12/01/2003 12:50:49 PM|||Travis|||

Human mate selection.

I am reading The Mating Mind, by Geoffrey Miller and it has me on a caffine inspired bit about how humans have evolved. This book takes a intersesting evolutionary psycology approach to explaining how mates are selected and how the human mind mainly evolved to be as a peacock's tail for mate selection.

Evolutionary theory has yet to permiate one last fortress- the humanities. How can evolution account for artwork, poetry and other extremely human events that require large amounts of effort without a direct survival benefit? It can be explained by mate selection.

What if creative intelligence first came about as a mutation, which soon became a fitness indicator for mate selection. Much like large muscles would lead a species such as Gorillas to evovle from some primate assestory, having intleligence as an indicator would possibly create us. Females would chose males that had more of this creative ability and vice versa- creating a powerful feedback mechanism that might explain the rapid devleopment of the human brain.

So the brain, is, in a sense, like a large peacock's tail used to attract members of the opposite sex.

It makes studying all the more fun, doesn't it?

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