Geoffrey Miller (evolutionary psychologist)
Encyclopedia
Geoffrey F. Miller Associate Professor of Psychology
at the University of New Mexico
, is an American evolutionary psychologist.
Miller is a 1987 graduate of Columbia University
, where he earned a B.A.
in biology
and psychology
. He received his PhD in cognitive psychology
from Stanford University
in 1993 under the guidance of Roger N. Shepard. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the evolutionary and adaptive system
s group in the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the University of Sussex
, UK (1992–94); Lecturer in the Department of Psychology, University of Nottingham
(1995); Research Scientist at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research
, Munich, Germany (1995–96); Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Economic Learning and Social Evolution, University College London
(1996–2000); he has worked at the University of New Mexico
, Albuquerque, since 2001, where he is now Associate Professor. In 2009, he was Visiting Scientist, Genetic Epidemiology
Group, Queensland Institute of Medical Research
, Brisbane, Australia.
's theoretical observation that evolution is driven not just by natural selection
, but by the process called sexual selection
. In support of his views on sexual selection, he has written The Mating Mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature. This revives and extends Darwin's suggestion that sexual selection through mate choice has been critical in human mental evolution—especially the more "self-expressive" aspects of human behavior, such as art, morality, language, and creativity. Identifying the survival value of these traits has proved elusive, but their adaptive design features do suggest that they evolved through mutual mate-choice by both sexes to advertise intelligence, creativity, moral character and heritable fitness. The supporting evidence includes human mate preferences, courtship behavior, behavior genetics
, psychometrics
, and life history
patterns. The theory makes many testable predictions, and sheds new light on human cognition
, motivation, communication, sexuality, and culture.
Miller believes that our minds evolved not as survival machines, but as courtship machines, and proposes that the human mind's most impressive abilities are courtship tools that evolved to attract and entertain sexual partners. By switching from a survival-centred to a courtship-centred view of evolution, he attempts to show how we can understand the mysteries of mind. The main competing theories of human mental evolution are (1) selection for generalist foraging ability (i.e., hunting and gathering
), as embodied in the work of researchers such as Hillard Kaplan and Kim Hill at the University of New Mexico, and (2) selection for social intelligence
, as argued by Andrew Whiten, Robin Dunbar
, and Simon Baron-Cohen
.
He has published on visual perception
, cognition
, learning, robotics
, neural networks
, genetic algorithms, human mate-choice, evolutionary game theory
, and the origins of language
, music, culture, intelligence, ideology and consciousness
. He studies human mental adaptations for judgment, decision-making, strategic behavior and communication in social and sexual domains. Apart from mutual mate-choice and sexual selection theory, this includes work on:
to gain an understanding of how marketing
has exploited our inherited instincts to display social status for reproductive advantage. Miller argues that in the modern marketing-dominated culture, "coolness" at the conscious level, and the consumption choices it drives, is an aberration of the genetic legacy of two million years of living in small groups, where social status has been a critical force in reproduction. Miller's thesis is that marketing persuades people—particularly the young—that the most effective way to display that status is through consumption choices, rather than conveying such traits as intelligence and personality through more natural means of communication, such as simple conversation.
Miller argues that marketers still tend to use simplistic models of human nature
that are uninformed by advances in evolutionary psychology and behavioural ecology. As a result, marketers "still believe that premium products are bought to display wealth, status, and taste, and they miss the deeper mental traits that people are actually wired to display—traits such as kindness, intelligence, and creativity". This, he claims, limits the success of marketing.
and mood disorder
s. His other interests include the origins of human preferences, aesthetics, utility functions, human strategic behavior, game theory
, experiment-based economics, the ovulatory effects on female mate preferences, and the intellectual legacies of Darwin
, Nietzsche, and Veblen
.
In 2007, Miller (with Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan) published an article in Evolution and Human Behavior
, demonstrating that lap dancers made more money during ovulation
. For this paper, Miller won the 2008 Ig Nobel Award
..
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
at the University of New Mexico
University of New Mexico
The University of New Mexico at Albuquerque is a public research university located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the United States. It is the state's flagship research institution...
, is an American evolutionary psychologist.
Miller is a 1987 graduate of Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, where he earned a B.A.
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
in biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
and psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
. He received his PhD in cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....
from Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
in 1993 under the guidance of Roger N. Shepard. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the evolutionary and adaptive system
Adaptive system
The term adaptation arises mainly in the biological scope as a trial to study the relationship between the characteristics of living beings and their environments...
s group in the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the University of Sussex
University of Sussex
The University of Sussex is an English public research university situated next to the East Sussex village of Falmer, within the city of Brighton and Hove. The University received its Royal Charter in August 1961....
