1,977 words
Geoffrey Miller
Virtue Signaling: Essays on Darwinian Politics and Free Speech
Cambrian Moon, 2019
Geoffrey Miller is an American evolutionary psychologist with a position at the University of New Mexico. His most important book so far remains his first, The Mating Mind (2000), a study of sexual selection. (more…)
1,406 words
Tucker Max and Geoffrey Miller
Mate: Become the Man Women Want
New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015
Time was when a young man did not need to master evolutionary psychology in order to find himself a girl. The adult world provided the young with ready-made social rituals for meeting, assessing one another’s prospects as a mate, and (eventually) entering into a lifelong covenant to bear and raise a new generation. (more…)
2,042 words
Geoffrey Miller
Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
New York: Viking, 2009
When I was asked to review this book, I half groaned because I was sure of what to expect and I also knew it was not going to broaden my knowledge in a significant way. From my earlier reading up on other, but tangentially related subject areas (e.g., advertising), I already knew, and it seemed more than obvious to me, that consumer behavior had an evolutionary basis. (more…)
1,925 words
Geoffrey Miller
The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
New York: Random House, 2000
Darwinian evolution is seen as a cold, ruthless struggle for survival that shaped what we eventually became. But, the critic responds, whence kindness, humor, language, playfulness, art and creativity? Scientists have tried to explain altruism towards relatives as kin selection and other forms of morality as based on reciprocity, but we all often help people who are not related to us when there’s nothing to be gained. (more…)
