The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature Read Online Free PDF

uses its trunk every day to convey leaves from trees to mouth, showing clear survival benefits during foraging. The trouble with our unique human abilities is that they do not show the standard features of survival adaptations—convergent evolution, adaptive radiation, and obvious survival utility—and so are hard to explain through natural selection.
    Sexual selection cuts through this Gordian knot. Biologists recognize that sexual selection through mate choice is a fickle, unpredictable, diversifying process. It takes species that make their livings in nearly identical ways and gives them radically different sexual ornaments. It never happens the same way twice. It drives divergent rather than convergent evolution. There are probably half a million species of beetle, but no two have the same kind of sexual ornamentation. There are more than three hundred species of primates, but no two have the same shape and color of facial hair. If the human mind's most unusual capacities evolved originally as courtship ornaments, their uniqueness comes as no surprise. Nor should we be surprised at the lack of survival benefits while brain size was tripling. The brain's benefits were mainly reproductive.
    We get confused about the human mind's biological functions because of a historical accident called human history. The courtship ornaments that our species happened to evolve, such as language and creativity, happened to yield some completely unanticipated survival benefits in the last few thousand years: agriculture, architecture, writing, metalworking, firearms, medicine, and microchips. The usefulness of these recent inventions tempts us to credit the mind with some general survival advantage. From the specific benefits of specific inventions, we infer a generic biological benefit from the mind's "capacity for culture." We imagine evolution toiling away for millions of years, aiming at human culture, confident that the energetic costs of large brains will someday pay off with the development of civilization. This is a terrible mistake. Evolution does not have a Protestant work ethic. It does not get tax credits for research and development. It cannot understand how a costly investment in big brains today may be justified by cultural riches tomorrow.
    To understand the mind's evolution, it is probably best to forget everything one knows about human history and human civilization. Pretend that the last ten thousand years did not happen. Imagine the way our species was a hundred thousand
years ago. From the outside, they would look like just another group of large primates foraging around Africa, living in small bands, using a few simple tools. Even their courtship looks uneventful: a male and a female just sit together, their eyes meet, and they breathe at each other in odd staccato rhythms for several hours, until they start kissing or one gives up and goes away. But if one could understand their quiet, intricately patterned exhalations, one could appreciate what is going on. Between their balloon-shaped skulls pass back and forth a new kind of courtship signal, a communication system unlike anything else on the planet. A language. Instead of dancing around in physical space like normal animals, these primates use language to dance around in mindscapes of their own invention, playing with ideas.
Talking about themselves gave our ancestors a unique window into one another's thoughts and feelings, their past experiences and future plans. Any particular courtship conversation may look trivial, but consider the cumulative effects of millions of such conversations over thousands of generations. Genes for better conversational ability, more interesting thoughts, and more attractive feelings would spread because they were favored by sexual choice. Evolution found a way to act directly on the mental sophistication of this primate species, not through some unique combination of survival challenges, but through the species setting itself a