The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature by Geoffrey Miller Read Free Book Online

when we are mired in that mixture of caffeine, television, habit, and self-delusion that in modern society we call "ordinary consciousness." It is so easy, when engaged in abstract theorizing about mental evolution, to forget that we are talking about the origins of our own genes, from our own parents, that built our own minds, over our own lifetime. Equally, we are talking about the origins of the genes that built the mind and body of the first person you ever fell in love with, and the last person, and everyone in between. A theory that can't give a satisfying account of your own mind, and the minds you've loved, will never be accepted as providing a scientific account of the other six billion human minds on this planet. Theories that don't fulfill this human hunger for self-explanation may win people's minds, but it will not win their hearts. The fact that 47 percent of Americans still think humans were created by God in the last ten thousand years suggests that evolutionary theories of human origins, however compelling at the rational level, have not proved satisfying to many people. We might as well admit that this is a third demand to impose on theories of human mental evolution, and see whether we can fulfill it. This criterion should not take precedence over evolutionary principles or psychological evidence, but I think it can be a useful guide in developing testable new ideas. If we cannot fulfill this criterion, perhaps we'll just have to live with the existential rootlessness that Jean-Paul Sartre viewed as an inevitable part of the human condition.
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In facing these three challenges, I have found my professional training as an experimental cognitive psychologist of limited value. What I learned about the psychology of judgment and decision-making was helpful in thinking about sexual choice. But most experimental psychology views the human mind exclusively as a computer that learns to solve problems, not as an entertainment system that evolved to attract sexual partners. Also, psychology experiments usually test people's efficiency and consistency when interacting with a computer, not their wit and
warmth when interacting with a potential spouse. These attitudes have carried over into fashionable new areas such as cognitive neuroscience.
    Because cognitive psychology and neuroscience usually ignore human courtship behavior, this book discusses very little of the research areas I was trained to pursue. Such research reveals how human minds process information. But evolution does not care about information processing as such: it cares about fitness—the prospects for survival and reproduction. Experiments that investigate how minds process arbitrary visual and verbal information shed very little light on the fitness costs and benefits of the human abilities that demand evolutionary explanation, such as art and humor. Conversely, some less well-funded research on individual differences, personality, intelligence, and behavior genetics has proven surprisingly useful to me. Such research bears directly on the key questions in sexual selection: how do traits differ between individuals, how can those differences be perceived during mate choice, how are those differences inherited, and how are they related to overall fitness? Its conclusions are not always what we refer to nowadays as "politically correct." I would have been more comfortable combining evolutionary biology with a politically correct neuroscience that ignores human sexuality, individual differences, and genes. But in evolutionary psychology we have to deal with evolution, and that means paying attention to genetically heritable individual differences that give survival or reproductive advantages over other individuals.
    Many recent books about the human mind's evolution have offered radical new ideas about how evolution works, but have described the mind's capacities very conservatively. That approach suggests that modern evolutionary theory