Rating
The Pequod Review:
The consensus among evolutionary psychologists seems to be that Geoffrey Miller’s thesis in The Mating Mind — namely, that the growth of the human brain was driven by a mating preference for higher intelligence — is incorrect. However he makes compelling and well-articulated arguments throughout:
Sexual selection is the professional at sifting between genes. By comparison, natural selection is a rank amateur. The evolutionary pressures that result from mate choice can therefore be much more consistent, accurate, efficient, and creative than natural selection.
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Consider the huge Thanksgiving feast that American families organize when a daughter first brings home a potential husband. The family members are not improving their collective survival chances, they are improving the daughter’s mating prospects by demonstrating their wealth, health, family size, and other aspects of familial fitness. The prodigious waste of uneaten turkey even follows the predictions of the handicap principle. Across cultures, marriage rituals serve similar functions, wasting vast resources so that a kin group can display its fitness to a group of possible in-laws.
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Individuals feel social pressure to adopt the beliefs that are conventionally accepted as indicating a “good heart,” even when those beliefs are not rational. We may even find ourselves saying, “His ideas may be right, but his heart is clearly not in the right place.” Political correctness is one outcome of such attributions. For example, if a scientist says, “I have evidence that human intelligence is genetically heritable,” that is usually misinterpreted as proclaiming “I am a disagreeable psychopath unworthy of love.”
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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.
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Our modern quality of life depends on our ability to benefit from millions of acts of courtship, in which we are neither the producer nor the intended receiver. One’s life may be save by a side-impact airbag designed by an engineer in Stockholm, striving for local status in a Volvo design team… The signal difference between modern life and Pleistocene life is that we have the social institutions and technologies for benefiting from the courtship efforts of distant strangers.
Recommended.