Geoffrey Miller
Geoffrey Miller (born 1965, Cincinnati) is an evolutionary psychologist best known for proposing that the human mind’s most elaborate features — intelligence, language, art, humour, and morality — evolved primarily through sexual-selection (mate choice) rather than purely through natural selection for survival.
Work Appearing in This Wiki
- miller-2001-mating-mind — The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (Anchor Books, 2001)
Academic Background
- BA, Columbia University
- PhD in Cognitive Psychology, Stanford University
- Postdoctoral work: University of Sussex, University of Nottingham, Max Planck Institute (Munich), University College London
- Current position: Professor of Psychology, University of New Mexico (evolutionary psychology laboratory)
- Previously: London School of Economics; UCLA
Core Research Areas
- Sexual selection and human mental evolution
- Fitness indicators and honest signalling in human behaviour
- Evolutionary approaches to creativity, art, language, and moral behaviour
- Consumer behaviour through evolutionary lens (Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior, 2009)
Signature Ideas
- runaway-selection of the human brain — hominid brain expansion as a Fisher runaway process driven by mate choice
- General intelligence as fitness indicator — g factor advertises genetic quality to potential mates
- Art, language, humour as courtship displays — cultural production partly as sexual selection artefact
- Mental ornaments parallel physical ornaments: both selected by choosy mates as costly honest signals
Reception
The Mating Mind was well received as a creative, well-argued extension of evolutionary theory. Critics noted that separating the sexual-selection account from the survival-selection account empirically is difficult. Miller’s ideas have been influential in evolutionary psychology and have generated both mainstream interest and academic debate.