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

brains was driven by selection for "Machiavellian intelligence" to outsmart, deceive, and manipulate one's social competitors. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar has suggested that large primate brains evolved to cope with large numbers of primate social relationships. He views human language, especially gossip, as an extension of primate grooming behavior. Many researchers have suggested that acquiring our ability to attribute beliefs and desires to others, which they call our "Theory of Mind," was a key stage in human evolution.
    Scientists became excited about social competition because they realized that it could have become an endless arms race, requiring ever more sophisticated minds to understand and influence the minds of others. An arms race for social intelligence looks a promising way to explain the human brain's rapid expansion and the human mind's rapid evolution.
    The human mind is clearly socially oriented, and it seems likely that it evolved through some sort of social selection. But what kind of social selection, exactly? Sexual selection is the best-
understood, most powerful, most creative, most direct, and most fundamental form of social selection. From an evolutionary perspective, social competition centers around reproduction. Animals compete socially to acquire the food, territory, alliances, and status that lead to reproduction. Sexual selection is the most direct form of social selection because mate choice directly favors some traits over others, and immediately produces offspring that are likely to inherit the desired traits.
In other forms of social selection, the link between behavior and reproduction is much less direct. For example, the ability to form and maintain social alliances leads to easier foraging, better protection against predators, and better sexual access to desired mates. This in turn may lead to higher reproductive success, if the desired mates are willing. Other forms of social selection are important, but mostly because they change the social scenery behind sexual selection. Social selection is like the political tension between the Montagues and Capulets. It matters largely because it influences the sexual prospects of Romeo and Juliet.
Sexual selection is the premier example of social selection, and courtship is the premier example of social behavior. Theories of human evolution through social selection without explicit attention to sexual selection are like dramas without romance. Prehistoric social competition was not like a power struggle between crafty Chinese eunuchs or horticulturally competitive nuns: it was a complex social game in which real males and real females played for real sexual stakes. They played sometimes with homicidal or rapacious violence, and sometimes with Machiavellian strategizing, but more often with forms of psychological warfare never before seen in the natural world: conversation, charm, and wit.
What Makes Sexually Selected Traits So Special?
Apart from sexual selection being a special sort of evolutionary process, the adaptations that it creates also tend to show some special features. Adaptations for courtship are usually highly developed in sexually mature adults but not in youth. They are
usually displayed more conspicuously and noisily by males than by females. They produce sights and sounds that prove attractive to the opposite sex. They often reveal an animal's fitness by being difficult to produce if the animal is sick, starving, injured, or full of harmful mutations. They show conspicuous differences between individuals, and those differences are often genetically heritable. ("Heritable" implies that some proportion of the differences between individuals in a particular trait are due to genetic differences between individuals.) As we shall see, the human mind's most distinctive features, such as our capacities for language, art, music, ideology, humor, and creative intelligence, fit these criteria quite well.
However, traits with these features