Quotes from Geoffrey Miller

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.

Sports evolved through sexual selection, but they are not crude sexual displays.

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.

People act differently when they're in love with different people. We tend to match our expressed interests and preferences to those of a desired individual.

Human ideology is the result: a tabloid concoction of religious conviction, political idealism, urban myth, tribal myth, wishful thinking, memorable anecdote, and pseudo-science.

White-collar professionals also use prescription drugs such as Provigil, Ritalin, and Adderall to boost their intelligence and attentiveness.

History suggests that we had very little hope until the social institutions of science arose. Before science, there was no apparent cumulative progress in the accuracy of human belief systems. After science, everything changed.

This effect is so robust that it even occurs in virtual worlds, as in the "Corrupted Blood" plague that ravaged World of Warcraft in September 2005.

So, what's the catch? What would we have to do to get these knives and shoes?' You explain, 'All you have to do is sit in classrooms every day for sixteen years to learn counterintuitive skills, and then work and commute fifty hours a week for forty years in tedious jobs for amoral corporations, far away from relatives and friends, without any decent child care, sense of community, political empowerment, or contact with nature.

Setting boundaries on human behavior is the job of law, custom, and etiquette, not evolutionary psychology.

Living doesn't cost much, but showing off does.

Consumerism has become our most potent ideology because it so contemptuously dismisses our natual 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.

In search of good ideas, I started to see that marketing underlies everything in modern human culture in the same way that evolution underlies everything in human nature.

Fools toast each other's wealth, whereas sages toast each other's health.

Our inherited legacy of adaptatios is literally precious. Even the poorest parents give their children vast riches, in the form of senses, emotions, and mental faculties that have been optimized through millions of years of product development.

Sexual selection tends to amplify individual differences in traits so that they can be easily judged during mate choice. It also makes some courtship behaviors so costly and difficult that less capable individuals may not bother to produce them at all.

Even in the twenty-first century, we still can't buy sane parents, successful siblings, or sensible children. We can't even buy decent replacements for biological adaptations that go wrong -artificial eyes, brains, hands, or wombs. Our bodily organs are the most value-dense items that we can call our own. They are beyond price, but we take them for granted until we lose them through accident or age.

Psychopahy is basically the absence of sympathy. There are fewer female psychopaths, perhaps because female psychophats would not have shown sufficient sympathy to their babies in past generations.

Psychopathy is basically the absence of sympathy. There are fewer female psychopaths, perhaps because female psychophats would not have shown sufficient sympathy to their babies in past generations.

Our inherited legacy of adaptations is literally precious. Even the poorest parents give their children vast riches, in the form of senses, emotions, and mental faculties that have been optimized through millions of years of product development.

Anyone who wishes to imply superiority in their particular line of work is apt to style themselves an artist. The imperatives of fitness display allow us to understand the passion with which people debate whether something is or is not an art. A claim that one's work is art is a claim for sexual and social status.

Beauty conveys truth, but not the way we thought. Aesthetic significance does not deliver truth about the human condition in general: it delivers truth about the condition of a particular human, the artist.

Our sense of beauty was shaped by evolution to embody an awareness of what is difficult as opposed to easy, rare as opposed to common, costly as opposed to cheap, skillful as opposed to talentless, and fit as opposed to unfit.

For males, verbal self-advertisement appears to be a fairly constant function of speech, while for females, it may be an occasional function, more limited to one-to-one conversations with desired mates.