember the cost. Only in a spoiled modern world can we still cling to the ideal of the "alpha male," repudiated over 20 years ago by the same researcher who coined it (two years before Miller's publication date). In the real world, the wannabe alpha male would sow hate and resentment, along with his semen, and would probably wake up one morning in a ditch with a few little pieces missing. Because life is not a series of refereed single combats. Your precious, superior offspring will need safety to carry your precious, superior genes into the next generation. Humans are social animals.

Adonis was mortal, you'll recall, until Ovid's heirs made him into a god.

So pace to my well-read friend and his moral reaction to perceived sociopathic tendencies. I'm not marrying Geoffrey Miller, I'm reading him. And didn't Aristotle say it was the mark of an educated person to be able to entertain an idea without necessarily adopting it? Cherrypicking examples to confirm your beliefs is the luxury of the stupid. In a rapidly changing world, infested with proud ignorance as if it were a form of purity, one ought to grasp anything of heuristic value like a lifeline.

If, however, my daughter were to bring someone like Miller home from college ...

[Jacob O'connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently picked this book back up to do some research.  I read it a few years ago.  I really enjoyed it, and I still quote from it often.

Geoffrey Miller is an evolutionary psychologist.  This is a new approach to psychology that reasons we can figure out how we evolved in the past by looking at how we behave now. 

In the case of The Mating Mind, Miller defends what he calls "sexual selection".  Why does the peacock have those cumbersome feathers that make it harder to avoid predators?  Certainly not survival of the fittest.  Miller believes that peacock risks his neck with those feathers because it is a “fitness indicator” to attract peahens. 

He also speculates that the reason human beings excel at certain things that do not make it any easier to survive is that these have been "selected" by our ancestors.  For instance, the women in your ancestry may have preferred men with good singing voices.  Over generations, your people became better and better singers.  Ultimately, Miller believes this is why the "mind" evolved into existence.  It was necessary for cavemen to think, or become more creative, to outcompete their rivals for the love of Wilma or Betty. 

I've read a number of books in this genre.  One of the reasons I find this material so fascinating is that the conclusions they draw make great additions to the teleological argument for the existence of God. That is, evolutionary psychologists can give incredible insight into the "design" of our bodies and minds.  Our brains, physical features, and talents are perfectly suited to attract the opposite sex. Geoffrey Miller would say this is because of evolution.  For me, it is a powerful reason to believe in a creator. 

[Alan Gou · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an incredibly interesting book. Its biggest contribution is to shine the light on "sexual selection", the less-popular, less-talked about sibling of competitive selection, but which Darwin gave just as much importance as he gave to natural selection.

The hypothesis in the center of it is that the human brain evolved to its current state not solely due to natural selection and the advantages bestowed by a higher intellect, but also due to sexual selection — women and men choosing each other, subconsciously, in no small part based on the characteristics of their mate's brain.

The brain, in this theory, is a sexual ornament, in that it signals to potential mates its carrier's fitness, in the same way a peacock's plumage signals its strength, vitality, and genetic quality. A brain is expensive, consuming vast caloric resources, and complex, with trillions upon trillions of neurons folded in upon another. This is precisely the point of a sexual ornament — it should be expensive to maintain and hard to fake, for someone who's not as fit won't be able to expend the resources to have a big brain and stay alive at the same time. And it should be complex, because the more genes involved in its expression, the more deficiencies in the ornament can signal genetic mutations.

How do you determine the fitness of someone's brain? You look at all their behaviors and traits beyond physical appearance and strength: their humor, dance moves, ability to create poetry and art, ability to expound on abstract topics and ideas.

[Yasin S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Evrimle ilgili okunması gereken en önemli eserlerden biri. Richard Dawkins'in de belirttiği gibi cinsel seçilim üzerine bu kadar geniş çapta bir kitap yazılmadı. Evrimsel psikolojinin insan davranışlarını ve kadın erkek ilişkilerini daha iyi anlamamıza olanak sağladığını kitabı okuduktan sonra farkediceksiniz.

[Harlan Wilton · Rating 5 out of 5]

reading books on evolutionary biology is a fitness indicator

[Alex Zakharov · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fast, fun, and speculative ride on evolution of human intelligence through sexual selection. Miller starts off by outlining main challenges to explaining evolution of the brain and creative culture via mainstream natural selection (brain size, lag between cost and survival benefit, no obvious payoffs for humor, creativity, music). He enumerates a few attempts to solve this evolutionary puzzle by way of gene-culture co-evolution, “social brain” hypothesis, tribal warfare and finds these theories wanting.

