Quotes from Geoffrey Miller

our social needs for intimacy, belonging, and acceptance. Mate preferences for status can explain our esteem needs for recognition, fame, and glory. Mate preferences for intelligence, knowledge, skills, and moral virtues can explain our cognitive needs to learn, discover, and create, and our self-actualization needs to fulfill our potential (for example, to display the highest possible mate value given our genetic quality).

By intelligently choosing their sexual partners for their mental abilities, our ancestors became the intelligent force behind the human mind's evolution.

Instead, they face a bizarre new world of frustrating duties and counterintuitive ideas: sit still, learn math, find a job, move away from friends, ignore kin, drive cars, leave kids in day care, and grow burdensome in old age.

Our sense of beauty was shaped by evolution to embody 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.

It seems likely that male choice shaped breasts not to distinguish girls from women, but to distinguish young women from older women. Here, the informative thing about breasts is the way they droop with the effects of age and gravity.

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.

In developed countries, we have less to fear from infectious parasites, but much more to fear from infectious memes. So, instead of opening our bodies to ambient germs, we open our minds to ambient culture, to determine if we can stay sane throughout the onslaught.