Are well all at Hypography just to make ouselves more sexually attractive?

[Michaelangelica]

Are we all at Hypography just to make ourselves more sexually attractive?

Is the human brain just an ornament like the peacocks tail?

How many times to people say they chose a partner because he/she "made me laugh".- -displaying cognitive gymnastics?

Natasha Mitchell: You think the brain itself isn't an organ that drives our survival?

Geoffrey Miller: I think the human brain is in large part a sexual ornament in both men and women.
Certainly many parts of it have been used in hunter/gatherer societies like our ancestors lived in for hunting and gathering and avoiding predators and raising children.
But an awful lot of the capacities we have such as language, a sense of humour, a capacity for producing art and music, to me are only explicable as ways of attracting and keeping sexual partners.

Natasha Mitchell: Gosh, what about walking through the world and our cognitive powers and our intelligence?

Geoffrey Miller: I think the interesting thing about human intelligence and capacities for abstract reasoning, and metaphor and analogy, is how very poor most people are at being evidenced based and sceptical.
What we love to do is pick up little factoids and half-understood theories and repeat them to others to be interesting. Particularly on first dates. So we try to be interesting, we don't really much care about the truth of what we're saying, and scientists have to be extremely self conscious about this: not just to be interesting but to be right.
Most humans most of the time though adopt ideologies and beliefs that are there principally to make their minds attractive to others, not because those beliefs actually correspond to the world.

Natasha Mitchell: There you have it, one take on Darwin 's sexy legacy for our brains. And Geoffrey Miller's book, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, certainly caused a real stir when it came out. And we'll hear about his new work on the prehistoric motivations for the modern consumer a little later.

Is hypography sexually motivated consumerism?

What happens in modern societies is we have those sort of residual instincts for caring what everybody we meet thinks of us.
Even if they are total strangers in a city of 10 million who we'll never meet again, who will have no possible socio sexual interactions of any substance with us.
And that's what marketers are really tapping into.
You can see this particularly among teenagers: the need to have the Billabong or the Hollister clothing is so strong.
The alternatives, different ways of displaying your intelligence or your personality through more natural means of communication like simple conversation become derogated.
And so the marketers have convinced young people in particular that the only effective way to display themselves is through the consumption choices that they make.
. . .
If you actually want to make friends and meet people, you have to do it face to face, that's the way that we have evolved to assess people, is through face-to-face conversation.
. . .
What's interesting about young people today is they are circumventing a lot of conspicuous consumption through electronic communication like Facebook and MySpace and online gaming where they can get to know each other and display their intelligence and personality traits without buying anything and displaying your innermost being to tens of thousands of potential audience members.
. ..
Geoffrey Miller: Yes, to a large degree that evolutionary psychology of consumption of behaviour is a theory of coolness, it's a theory of why we think certain things are cool or rad or happening or fashionable.
At the conscious level we're simply tuned in to what's happening now, what will increase my status, what will appear, you know, credibly connected to ongoing contemporary culture among my peers.
That's at the conscious level but what I'm arguing is at the unconscious level we have all these motivations and preferences and emotions that are driving that behaviour that are a genetic legacy of two million years of living in these little groups where social status was ever so important. And modern consumption is just an efflorescence, an aberration of those instincts.
. . .
I think if you are an insightful Darwinian you have a whole new set of criticisms and insights into contemporary culture and economic policy that you'd never get without a Darwinian perspective.

It also leads you to do empirical research that discovers things that never would have been discovered without an evolutionary perspective. For example, a study that my colleague Vladas Griskevicius at the University of Minnesota

Evolutionary psychologist Professor Geoffrey Miller, whose new book out in May is called Spent: Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerism.

All In The Mind - 14 February 2009 - All in the Mind and the Philosopher's Zone special: Happy Birthday Charles Darwin

This was a small part of a hour-long radio programme on how Darwin is/should be influencing today's science
Worth listening to but a bit diffuse. A butterfly programme touching on many interesting flowers that you wanted to hear more about.
Audio will only be on the site for another week. i recommend listening to the whole programme with the transcript open . I find it helps me.

[Moontanman]

I know I am! I sit here and eat chips, drink beer and get fat so the girls will gang up on me in large groups!

Actually that is an interesting premise, I never thought of it that way, I've alwasy seen the jocks get the girls and the smart guys live in their moms basements alone!

[CraigD]

Starting with the assumption that most of our social behavior – how we behave around other people – is in at least an unconscious way motivated by biological drives to survive and reproduce, I think we need to be careful in considering how social settings such as facebook, myspace, and yes, hypography, differ and are similar to physical interactions, and be skeptical of equating them too much. Though I’m not familiar with his writing, information like the interviews quoted in post #1 lead me to suspect psychologist Geoffrey Miller of, if not actually overly equating internet social settings with physical ones, leading interviewers and inexpert readers to equating them to much.

I believe this for the obvious reason that, barring some bizarre possibilities I’ve yet to hear reported, nobody reproduces without physical interaction.

This raises the possibility that, rather than being “peacock feathers” that increase the likelihood of an individual having descendents, online social forums are “honeypots” or “tar pits” that reduces it.

The key question, seems to me to be if the behavior in question – using online social forums – leads to mating, or has an opposite effect. Do people meet mates in online forums? Are people met in physical space enticed into mating due ones knowledge of and experience in them. Or are people who frequent online forums less likely to meet mates? Does mention of knowledge and experience online repel prospective mates?

My guess – which I’ve not seen addressed by any well-controlled study, and which could be wrong – is the answer to the above is, on average, no/no/yes/yes. People who have descendents mostly do so, I suspect, despite online socialization, not because of it. I suspect that the most significant factors affecting mating have been little changed by the appearance of computers and the internet.

[Moontanman]

I don't know about you guys but I have a very large..... Brain, long and thick

[Michaelangelica]

Size Isn't everything (But tell me how big is it?)

Craig I think the author is saying two things
1. On line stuff like this is consumerism
(men interested in mating strangely. tend to indulge in computer chat even more). Women do charitable things (Care2 network is full of women)
he himself says
"If you actually want to make friends and meet people, you have to do it face to face, that's the way that we have evolved to assess people, is through face-to-face conversation."
and
2. the brain evolved to impress and attract a mate.

Perhaps we just need to wait for the book so he can clarify and support his position a bit more

I do like the analogy/simile though, of the brain being the equivalent to the tail of the Pee-cock.