Foreign thinker
Geoffrey Miller
Geoffrey MillerEvolutionary psychologyAmericanb. 1965
Life and Thought
Geoffrey Miller is an American evolutionary psychologist and professor at the University of New Mexico. He is best known for *The Mating Mind* (2000), which argues that many features of the human mind, including creativity, humor and art, evolved through sexual selection as indicators of genetic fitness. He has also written on consumerism and social status from an evolutionary perspective.
Geoffrey Miller was born in 1965 and earned his doctorate in cognitive psychology at Stanford University. He worked for years at research centers in Europe and the United States and has been a professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico since the mid-2000s. His research lies at the intersection of evolutionary psychology, cognitive science and the psychology of social behavior.
His most important work is *The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature* (2000). Drawing on Darwin's theory of sexual selection, Miller argues that the large human brain and abilities such as language, music, art, humor and creativity cannot be explained by survival pressures alone. In his view, these traits evolved as courtship displays and indicators of genetic quality in competition for mates.
In *Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior* (2009), he extends the same framework to economic behavior and consumerism, trying to show that much conspicuous consumption is a display of traits such as intelligence, conscientiousness and financial capacity. He co-wrote *Mate* (2015) with Tucker Max on the psychology of mate choice and relationships, and published *Virtue Signaling* (2019) on the role of displaying moral values in social status. His theory of the role of sexual selection in the evolution of the mind has been controversial among researchers, with many supporters and critics.