And so Miller reboots good old sexual selection, jacks it up with Fisher’s fitness indicators and Zahavi’s handicaps, and mounts it on top of human behavioral genetics and “genic capture”. Within such framework, brain becomes an increasingly large mutational target, yielding increasingly complex behaviors that signal genetic health and correlate via g factor.

Now we can revisit art, creativity, language, and even morals and argue for adaptive value through reproductive success. To get these to work Miller needs a better solution to altruism than kin selection or reciprocity, and without falling into the morass of group selection. He dusts off John Nash and argues for altruism via “equilibrium selection”. I like it.

With altruism out of the way, we can piggy back art off fitness signaling, and argue for language as a perfectly selfish courtship tool. Then we can start bootstrapping morals as equilibrium selection of costly wasteful signals. Finally, Miller’s mechanism for creativity is kinda cute too – he frames it as a generalized form of Protean behavior where unpredictability signals agility of the mind.

Good read, and certainly more entertaining than the more mainstream theories of Pinker, Buss, Henrich, and Dunbar. And for my money – more plausible too.

[Jayson Brady · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely worth reading to understand sexual selection, it's sub-theories, and it's history. Found it too long a skimmed the last half on account of being unnecessarily repetitive. But the first half is very fascinating and well worth it.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t know why or how… But the first moment I read Jon Sefcek and Geoffrey Miller's article on evolutionary psychology I knew that what they said was true. There was no hint of skepticism. I was like, this makes so much sense, this explains everything!!! This theory successfully explains “why it is so much harder for us to learn mathematics than music, surgery than sports, and rational science than the religious myth.” I am so happy that during my vacation I got to read this BIBLE, this is the BIBLE. Period.

“Sexual selection is the premier example of social selection, and courtship is the premier example of social behavior. Theories of human evolution through social selection without explicit attention to sexual selection are like dramas without romance. Prehistoric social competition was not like a power struggle between crafty Chinese eunuchs or horticulturally competitive nuns: it was a complex social game in which real males and real females played for real sexual stakes. They played sometimes with homicidal or rapacious violence, and sometimes with Machiavellian strategizing, but more often with forms of psychological warfare never before seen in the natural world: conversation, charm, and wit.”

“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.”

I used to be a kinda passionate feminist, but now I see patriarchy with other eyes because I finally get biology. All that studying of chimps opened my mind, and I was like, I get it, I finally get it.

“Sex differences can occur on different levels, however. One could argue that runaway sexual selection did not favor brain size or intelligence directly, but the behavioral manifestations of high creative intelligence. On this view, perhaps runaway sexual selection accounts in part for the greater propensity of males to advertise their creative intelligence through trying to produce works of art, music, and literature, amassing wealth, and attaining political status. A strong version of this theory might suggest that human culture has been dominated by males because human culture is mostly courtship effort, and all male mammals invest more energy in courtship. Male humans paint more pictures, record more jazz albums, write more books, commit more murders, and perform more strange feats to enter the Guinness Book of Records. Demographic data shows not only a large sex difference in display rates for such behaviors, but male display rates for most activities peaking between the ages of 20 and 30, when sexual competition and courtship effort are most intense. This effect can be observed from any street corner in the world: if a vehicle approaches from which very loud music is pouring, chances are it is being driven by a young male, using the music as a sexual display.”

The chapters I liked the most were Courtship in the Pleistocene, Arts of Seduction, and The Wit to Woo.

And I cannot skip this incredible description of two minds trying to get the world around them.