, UK (1992–94); Lecturer in the Department of Psychology, University of Nottingham
University of Nottingham
The University of Nottingham is a public research university based in Nottingham, United Kingdom, with further campuses in Ningbo, China and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia...
(1995); Research Scientist at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research
Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research
The Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research was a research institute of the Max Planck Society formerly located in Munich in Germany.Founded in 1981, the institute included during its history the following units:...
, Munich, Germany (1995–96); Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Economic Learning and Social Evolution, University College London
University College London
University College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and the oldest and largest constituent college of the federal University of London...
(1996–2000); he has worked at the University of New Mexico
University of New Mexico
The University of New Mexico at Albuquerque is a public research university located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the United States. It is the state's flagship research institution...
, Albuquerque, since 2001, where he is now Associate Professor. In 2009, he was Visiting Scientist, Genetic Epidemiology
Genetic epidemiology
Genetic epidemiology is the study of the role of genetic factors in determining health and disease in families and in populations, and the interplay of such genetic factors with environmental factors...
Group, Queensland Institute of Medical Research
Queensland Institute of Medical Research
The Queensland Institute of Medical Research is one of Australia’s largest medical research institutes, and is recognised worldwide for the quality of its research. QIMR was established in 1945 by an Act of the Government of Queensland. The original purpose of the Institute was to further the...
, Brisbane, Australia.
Human mental evolution
The starting point for Miller's work was DarwinCharles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
's theoretical observation that evolution is driven not just by natural selection
Natural selection
Natural selection is the nonrandom process by which biologic traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution....
, but by the process called sexual selection
Sexual selection
Sexual selection, a concept introduced by Charles Darwin in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, is a significant element of his theory of natural selection...
. In support of his views on sexual selection, he has written The Mating Mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature. This revives and extends Darwin's suggestion that sexual selection through mate choice has been critical in human mental evolution—especially the more "self-expressive" aspects of human behavior, such as art, morality, language, and creativity. Identifying the survival value of these traits has proved elusive, but their adaptive design features do suggest that they evolved through mutual mate-choice by both sexes to advertise intelligence, creativity, moral character and heritable fitness. The supporting evidence includes human mate preferences, courtship behavior, behavior genetics
Behavioural genetics
Quantitative human behavioural genetics is a specialisation in the biological field of behaviour genetics that studies the role of genetics in human behaviour employing quantitative-genetic methods. The field is an overlap of quantitative genetics and psychology...
, psychometrics
Psychometrics
Psychometrics is the field of study concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement, which includes the measurement of knowledge, abilities, attitudes, personality traits, and educational measurement...
, and life history
Biological life cycle
A life cycle is a period involving all different generations of a species succeeding each other through means of reproduction, whether through asexual reproduction or sexual reproduction...
patterns. The theory makes many testable predictions, and sheds new light on human cognition
Cognition
In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
, motivation, communication, sexuality, and culture.
Miller believes that our minds evolved not as survival machines, but as courtship machines, and proposes that the human mind's most impressive abilities are courtship tools that evolved to attract and entertain sexual partners. By switching from a survival-centred to a courtship-centred view of evolution, he attempts to show how we can understand the mysteries of mind. The main competing theories of human mental evolution are (1) selection for generalist foraging ability (i.e., hunting and gathering
Hunter-gatherer
A hunter-gatherer or forage society is one in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to agricultural societies which rely mainly on domesticated species. Hunting and gathering was the ancestral subsistence mode of Homo, and all modern humans were...
), as embodied in the work of researchers such as Hillard Kaplan and Kim Hill at the University of New Mexico, and (2) selection for social intelligence
Social intelligence
Social intelligence describes the exclusively human capacity to use very large brains to effectively navigate and negotiate complex social relationships and environments....
, as argued by Andrew Whiten, Robin Dunbar
Robin Dunbar
Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar is a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist and a specialist in primate behaviour. He is currently Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and the Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology of the University of Oxford and the...
, and Simon Baron-Cohen
Simon Baron-Cohen
Simon Baron-Cohen FBA is professor of Developmental Psychopathology in the Departments of Psychiatry and Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. He is the Director of the University's Autism Research Centre, and a Fellow of Trinity College...
.
He has published on visual perception
Visual perception
Visual perception is the ability to interpret information and surroundings from the effects of visible light reaching the eye. The resulting perception is also known as eyesight, sight, or vision...
, cognition
Cognition
In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
, learning, robotics
Robotics
Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots...
, neural networks
Neural Networks
Neural Networks is the official journal of the three oldest societies dedicated to research in neural networks: International Neural Network Society, European Neural Network Society and Japanese Neural Network Society, published by Elsevier...
