The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped The Evolution Of Human Nature (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
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.
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.
What do You think about The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped The Evolution Of Human Nature (2001)?
Impressive thinking from Miller to fill the missing gap of evolutionary psychology. If everything we do and think must have evolutionary purpose, what's the point of creativity, kindness, morality, humour - all of which have no obvious survival benefit?Enter The Mating Mind. Convincingly pointed out that our mental excesses probably function much like the peacock's tail - they advertise one's fitness for mating purposes. Very hard to resist this theory's plausibility.Highly enjoyable and illuminating.
—Henry Manampiring
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.
—Jason
A fascinating look at how the process of sexual selection probably shaped our mental abilities. The forces of sexual selection have been largely marginalized in favor of natural selection ever since Darwin, yet it may account for many of the complex mental behaviors that are uniquely human that we find so difficult to explain in survivalist terms. Topics include art, morality, language, creativity, and humor.The first half of the book spends a lot of time detailing the general forces of sexual selection and the adaptations favored by it, giving examples drawn from other organisms. Only after a fairly exhaustive 175 pages do we get to the finer details of human adaptations from sexual selection. It's well worth it for anyone with an interest in evolutionary psychology.
—Mark
