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

Ever since the Darwinian revolution, this survivalist view has seemed the only scientifically respectable possibility. Yet it remains

‘The mind is a neural computer, fitted by natural selection with combinational algorithms for causal and probabilistic reasoning about plants, animals, objects and people.” (View Highlight)

Sexual choice has not been seen as reaching very deep into human cognition and communication, and sexuality is typically viewed as irrelevant to the serious business of evolving human intelligence and language.

In the 1990s evolutionary psychologists reached a consensus that human intelligence evolved largely in response to social rather than ecological or technological challenges. Some primate researchers have suggested that the transition from monkey brains to ape 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. (View Highlight)

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.

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? (View Highlight)

Tags: #evolution

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. (View Highlight)

Yet they did not invent agriculture for another ninety thousand years, or urban civilization for another ninety-five thousand years. How could evolution favor the expansion of a costly organ like the brain, without any major survival benefits becoming apparent until long after the organ stopped expanding? (View Highlight)

The third problem is that nobody has been able to suggest any plausible survival payoffs for most of the things that human minds are uniquely good at, such as humor, story-telling, gossip, art, music, self-consciousness, ornate language, imaginative ideologies, religion, and morality. How could evolution favor such apparently useless embellishments? The fact that there are no good theories of these adaptations is one of science’s secrets. (View Highlight)

Before sexual reproduction evolved, there were several ways for organisms to accomplish the evolutionary task of spreading their DNA around. There was the divide-and-conquer strategy: wrap DNA in single cells that busily eat nutrients until they grow large enough to split in half, leaving each half to grow and split in turn. Bacteria are the masters of this technique, capable of doubling their populations every few minutes, but vulnerable to mass extermination through perils such as toothbrushes and soap.

Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud took a similar line, arguing that society depends on the renunciation of animal passions and conformity to learned social norms. One of the few points of agreement between biologists and social scientists in the 20th century was that human morality must be taught, because it cannot be instinctive. (View Highlight)

As we have seen, David Buss’s findings indicate that kindness is the most desired trait in a sexual partner around the world. Other research on human mate choice consistently confirms the attractiveness of kindness, generosity, sympathy, and tenderness. (View Highlight)

One perspective is that hunting should be regarded as just another competitive male sport, a contest in which winners can attract mates by demonstrating their athletic prowess. As we saw in Chapter 7, men spend huge amounts of time and energy doing useless sweaty things with one another: basketball, sumo, cricket, skiing, tae kwon do, mountaineering, boxing. To an evolutionist, male human sports are just another form of ritualized male contest in which males compete to display their fitness to females through physical dominance. (View Highlight)

Theory of Mind The ability to attribute beliefs and desires to other individuals, in order to better understand their behavior. The theory of mind is a key component of Machiavellian intelligence theory. (View Highlight)