“However, when we come to verbally expressed beliefs, sexual selection undermines these reliability arguments. While natural selection for survival may have endowed us with pragmatically accurate perceptual systems, mate choice may not have cared about the accuracy of our more complex belief systems. Sexual selection could have favored ideologies that were entertaining, exaggerated, exciting, dramatic, pleasant, comforting, narratively coherent, aesthetically balanced, wittily comic, or nobly tragic. It could have shaped our minds to be amusing and attractive, but deeply fallible. As long as our ideologies do not undermine our more pragmatic adaptations, their epistemological frailty does not matter to evolution.
Imagine some young hominids huddling around a Pleistocene campfire, enjoying their newly evolved language ability. Two males get into an argument about the nature of the world, and start holding forth, displaying their ideologies.
The hominid named Carl proposes: “We are mortal, fallible primates who survive on this fickle savanna only because we cluster in these jealousy-ridden groups. Everywhere we have ever traveled is just a tiny, random corner of a vast continent on an unimaginably huge sphere spinning in a vacuum. The sphere has traveled billions and billions of times around a flaming ball of gas, which will eventually blow up to incinerate our empty, fossilized skulls. I have discovered several compelling lines of evidence in support of these hypotheses.…”
The hominid named Candide interrupts: “No, I believe we are immortal spirits gifted with these beautiful bodies because the great god Wug chose us as his favorite creatures. Wug blessed us with this fertile paradise that provides just enough challenges to keep things interesting. Behind the moon, mystic nightingales sing our praises, some of us more than others. Above the azure dome of the sky the smiling sun warms our hearts. After we grow old and enjoy the babbling of our grandchildren, Wug will lift us from these bodies to join our friends to eat roasted gazelle and dance eternally. I know these things because Wug picked me to receive this special wisdom in a dream last night.”
Which ideology do you suppose would prove more sexually attractive? Will Carl’s truth-seeking genes—which may discover some rather ugly truths—out-compete Candide’s wonderful-story genes? The evidence of human history suggests that our ancestors were more like Candide than Carl. Most modern humans are naturally Candides. It usually takes years of watching BBC or PBS science documentaries to become as objective as Carl.
When we considered the evolution of language, we saw that sexual selection rarely favors displays that include accurate conceptual representations of the world. Across millions of species throughout the Earth’s history, there have been only two good examples of sexual selection for world-representing truth: human language and human representational art. Even so, human language’s ability to refer to real objects and events does not guarantee the reliability of human ideologies expressed through language.
Sexual selection usually behaves like an insanely greedy tabloid newspaper editor who deletes all news and leaves only advertisements. In human evolution, it is as if the editor suddenly recognized a niche market for news in a few big-brained readers. She told all her reporters she wanted wall-to-wall news, but she never bothered to set up a fact-checking department. Human ideology is the result: a tabloid concoction of religious conviction, political idealism, urban myth, tribal myth, wishful thinking, memorable anecdote, and pseudo-science.”

People were creating all those myths about creation and Gods because they did not know anything about their world scientifically. I think that for many people nowadays it is easier to still cling to religious beliefs because they give them a comfort science doesn’t. I mean life scientifically is terrifying and lonesome and evolution is “heartlessly unromantic”, indeed.

God, I live for these types of books... They are incredible!!! Omg, now I want to read more and more and more on this subject… I am addicted. Now I have my romantic views shattered once and for all. Guess who won’t be able to watch romantic movies anymore? It's like I woke up from a long dream... This is what I call true enlightenment.

[Manuel Del Río Rodríguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

When we think of evolution, the phrase that often comes to mind is "survival of the fittest"—a process of natural selection that optimizes for survival. However, when applying this reductionist model to explain human evolution, particularly our most distinctive traits like intelligence, creativity, art, language, and morality, we quickly encounter puzzles. Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind offers a compelling solution to these quandaries through the lens of evolutionary psychology. His central argument is that, in addition to natural selection, humans (like other animals) are shaped by sexual selection, a process that prioritizes reproductive success over mere survival.

Miller revisits the concept of sexual selection, first proposed by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man but largely overlooked by biologists until the late 20th century. He explains how sexual selection operates through "fitness indicators"—traits that signal genetic quality to potential mates. The peacock’s tail serves as a quintessential example: its extravagant, costly, and risky display provides a reliable and unforgeable signal of good genes to peahens. Miller posits that human intelligence and creativity have evolved similarly, functioning as sexual ornaments.

With this thesis established, Miller devotes the rest of the book to exploring how various human traits can be understood as "mental fitness displays"—costly signals that evolved to demonstrate fitness during courtship. For instance, he argues that language, much like birdsong, did not evolve for truthful communication but rather for self-serving purposes that incidentally benefitted the group. Creativity, he suggests, functions as a kind of randomization strategy—akin to behaviors observed in other animals—that was repurposed for humor and entertainment, keeping romance alive. Art, he likens to the elaborate nest-making and decorating of bowerbirds, serving as a display of skill and resourcefulness.

Miller’s thesis is coherent, persuasive, and eminently plausible. But is it true? That’s a more difficult question. In the social sciences, it’s often possible to craft "just-so stories" that elegantly explain phenomena but are challenging—or even impossible—to test empirically. Marxism in history and economics, or Freudian psychology, are familiar examples. Similarly, Miller’s arguments rely heavily on speculative reasoning about human evolution during the Pleistocene—a period spanning millions of years about which we know very little. While this isn’t a flaw unique to his work, it does highlight the speculative nature of the book.

