The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature Read Online Free Page B
Author: Geoffrey Miller
Tags: science, Evolution, Life Sciences
our ancestors as fully sexual beings capable of intelligent mate choice.
The sexual choice idea is also timely because it counters the charge that evolutionary psychology is some sort of "biological reductionism" or "genetic determinism." Many critics allege that evolutionary psychology tries to reduce psychology to biology, by explaining the mind's intricacies in terms of the brute replication of genes. In general, there is nothing wrong with reductionism—it is a powerful and successful strategy for understanding the world, and a cornerstone of the scientific method. However, there are serious problems with biological reductionism in the sense of trying to account for all of human nature in terms of the survival of the fittest. Often this strategy has led scientists to dismiss far too glibly many important human phenomena, such as creativity, charity, and the arts. This book tries very hard to avoid that particular type of reductionism. My theory suggests that our most cherished abilities were favored by the most sophisticated minds ever to have emerged on our planet before modern humans: the minds of our ancestors. It doesn't reduce psychology to biology, but sees psychology as a driving force in biological evolution. It portrays our ancestors' minds as both products and consumers evolving in the free market of sexual choice. My metaphors for explaining this theory will come more from marketing, advertising, and the entertainment industry than from physics or genetics. This is probably the least reductionistic theory of the mind's evolution one could hope for that is consistent with modern biology.
The Gang of Three
It began as an attempt to solve three basic problems concerning human mental evolution. These problems crop up as soon as we ask why we evolved certain abilities that other species did not evolve.
The first problem is that really large brains and complex minds arose very late in evolution and in very few species. Life evolved relatively quickly after the Earth cooled from a molten blob to a planet with a stable surface and some pools of water. Then it was another three billion years before any animal evolved a brain heavier than one pound. Even then, brains heavier than a pound evolved only in the great apes, in several varieties of elephants and mammoths, and in a few dozen species of dolphins and whales. Chimpanzee brains weigh one pound, our brains weigh three pounds, bottlenose dolphin brains weigh four pounds, elephant brains weigh eleven pounds, and sperm whale brains weigh eighteen pounds. But over 99 percent of animal species thrive with brains much smaller than a chimpanzee's. Far from showing any general trend towards big-brained hyper-intelligence, evolution seems to abhor our sort of intelligence, and avoids it whenever possible. So, why would evolution endow our species with such large brains that cost so much energy to run, given that the vast majority of successful animal species survive perfectly well with tiny brains?
Second, there was a very long lag between the brain's expansion and its apparent survival payoffs during human evolution. Brain size tripled in our ancestors between two and a half million years ago and a hundred thousand years ago. Yet for most of this period our ancestors continued to make the same kind of stone handaxes. Technological innovation was at a standstill during most of our brain evolution. Only long after our brains stopped expanding did any tradition of cumulative technological progress develop, or any global colonization beyond the middle latitudes, or any population growth beyond a few million individuals. Arguably, one could not ask for a worse correlation between growth in a biological organ and evidence of its supposed survival benefits. Our ancestors of a
hundred thousand years ago were already anatomically modern humans with bodies and brains just like ours. Yet they did not invent agriculture for another ninety thousand years, or urban civilization for
The sexual choice idea is also timely because it counters the charge that evolutionary psychology is some sort of "biological reductionism" or "genetic determinism." Many critics allege that evolutionary psychology tries to reduce psychology to biology, by explaining the mind's intricacies in terms of the brute replication of genes. In general, there is nothing wrong with reductionism—it is a powerful and successful strategy for understanding the world, and a cornerstone of the scientific method. However, there are serious problems with biological reductionism in the sense of trying to account for all of human nature in terms of the survival of the fittest. Often this strategy has led scientists to dismiss far too glibly many important human phenomena, such as creativity, charity, and the arts. This book tries very hard to avoid that particular type of reductionism. My theory suggests that our most cherished abilities were favored by the most sophisticated minds ever to have emerged on our planet before modern humans: the minds of our ancestors. It doesn't reduce psychology to biology, but sees psychology as a driving force in biological evolution. It portrays our ancestors' minds as both products and consumers evolving in the free market of sexual choice. My metaphors for explaining this theory will come more from marketing, advertising, and the entertainment industry than from physics or genetics. This is probably the least reductionistic theory of the mind's evolution one could hope for that is consistent with modern biology.
The Gang of Three
It began as an attempt to solve three basic problems concerning human mental evolution. These problems crop up as soon as we ask why we evolved certain abilities that other species did not evolve.
The first problem is that really large brains and complex minds arose very late in evolution and in very few species. Life evolved relatively quickly after the Earth cooled from a molten blob to a planet with a stable surface and some pools of water. Then it was another three billion years before any animal evolved a brain heavier than one pound. Even then, brains heavier than a pound evolved only in the great apes, in several varieties of elephants and mammoths, and in a few dozen species of dolphins and whales. Chimpanzee brains weigh one pound, our brains weigh three pounds, bottlenose dolphin brains weigh four pounds, elephant brains weigh eleven pounds, and sperm whale brains weigh eighteen pounds. But over 99 percent of animal species thrive with brains much smaller than a chimpanzee's. Far from showing any general trend towards big-brained hyper-intelligence, evolution seems to abhor our sort of intelligence, and avoids it whenever possible. So, why would evolution endow our species with such large brains that cost so much energy to run, given that the vast majority of successful animal species survive perfectly well with tiny brains?
Second, there was a very long lag between the brain's expansion and its apparent survival payoffs during human evolution. Brain size tripled in our ancestors between two and a half million years ago and a hundred thousand years ago. Yet for most of this period our ancestors continued to make the same kind of stone handaxes. Technological innovation was at a standstill during most of our brain evolution. Only long after our brains stopped expanding did any tradition of cumulative technological progress develop, or any global colonization beyond the middle latitudes, or any population growth beyond a few million individuals. Arguably, one could not ask for a worse correlation between growth in a biological organ and evidence of its supposed survival benefits. Our ancestors of a
hundred thousand years ago were already anatomically modern humans with bodies and brains just like ours. Yet they did not invent agriculture for another ninety thousand years, or urban civilization for
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