Lessons from Geoffrey Miller

Geoffrey Miller, an influential evolutionary psychologist, has reshaped our understanding of the human mind, arguing that our most cherished qualities—intelligence, creativity, humor, and morality—are not mere survival tools, but rather sophisticated ornaments sculpted by the forces of sexual selection. His work posits that the human brain evolved, much like a peacock's tail, as a "courtship machine" to attract and entertain sexual partners.

On Sexual Selection and the Evolution of the Mind

The central pillar of Miller's work is that our minds are products of our ancestors' mating choices. These quotes lay the foundation for his theory.

"The human mind's most impressive abilities are like the peacock's tail: they are courtship tools, evolved to attract and entertain sexual partners." [1][2]
"By intelligently choosing their sexual partners for their mental abilities, our ancestors became the intelligent force behind the human mind's evolution." [2][3]
"Every one of our ancestors managed not just to live for a while, but to convince at least one sexual partner to have enough sex to produce offspring. Those proto-humans that did not attract sexual interest did not become our ancestors, no matter how good they were at surviving." [2]
"I shall argue that the most distinctive aspects of our minds evolved largely through the sexual choices our ancestors made." [2]
"The human mind and the peacock's tail may serve similar biological functions." [2][4]
"If we were typical animals, our attitudes to others would be dominated not by hate, exploitation, spite, competitiveness, or treachery, but by indifference. And so they are." [4]
"For male genes, copulation is the gateway to immortality. This is why males risk their lives for copulation opportunities." [1]
"Dismissing the idea that female choice could influence the direction of evolution began to look both sexist and unscientific." [1][4]
"Evolutionary psychology must become less Puritan and more Dionysian. Where others thought about the survival problems our ancestors faced during the day, I wanted to think about the courtship problems they faced at night." [5]
"Our responsibility is not to speculate endlessly about the possible futures of our daughter species, but to become, with as much panache as we can afford, their ancestors." [1][4]

On Creativity, Humor, and Art

For Miller, our creative and artistic abilities are premier examples of sexually selected traits—they are reliable indicators of a good brain and good genes.

"A capacity for comedy reveals a capacity for creativity. It plays upon our intense neophilia. It circumvents our tendencies towards boredom. Creativity is a reliable indicator of intelligence, energy, youth, and proteanism. Humor is attractive, and that is why it evolved." [3][6]
"The healthy brain theory proposes that our minds are clusters of fitness indicators: persuasive salesmen like art, music, and humor, that do their best work in courtship, where the most important deals are made." [3][7]
"Art reveals our visual aesthetics. Conversation reveals our personality and intelligence." [1]
"These capacities for randomness may have been amplified into human creativity through sexual and social selection." [8][9]
"Men write more books. Men give more lectures. Men ask more questions after lectures. Men post more e-mail to Internet discussion groups. To say this is due to patriarchy is to beg the question of the behavior's origin." [4]
"If men control society, why don't they just shut up and enjoy their supposed prerogatives? The answer is obvious when you consider sexual competition: men can't be quiet because that would give other men a chance to show off verbally." [1][4]

On Consumerism and Signaling

In Spent, Miller deconstructs modern consumerism, arguing that our purchases are primarily driven by an unconscious desire to signal our traits to others.

"Consumerism is hard to describe when it's the ocean and we're the plankton." [6][8]
"The rich covet the new iPod not for the sounds it can make in their heads, but for the impressions it can make in the heads of others." [3]
"All ads effectively have two audiences: potential product buyers, and potential product viewers who will credit the product owners with various desirable traits." [3][6]
"Capitalism is not materialistic but semiotic. It concerns mainly the psychological world of signs, symbols, images, and brands." [6]
"Consumerism has become our most potent ideology because it so contemptuously dismisses our natural human modes of trait display, and it keeps us too busy – working, shopping, and product displaying – to remember what we can signal without all the products." [6]
"The ad does not say “Buy this!”; it says, “Be assured that if you buy and display this product, others are being well trained to feel ugly and inferior in your presence, just as you feel ugly and inferior compared with this goddess.” [4][10]
"Fundamentally, what matters to people is not material wealth. It's maximizing things like your social status, your attractiveness, and your prestige." [11]
"Buying something outright means, at best, being able to use it until it becomes boring, unfashionable, or obsolete, or until one dies. Personal 'ownership' is just a way of renting things from the universe for a human life span, or less." [12]
"You know some costly signaling is going on when thousands of teenagers spend three years each learning a long-dead language just so they'll score better on an IQ test [the SAT] that pretends it's not an IQ test, so they can spend four more years and a hundred thousand dollars to get a college degree that pretends it's not an IQ guarantee." [13]

On Virtue Signaling and Morality

Miller views morality and virtue not as divinely inspired or purely rational principles, but as evolved signaling systems that advertise our quality as a potential partner and ally.