It would be unfair to criticize Miller for the lack of experimental evidence; this is, after all, a popular science book, intended as a distilled and accessible summary of years of research. Nevertheless, the speculative foundation of many arguments leaves room for skepticism.

That said, The Mating Mind is an illuminating and thought-provoking read. Miller’s ideas are presented with clarity and flair, and his insights into human evolution are both entertaining and intellectually stimulating. For those intrigued by the intersection of evolution, psychology, and human behavior, this book is well worth reading

[Egor Aristov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Превосходный нон-фикшен. Рекомендую всем, кого интересует «величайшее шоу на Земле» — эволюция. С точки зрения неискушённого обывателя, книга могла быть покороче. Но в данном случае «избыточный» объём происходит не оттого, что автор раздувает какую-то банальную мысль до положенного массы печатных знаков. Просто Миллер, будучи учёным, стремится дать величественному в своей сложности явлению адекватное отражение. Изложение вполне доступное и часто прямо-таки блещет остроумием.

Два главных откровения, которые я получил от Миллера.

(1) Эволюция — это не только про «выживание наиболее приспособленного» (естественный отбор). Она в равной степени про «выживание наиболее привлекательного» (половой отбор). Интересно, что эти движущие силы развития всего живого, в принципе дополняя друг друга, могут вступать в противоречие. И, кажется, жизнь устроена так, что оставить потомство, передать свои гены следующему поколению важнее, чем достичь успеха в соревновании на долгожительство.

«Выживание без размножения — это эволюционное забвение. <...> С другой стороны, размножение, за которым следует гибель, всё же может вылиться в эволюционный успех.»

(2) Человеческий разум с такими уникальными способностями, как речь, моральные ценности, художественное творчество, креативность, юмор — продукт полового отбора, избыточно затратное, с точки зрения естественного отбора, «украшение», лучше, чем что бы то ни было, демонстрирующее нашу приспособленность потенциальным партнёрам.

«Эта книга утверждает, что мы не были созданы ни всеведущим божеством, ни слепым и бездумным естественным отбором. Своим развитием мы обязаны существам, по разумности стоящим где-то посередине, — нашим собственным предкам, которые выбирали половых партнёров настолько осмысленно, насколько могли. От них мы унаследовали сексуальные вкусы — тягу к добросердечным, щедрым, креативным, умным спутникам жизни — и часть этих предпочитаемых ими признаков. Мы — результат длившегося миллионы лет генно-инженерного эксперимента, в котором наши предки отбирали генетический материал путём выбора половых партнёров.»

Ещё для меня очень ценно вот какое обстоятельство. Автор постоянно подчёркивает, что все эти самые замечательные и возвышенные проявления человеческого разума — красноречие, остроумие, доброта, щедрость, художественное мастерство — не теряют ценности оттого, что обнаруживают свою инструментальную функцию.

«Если бы не было полового отбора, склонность людей к благотворительности была бы величайшей загадкой эволюции. <...> Это не значит, что люди, занимаясь благотворительностью, стремятся получить больше секса. Нет, они просто пытаются быть великодушными. Это и есть их мотивация.»

[Arron Kallenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite Miller's recent well publicized self-described "idiotic, impulsive, and badly judged" tweet, which seems to have generally lowered his social status and sexual attractiveness, I still found "The Mating Mind" to be quite entertaining, informative, progressive and open-minded, so much so that I nearly can't believe the same person crafted both the book and the tweet. What I like most about this book is that it demonstrates how much more complex, chaotic and integrated nature and evolution are than the predominant survival of the fittest paradigm would lead us to believe. Miller suggests that processes, such as those that embace randomness, novelty, creativity, language, art, along with a whole host of other other seemingly useless and wasteful natural occurrences, are not mealy footnotes to evolution but the essential drivers of sexual selection, which itself is the gateway through which any lifeforms lucky enough to be naturally selected must first pass. Miller goes on to demonstrate that Darwin himself identified and took great pains to detail the incredible importance of sexual selection. In addition, he points out that, because of the Victorian era male dominated scientific community to which Darwin proposed both sexual and natural selection, sexual selection did not until recently receive the attention it deserves. The rest of the book is devoted to rethinking many of the most wonderful aspects of being human, not in the context of Machiavellian-minded natural selection, but in the much more subtle and diverse context of sexual selection and mate choice.

