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

are sometimes not considered legitimate biological adaptations. Evolutionary psychologists Steven Pinker and John Tooby have argued that our science should focus on human universals that have been optimized by evolution, no longer showing any significant differences between individuals, or any genetic heritability in those differences. That is a good rule of thumb for identifying survival adaptations. But, as we shall see, it rules out all sexually selected adaptations that evolved specifically to advertise individual differences in health, intelligence, and fitness during courtship. Sexual selection tends to amplify individual differences in traits so that they can be easily judged during mate choice. It also makes some courtship behaviors so costly and difficult that less capable individuals may not bother to produce them at all. For art to qualify as an evolved human adaptation, not everyone has to produce art, and not everyone has to show the same artistic ability. On the contrary, if artistic ability were uniform and universal, our ancestors could not have used it as a criterion for picking sexual partners. As we shall see, the same reasoning may explain why people show such wide variation in their intelligence, language abilities, and moral behavior.
While sexually selected adaptations can be distinguished from survival adaptations from the outside, they may not feel any different from the inside. In particular, they may not feel very
sexual when we're using them. Sexual selection is a theory of evolutionary function, not a theory of subconscious motivation. When I argue that a particular human ability evolved to attract sexual partners, I am not claiming that there is some sort of Freudian sex drive at work behind the scenes. Peacock tails do not need a sexual subconscious in order to be sexually attractive, and neither do our instincts for art, generosity, or creativity.
Why Now?
If sexual selection is so great, why hasn't it been used before now to explain the most distinctive aspects of human nature? In the next chapter, I trace the reasons why sexual selection theory was neglected for a century after Darwin and why it was revived only in the 1980s. The century of neglect is important to appreciate, because virtually all of 20th-century science has tried to explain human mental evolution using natural selection alone. Even now, sexual selection is usually invoked only to explain the differences between women and men, not those between humans and other primates. Although evolutionary biologists and evolutionary psychologists all know about sexual selection, its power, subtlety, and promise for explaining human mental traits have been overlooked.
The idea that sexual choice was an important factor in the human mind's evolution may sound radical, but it is firmly grounded in current biology. Twenty years ago, this book could not have been written. Only since then have scientists come to realize how profoundly mate choice influences evolution. There has been a renaissance of interest in sexual selection, with an outpouring of new facts and ideas. Today, the world's leading biology journals are dominated by technical papers on sexual selection theory and experiments on how animals choose their mates. But this has been a secret renaissance, hidden from most areas of psychology and the humanities, and largely unrecognized by the general public.
Prudery has also marginalized sexual selection—which is, after all, about sex. Many people, especially scientists, are ambivalent
about sex: fascinated but embarrassed, obsessed yet guilty, alternately ribald and puritanical. Scientists still feel awkward teaching sexual selection to students, talking about it with journalists, and writing about it for the public. Science is not so different from popular culture in this respect. Just as there are very few good films that explicitly show sexual penetration, there have been very few good theories of human mental evolution that depict