Geoffrey Miller (born 1965) is an American evolutionary psychologist; his work is in the tradition of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker. Evolutionary psychology ( EP) attempts to explain mental and psychological traits €”such as Memory, Perception, Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941 is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and Popular science Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts) is a prominent American philosopher whose research Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18 1954 is a prominent Canadian - American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author
In Miller's view, evolution is driven not just by natural selection, for survival, but equally importantly by the process that Darwin called sexual selection. Natural selection is the process by which favorable Heritable traits become more common in successive Generations of a Population of Charles Robert Darwin (February 12 1809 &ndash April 19 1882 was an English naturalist, who realised and demonstrated that all Species of life Sexual selection is the Theory proposed by Charles Darwin that states that certain evolutionary traits can be explained by Intraspecific competition 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 behaviour, such as art, morality, language, and creativity. For the Björk song see Human Behaviour Human behavior is the collection of Behaviors exhibited by Human beings and influenced by 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 behaviour, behaviour genetics, psychometrics, and life history patterns. Behavioural genetics is the field of Biology that studies the role of Genetics in Animal (including Human) Behaviour. The term life history has been given many meanings in several scientific fields The theory makes many testable predictions, and sheds new light on human cognition, motivation, communication, sexuality and culture. Human cognition is the study of how the Human brain thinks As a subject of study human cognition tends to be more than only theoretical in that its theories lead to working
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, which 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. A hunter-gatherer society is one whose primary subsistence method involves the direct procurement of edible plants and animals from the wild Foraging and Hunting Social intelligence according to the original definition of Edward Thorndike, is "the ability to understand and manage men and women boys and girls to act wisely Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar (born June 28, 1947, Liverpool) is a British anthropologist and Evolutionary biologist specialising Simon Baron-Cohen is a professor of Developmental psychopathology in the departments of Psychiatry and Experimental psychology, a Fellow of Trinity
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. In Psychology, visual perception is the ability to interpret information from Visible light reaching the Eyes The resulting Perception is also Cognition is a concept used in different ways by different disciplines but is generally accepted to mean the process of awareness or thought See also Robot Robotics is the science and technology of Robots and their design manufacture and application Traditionally the term neural network had been used to refer to a network or circuit of biological neurons. A genetic algorithm (GA is a Search technique used in Computing to find exact or Approximate solutions to optimization and Search Evolutionary game theory (EGT is the application of interaction dependent strategy drift in populations to Game theory. The origin of language ( glottogony) is a topic that has attracted considerable speculation throughout human history Consciousness has been defined loosely as a constellation of attributes of Mind such as Subjectivity, Self-awareness, Sentience, and the In particular, he studies human mental adaptations for judgment, decision-making, strategic behaviour 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 heuristics, as adapted to the statistical structure of individual differences (including genetic and phenotypic covariances);
- animate motion perception mechanisms, as adapted to typical patterns of intentional movement; and
- consumer behaviour (applications of evolutionary psychology in product design and aesthetics, marketing, advertising, branding, and the use of genetic algorithims for interactive online product design). heuristic (hyu̇-ˈris-tik is a method to help solve a problem commonly an informal method A phenotype is any observable characteristic of an Organism, such as its morphology, Development, biochemical or physiological properties In Probability theory and Statistics, covariance is a measure of how much two variables change together (the Variance is a special case of the covariance Motion perception is the process of inferring the speed and direction of elements in a scene based on visual, vestibular and proprioceptive inputs Aesthetics or esthetics ( also spelled æsthetics) is commonly known as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values sometimes called
His clinical interests are the application of fitness indicator theory to understand the symptoms, demographics, and behaviour genetics of schizophrenia and mood disorders. Schizophrenia ( from the Greek roots schizein (σχίζειν "to split" and phrēn A mood disorder is the term given for a group of diagnoses in the DSM IV TR classification system where a disturbance in the person's emotional mood is hypothesised His other interests include the origins of human preferences, aesthetics, utility functions, human strategic behaviour, game theory, experiment-based economics, the ovulatory effects on female mate preferences, and the intellectual legacies of Darwin, Nietzsche and Veblen. Game theory is a branch of Applied mathematics that is used in the Social sciences (most notably Economics) Biology, Engineering, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15 1844 August 25 1900 ( was a nineteenth-century German philosopher and classical philologist
His research has provoked extensive media coverage. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of New Mexico. The University of New Mexico ( UNM) is a Public University in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
He is co-editor of the volume Mating intelligence: Sex, relationships, and the mind's reproductive system, and is currently writing his second book, Faking fitness: the evolutionary origins of consumer behavior.
External links
- Geoffrey Miller's homepage at the University of New Mexico -- includes downloadable versions of several of his scholarly papers
References
- Miller G (2000) The mating mind: how sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature, London, Heineman, ISBN 0-434-00741-2 (also Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-49516-1)
- Precis of The mating mind
- Geoffrey Miller's homepage at the University of New Mexico—includes downloadable versions of several of his scholarly papers
- Human Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences at the University of New Mexico webpage
- Miller G (2006) "Why We Haven't Met Any Aliens", "Seed Magazine". Seed (subtitled Science Is Culture; originally Beneath the Surface) is a science magazine published bimonthly by Seed Media Group and distributed
- Miller G (2007) "Geoffrey Miller forecasts the future", "New Scientist Magazine"
- Dutton D (2000) Review of The Mating Mind
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