[Dennis Littrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sexual selection writ large, very large

There was a commercial for Toyota's Paseo a few years ago in which its reliability was being touted when suddenly an insistent voice came on and whispered what Toyota hoped was the subliminal truth: "Women dig it!"

I think the perception of the human brain as a sexual ornament--Geoffrey Miller's primary argument in this book--is in the same class. Sex may help to sell cars, and the fact that women are attracted to men of means with expensive cars (forget the Paseo) is not to be doubted, but to suppose that the primary function of any automobile is symbolic or ornamental is mistaken. While witty conversation and musical display certainly are attractive attributes of a well-made brain, they are secondary to the social, political and subsistence skills of that brain as reasons for its being.

The brain, as Miller points out, is a very expensive organ, eating up a disproportional amount of our caloric intake, requiring a long period of development both inside and outside the womb, as well as making childbirth painful and dangerous--which are some of the reasons it has never grown so disproportionately large in any other creature. Such an organ must have some very fine compensating qualities to make it adaptive. The fact that women dig it (or men for that matter) isn't enough. The case of the peacock with its huge showy tail feathers and the Irish elk with its enormous antlers are cited as examples of runaway sexual ornamentation, and they are that, I suppose. But the Irish elk is extinct and the peacock is not exactly a favorite to survive for very much longer. Most creatures do not develop features that are so grossly expensive strictly as lures for the opposite sex. Most such lures are modest, the coloring of birds, the combs on roosters, the mane on a lion, a woman's breasts, etc.

Miller knows this and his book does not contradict what I have written. The problem is one of perception and understanding. Evolutionary theory, seemingly so simple at first glance, is an incredibly complex subject, so much so that no one person can hope to grasp it all--or, I should say, grasp what little we now know. Evolutionary psychology, which follows from the fact of evolution just as surely as evolutionary biology does, is also an incredibly complex subject awaiting its first genius. But separating "just so stories" from genuine insights is extraordinarily difficult. There is no way Miller or others can prove that the human brain developed in part because of sexual selection--although I personally do not doubt that it did. Nor do I doubt that the elephant's size was also enhanced through sexual selection, perhaps even the cheetah's speed as well. But how to prove it? Consequently, it becomes a matter of opinion to what extent the thesis is correct. Is Miller overstating the case? There is no sure way of deciding. Each reader must weigh the arguments and reach his own conclusions. This is why evolutionary psychology, despite its enormous power to provide insight into who we are and why we behave as we do, is difficult for some people to understand and will continue to be controversial for decades to come.

But this very readable and thought-provoking work goes well beyond its primary thesis as Miller explores sexual selection theory over a wide range of human ability and ornamentation. One of the most exciting things he does is to recognize that biologist Amotz Zahavi's handicap principle can function as a fitness indicator not only to predators but to members of the opposite sex. Thus springboks jump into the air to show predators that they have energy to spare, while women incur the "handicap" of growing large, fatty breasts to show that they have foraged well and have reserves to feed their children. In this way fitness is demonstrated, the former to discourage a fruitless chase, the latter to advertise ready fertility to members of the opposite sex.

I also appreciate his recall of neotony--the retention of child-like features in the adult--as a significant feature of sexual selection. Most recent books on evolutionary psychology have forgotten Ashley Montagu's Growing Young (1989) and Stephen J. Gould's Ontongeny and Phylogeny (1977) both cited by Miller. Sexual selection makes us appear more childlike as a youth indicator, consistent with choosing a mate that will serve us well as a partner for many years to come.

Miller will find his critics here because one of the things he is trying to do is diminish the idea that the intellectual and artistic abilities of the brain are merely fortuitous side effects of its subsistent and social function, which is the position of Stephen Jay Gould and others. In this attempt I don't think Miller is going to be entirely successful. Fortuitous side effects of organs are at the very heart of evolutionary change, sometimes becoming more important than the earlier function. We see this in the case of fins that became legs, or light-detecting organs that became capable of discerning movement and color, and so on. The best explanation for the rapid and disproportionate growth of the human brain is its social/political function. Following in importance is its ability to understand the environment in a way that allows us to find food and shelter and avoid predators. Then, I would say, its tertiary function is to display itself to the opposite sex, to be "sexy."

It is impossible to do justice to this ambitious work in a review limited to a thousand words; however had I more space, given the wide terrain explored by Miller, I would be inadequate to the task. Quite simply, this is an incredibly complex work by a gifted young scientist trying to establish himself as one of the leaders in the growing field of evolutionary psychology, and a book all interested persons should read.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “Understanding Evolution and Ourselves”