The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped Human Nature Book

Evolutionary psychology has been called the "new black" of science fashion, though at its most controversial it more resembles the emperor's new clothes. Geoffrey Miller is one of the Young Turks trying to give the phenomenon a better spin. In The Mating Mind he takes Darwin's "other" evolutionary theory--of sexual rather than natural selection--and uses it to build a theory about how the human mind has developed the sophistication of a peacock's tail to encourage sexual choice and the refining of art, morality, music and literature.Where many evolutionary psychologists see the mind as a Swiss army knife, and cognitive science sees it as a computer, Miller's analogy is to an entertainment system, evolved to stimulate other brains. Taking up the baton from studies such as Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, it's a dizzyingly ambitious project which would be impossibly vague without the ingenuity and irreverence which Miller brings to bear. Steeped in popular culture, it mixes theories of runaway selection, fitness-indicators and sensory bias with explanations of why men tip more than women and how female choice shaped (quite literally) the penis. It also extols the sagacity of Mary Poppins (Miller allows ideas to cascade at such a torrent that the steam given off can run the risk of being mistaken for hot air).That large personalities can be as sexually enticing as oversize breasts or biceps may indeed prove solacing, but denuding sexual chemistry can be a curiously unsexy business, akin to analysing humour. As a courting display of Miller's intellectual plumage, though, The Mating Mind is formidable: its agent provocateur chest swelled with ideas and articulate conjecture. While occasionally his magpie instinct may loot fool's gold, overall it provides an accessible and attractive insight into modern Darwinism and the survival of the sexiest. --David VincentRead More