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

sexual relationships in every single generation since animals with eyes and brains first evolved half a billion years ago. In each generation, our genes had to pass through a gateway called sexual choice. Human evolution is the story of how that gateway evolved new security systems, and how our minds evolved to charm our way past the ever more vigilant gatekeepers.
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    Darwin's Prodigy
The idea of sexual selection has a peculiar history that embodies the best and the worst of science. The best, because it follows the classic heroic model. A lone genius (Charles Darwin), working from his country home without any official academic position, proposes a bold theory that explains diverse, previously baffling facts. Despite presenting the theory in a lucid, engaging best-seller ( The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex ) , the theory is immediately attacked, mocked, reviled, and dismissed by his narrow-minded colleagues. The theory falls into obscurity, but, as decades pass, more and more supporting evidence accumulates in ways that could never have been anticipated by the original thinker. Finally, over a century after it is first proposed, the theory gradually becomes accepted as a major, original contribution. Sexual selection theory has returned like the prodigal son. Science shows once again how truth wins out against historical contingency and ideological hostility.
Yet this history also shows the worst of science. Over a century passed before biologists took seriously Darwin's most provocative ideas about mate choice. The delay resulted not just from rational skepticism, but from a set of reactionary prejudices deriving from sexism, anthropocentrism, and a misguided type of reductionism. These prejudices were so strong that, for more than fifty years after Darwin, virtually no biologists or psychologists bothered to put his mate choice ideas to a good experimental test (though such tests have subsequently proven fairly easy to do, usually with positive results).
This chapter introduces some basic sexual selection ideas
through a narrative history. The history is important because the century when sexual selection was in exile was the century when the origins of the human mind seemed the most inexplicable. Before Darwin, religious myths accounted for human origins; after Darwin, evolution satisfactorily accounted for the human body, but not the human mind. In the 20th century, a unique scientific fascination with human psychology coexisted with an unprecedented bafflement about its origins. By considering the 19th-century origins of sexual selection theory, we may better understand aspects of human nature that were overlooked for most of the 20th century.
Ornaments of Gold
As a child, Charles Darwin was fascinated by nature. He collected beetles avidly, and was once so determined to capture a specimen, despite having his hands full, that he placed it in his mouth to carry home. His reward was a mouthful of defensive beetle-acid, but his enthusiasm remained intact. His family estate, The Mount, near Shrewsbury, had an excellent library full of his father's natural history books, a greenhouse stocked with exotic plants, an aviary for the fancy pigeons his mother kept, and access to a bank of the River Severn. Young Charles preferred nature's sights and sounds to the rote learning of Latin at the local Shrewsbury School.
By age 23, Darwin had left Shrewsbury for South America. His round-the-world voyage on the Beagle introduced him to the astounding volume and diversity of nature's ornaments. England had passerine birds with intricate songs, and pheasants with stately colors, but nothing prepared the young naturalist for the richly ornamented flora and fauna of the tropics: iridescent humming birds visiting outlandish flowers; beetles with carapaces of gold, sapphire, and ruby; enigmatic orchids; screaming parrots; butterflies like two blue hands clapping; monkeys with red, white, black, and tan faces; exotic