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

is a castle built on sand, whereas modern psychology is the Rock of Gibraltar. I take the opposite view. Mostly, my sexual choice theory relies on conservative, well-established evolutionary principles, but it takes a rather playful, irreverent view of human behavior.
This book also draws on a wide range of facts and ideas from
many areas of science, including psychology anthropology evolutionary theory primatology archeology cognitive science, game theory and behavior genetics. I also borrow a number of ideas from contemporary feminism and cultural theory and from some of my intellectual heroes such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Thorstein Veblen. I won't pretend to be expert in all these topics. Outside our own areas of expertise, scientists keep up to date by reading the same popular science books and magazine articles as other people do. This makes us vulnerable to the same intellectual fads that sweep through academic and popular culture; it also makes us dependent on the popularizers of other sciences, who sometimes have idiosyncratic views. I have tried to minimize such distortions by being fairly conservative about which ideas and data I rely on. I try to identify which of my arguments are well supported by the current evidence as I understand it, and which still need to be evaluated with further research.
There are also limits to my practical understanding of our
mental adaptations. I know less about art than most artists, less
    about language than political speech writers, and less about comedy than Matt Groening, originator of The Simpsons. If you find that you know more about some aspect of the human mind than I do, my errors and omissions could be considered your opportunities. There is plenty of room in evolutionary psychology
for contributions by people with all sorts of expertise.
This book presents one possible way to apply sexual selection theory in evolutionary psychology, but there are countless other ways. There is no pretense here of having a complete theory of the human mind, human evolution, or human sexual relationships. This is a snapshot of a provisional theory under construction. My aim is to stimulate discussion, debate, and further research, not to win people over to some doctrine set in stone.
    An Ancestral Romance
This book's most unusual challenge is that readers will sometimes be asked to imagine what it was like for our ancestors to fall in love with beings considerably hairier, shorter, poorer, less creative, less
articulate, and less self-conscious than ourselves. This is best done without visualizing such beings too concretely. I have never managed to feel genuine desire for any museum model of an Australopithecine female, however realistically their sloping foreheads, thick waists, and furry buttocks have been rendered. Nor have I found it easy to imagine feeling genuine love when gazing into the eyes of one of these ancestors from three million years ago. Our sexual preferences seem too hard-wired to permit these imaginative leaps. The limits of our contemporary sexual imaginations have always been an obstacle to appreciating the role of sexual choice in human evolution.
On the other hand, ancestral romance is not so hard to understand at a slightly more abstract level. Indeed, it may be intuitively easier to understand human evolution through sexual selection than through natural selection. While our ancestors faced very different survival problems than we do today, the problems of sexual rejection, heartbreak, jealousy, and sexual competition remain almost unchanged. Few of us have any experience digging tubers, butchering animals, escaping from lions, or raiding other tribes. But our past sexual relationships may prove a useful guide to understanding the sexual choices that shaped our species.
Each of our romantic histories goes back only a few years, but the romantic history of our genes goes back millions. We are here only because our genes enjoyed an unbroken series of successful