"We all virtue signal. I virtue signal; you virtue signal; we virtue signal. And those guys over there, in that political tribe we don't like—they especially virtue signal." [14]
"Virtue signaling includes the best of human instincts, and the worst of human instincts." [14]
"Sexual selection is the key to understanding virtue signaling." [15]
"From a sexual selection viewpoint, moral philosophy and political theory have mostly been attempts to shift male human sexual competitiveness from physical violence to the peaceful accumulation of wealth and status." [8][9]
"The moral virtues most readily explained by sexual selection are those most conspicuously manifest in sexual courtship and relationships, and consistently valued in mate choice across cultures." [15]
"Kindness, empathy, niceness, honesty, and heroism are among the most valued traits in a long-term partner." [15]
"Without virtue signaling, we'd never have seen the end of slavery, animal torture, cruel and unusual punishment, or any of the other outrages that Steven Pinker analyzed in The Better Angels of our Nature." [14]
"Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-travelling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017... Newton wouldn't last long as a 'public intellectual' in modern American culture. Sooner or later, he would say 'offensive' things... Result? On the upside, he'd drive some traffic through Huffpost... On the downside, we wouldn't have Newton's Laws of Motion." [6][16]

On Personality, Intelligence, and Society

Miller connects personality traits and intelligence to evolutionary pressures, offering novel perspectives on social structures and individual differences.

"A person of limited intelligence but high conscientiousness can make a valuable employee; a person of higher intelligence but very low conscientiousness is almost unemployable." [3][6]
"The highly open expose themselves to new experiences, cultures, people, relationships, norms, ideas, worldviews, art, music, sexual practices, and drugs. They can get infected by nasty, maladaptive memes; they might end up believing in astrology, homeopathy, or Scientology." [3][10]
"In developed countries, we have less to fear from infectious parasites, but much more to fear from infectious memes." [3][6]
"If you don't have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won't have the willpower to do a dissertation." [6][8]
"If most of your courtship attempts have succeeded, you must be a very attractive and charming person who has been aiming too low." [6][8]
"Sports are the intersection of mind and body, nature and culture, competition and mate choice, physical fitness and evolutionary fitness." [3][4]
"Scientific theories never dictate human values, but they can often cast new light on ethical issues." [8][9]
"Existing political philosophies all developed before evolutionary game theory, so they do not take equilibrium selection into account. Socialism pretends that individuals are not selfish sexual competitors, so it ignores equilibria altogether." [4]
"Conservatism pretends that there is only one possible equilibrium—a nostalgic version of the status quo—that society could play." [4]
"Libertarianism ignores the possibility of multiple equilibria and the coordination problems in moving from a less-preferred to a more-preferred equilibrium." [4]
"You may think that tax policy sounds like the most boring topic in the world. That is precisely what most governments, corporations, and special interests would like you to think." [4][10]
"Income taxes penalize people for what they contribute to society (labor and capital), whereas consumption taxes penalize people for what they take out of society (new retail purchases)." [4][6]
"The six traits are general intelligence (IQ), openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability, and extraversion. All six dimensions are also genetically heritable." [13]
"Short-term creative intelligence is basically general intelligence plus openness, while long-term creative achievement is also predicted by conscientiousness (hard work and ambition) and extraversion (active surgency and social networking)." [13]
"We need the freedom to live assortatively with like-minded people, and to establish a much wider variety of local communities with their own values and norms." [13]
"For anything to evolve it has to affect the probability of passing on your genes." [4]
"Whatever your goals, it's the struggle to get there that's most rewarding. It's almost as if life itself is inviting us to embrace difficulty—not as punishment but as a design feature." [17]

Learn more:

Lessons from Geoffrey Miller

On Sexual Selection and the Evolution of the Mind

On Creativity, Humor, and Art

On Consumerism and Signaling

On Virtue Signaling and Morality

On Personality, Intelligence, and Society

Written by Antoine Buteau

Lessons from Alex Schultz of Meta

Lessons from Verne Harnish