, genetic algorithms, human mate-choice, evolutionary game theory
Evolutionary game theory
Evolutionary game theory is the application of Game Theory to evolving populations of lifeforms in biology. EGT is useful in this context by defining a framework of contests, strategies and analytics into which Darwinian competition can be modelled. It originated in 1973 with John Maynard Smith...
, and the origins of language
Origin of language
The origin of language is the emergence of language in the human species. This is a highly controversial topic. Empirical evidence is so limited that many regard it as unsuitable for serious scholars. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris went so far as to ban debates on the subject...
, music, culture, intelligence, ideology and consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
. He studies human mental adaptations for judgment, decision-making, strategic behavior and communication in social and sexual domains. Apart from mutual mate-choice and sexual selection theory, this includes work on:
- human mental traits as fitness indicators (reliable cues of underlying phenotypic traits and genetic quality);
- social attribution heuristicHeuristicHeuristic refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. Heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution, where an exhaustive search is impractical...
s, as adapted to the statistical structure of individual differences (including genetic and phenotypic covarianceCovarianceIn probability theory and statistics, covariance is a measure of how much two variables change together. Variance is a special case of the covariance when the two variables are identical.- Definition :...
s); - animate motion perceptionMotion perceptionMotion perception is the process of inferring the speed and direction of elements in a scene based on visual, vestibular and proprioceptive inputs...
mechanisms, as adapted to typical patterns of intentional movement; and - consumer behavior (applications of evolutionary psychology in product design and aestheticsAestheticsAesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
, marketing, advertising, branding, and the use of genetic algorithims for interactive online product design).
Evolutionary psychology of consumerism
Miller's most recent work has used DarwinismDarwinism
Darwinism is a set of movements and concepts related to ideas of transmutation of species or of evolution, including some ideas with no connection to the work of Charles Darwin....
to gain an understanding of how marketing
Marketing
Marketing is the process used to determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments...
has exploited our inherited instincts to display social status for reproductive advantage. Miller argues that in the modern marketing-dominated culture, "coolness" at the conscious level, and the consumption choices it drives, is an aberration of the genetic legacy of two million years of living in small groups, where social status has been a critical force in reproduction. Miller's thesis is that marketing persuades people—particularly the young—that the most effective way to display that status is through consumption choices, rather than conveying such traits as intelligence and personality through more natural means of communication, such as simple conversation.
Miller argues that marketers still tend to use simplistic models of human nature
Human nature
Human nature refers to the distinguishing characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling and acting, that humans tend to have naturally....
that are uninformed by advances in evolutionary psychology and behavioural ecology. As a result, marketers "still believe that premium products are bought to display wealth, status, and taste, and they miss the deeper mental traits that people are actually wired to display—traits such as kindness, intelligence, and creativity". This, he claims, limits the success of marketing.
Clinical research
Miller's clinical interests are the application of fitness indicator theory to understand the symptoms, demographics, and behavior genetics of schizophreniaSchizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by a disintegration of thought processes and of emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests itself as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking, and it is accompanied by significant social...
and mood disorder
Mood disorder
Mood disorder is the term designating a group of diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classification system where a disturbance in the person's mood is hypothesized to be the main underlying feature...
s. His other interests include the origins of human preferences, aesthetics, utility functions, human strategic behavior, game theory
Game theory
Game theory is a mathematical method for analyzing calculated circumstances, such as in games, where a person’s success is based upon the choices of others...
, experiment-based economics, the ovulatory effects on female mate preferences, and the intellectual legacies of Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
, Nietzsche, and Veblen
Thorstein Veblen
Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen was an American economist and sociologist, and a leader of the so-called institutional economics movement...
.
In 2007, Miller (with Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan) published an article in Evolution and Human Behavior
Evolution and Human Behavior
Evolution and Human Behavior is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering research in which evolutionary perspectives are brought to bear on the study of human behavior. It is primarily a scientific journal, but articles from scholars in the humanities are also published...
, demonstrating that lap dancers made more money during ovulation
Ovulation
Ovulation is the process in a female's menstrual cycle by which a mature ovarian follicle ruptures and discharges an ovum . Ovulation also occurs in the estrous cycle of other female mammals, which differs in many fundamental ways from the menstrual cycle...
. For this paper, Miller won the 2008 Ig Nobel Award
Ig Nobel Prize
The Ig Nobel Prizes are an American parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early October for ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. The stated aim of the prizes is to "first make people laugh, and then make them think"...
..
External links
- Geoffrey Miller's homepage at the University of New Mexico; this includes downloadable versions of several of his journal articles.
- Precis of The mating mind
- Human Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences at the University of New Mexico webpage
- Dutton D (2000) Review of The Mating Mind
- Consumerism and evolutionary fitness – Geoffrey Miller interviewed on ABC Radio National, YouTube video