Geoffrey Miller (1)

First off, I found this book very hard to read. Not because I'm illiterate, but because it just wasn't enjoyable. I've finally just finished it, 14 months after buying it, because I never felt like picking it up and reading another chapter. It feels as though he just restates the same ideas over and over again with too many words. (Though I suppose verbosity might be a good way to impress certain potential mates.)

Despite the praise of science and the chapter's worth of references in the back, it felt less like a scientific exploration and more like a speculative argument, stating the conclusion first and then rounding up a bunch of evidence to back it up. I guess any evolutionary psychology book is going to sound mostly speculative, though.

Though not engrossing, I didn't find much to disagree with. Simply put, he argues that most of the evolved behaviors that are unexplainable by kin selection or reciprocity can actually be explained by runaway sexual selection, in the same way as handicap fitness indicators in other animals like peacocks or bowerbirds. It takes a lot of energy, health, and control of natural resources to create art (or make money to buy art), learn a large vocabulary, write fiction, practice religion, give to charity, and so on, yet none of these things provide much of a direct survival benefit. The conclusion is that they serve mostly to impress potential mates and compete against other suitors.

For example, he points out the way very rich and powerful people will volunteer their time to work at a soup kitchen for a day, when they could have used that time to earn money and pay a hundred other people to work in the soup kitchen for them. The primary reason for charity is to show off your helpfulness to potential mates, not to actually maximize the altruistic benefit to other people.

In the conclusion, he talks about how science is a subversion of these natural instincts to push them towards other ends. This is a very useful idea, as is the idea of consciously manipulating equilibrium selection to push society towards a more desirable equilibrium, which I've also had kicking around in my head for a while, but didn't have a name for until now.

His glossary definition of "marriage" is amusing: "A socially legitimated sexual relationship in which sexual fidelity and parental responsibilities are maintained through the threat of social punishment."

Other favorite quotes: "Existing political philosophies all developed before evolutionary game theory, so they do not take equilibrium selection into account. Socialism pretends that individuals are not selfish sexual competitors, so it ignores equilibria altogether. Conservatism pretends that there is only one possible equilibrium—a nostalgic version of the status quo—that society could play. Libertarianism ignores the possibility of equilibrium selection at the level of rational social discourse, and assumes that decentralized market dynamics will magically lead to equilibria that yield the highest aggregate social benefits. Far from being a scientific front for a particular set of political views, modern evolutionary psychology makes most standard views look simplistic and unimaginative."

"Scientific theories never dictate human values, but they can often cast new light on ethical issues. From a sexual selection viewpoint, moral philosophy and political theory have mostly been attempts to shift male human sexual competitiveness from physical violence to the peaceful accumulation of wealth and status. The rights to life, liberty, and property are cultural inventions that function, in part, to keep males from killing and stealing from one another while they compete to attract sexual partners."… (plus d'informations)

This book hooked me from its name alone: not only is the pun on its subtitle of Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior exactly my sense of humor, those subjects are right up my alley. Miller's thesis is that much of modern conspicuous consumption is a waste, and not just in the environmental sense. In his view, much of what we buy as signaling and trait display devices are also a waste in evolutionary terms, because human beings are already extremely good at figuring out who they want to have sex with, and most purchases don't actually add much value to the whole mating determination process. Proving that takes him through evolutionary psychology, the economics of consumption, product marketing and consumer behavior, signaling theory, the relationship between technological progress and human nature, the quantification of personality types, how shared qualities like musical taste relate to sexual attraction, and the politics of conservation. He's really funny and well-read, with a keen eye for how our endless quests to spread our genes manifest themselves in our product purchases, with plenty of references not only to recent scientific research, but also to relevant pop culture like The Sims.

Miller opens the book by asking the modern reader to pretend that they're explaining the logic of consumer capitalism to a Cro-Magnon, playing on the absurdity of the work-buy-consume paradigm of the modern industrialized nations by having the Cro-Magnons ask what exactly all the goods and services our lives revolve around are useful for in evolutionary terms, like maximizing mammoth hunts, aiding berry foraging, acquiring more mates, and so on. To no one's surprise, they're not much use directly, but this is not just a recapitulation of Naomi Klein's thesis in No Logo that brands have hijacked our lives. So many pages have been written about consumer capitalism that a reasonable person might be forgiven for their lack of enthusiasm at yet another political screed, since the takes write themselves: either consumer capitalism is a rot, a sickness, a spiritual disease; or we live in the best of all possible mall worlds and the haters who don't like it are just jealous losers. Likewise with evolutionary psychology, surely one of the world's most misunderstood disciplines: either it's the key to explaining just about every nuance of human behavior, or else it's a tendentious mishmash of backwards reasoning and just-so stories. Yet who would disagree with this amusing summary?:

"Animal bodies and behaviors evolve largely as advertisements for their genes. Male humans evolved potent new sales tactics - verbal courtship, rhythmic music, gentle foreplay, prolonged copulation - for seducing skeptical female customers into accepting free trials of their fastest-moving consumer goods (sperm). Female humans evolved potent new tactics of relationship marketing to build long-term loyalty among their highest-value male customers, and to promote continued male investment in their new subsidiaries (children)."

However, as an evolutionary psychologist, his aim is to cut through relativistic and unscientific descriptions of our shopping trips. As he says, "Consumerist capitalism, as humans practice it in any particular culture, is not a natural or inevitable outcome of human evolution, given a certain level of technological sophistication. An evolutionary-psychology analysis of consumerism is accordingly not a way of giving science's seal of approval to consumerism, nor is it a way of morally justifying consumerism as the highest possible stage of biocultural progress." This is important, because even though much consumption closely resembles narcissism ("Narcissists tend to alternate between public status seeking and private pleasure seeking"), and he has a really funny chart attempting to quantify narcissism by calculating the cost per pound of items ranging from tap water ($0.0000633/lb) to a Victoria's Secret bra ($240/lb) to a porn DVD ($1,510/lb) to a human egg ($4.5 trillion/lb), just saying "people buy things to show themselves off" needs a bit more explanation. I was really cheered by seeing that I'm not the only one who has trouble appreciating what the people around me have spent so much time and effort on:

"Seriously, can you remember anything specific worn by your spouse or best friend the day before yesterday? Can you remember what kind of watch your boss wears? The brand of your nearest neighbor's dining room table? The face of the last person you saw driving a Ferrari? Probably not, unless you have the obsessive consumer fetishism of American Psycho's protagonist.... The net result could be called the fundamental consumerist delusion - that other people care more about the artificial products you display through consumerist spending than about the natural traits you display through normal conversation, cooperation, and cuddling."

He posits three different models of consumption, with the first two being mostly-accurate caricatures of the way many people look at capitalism:

- Wrong Conservative Model: human nature free markets = consumerist capitalism (the hardcore libertarian model that includes Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and modern Republicans)
- Wrong Radical Model: the blank slate oppressive institutions invidious ideologies = consumerist capitalism (the "blank slate" model criticized by Steven Pinker that includes Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Rose, and Richard Lewontin)
- Sensible Model: human instincts for trying unconsciously to display certain desirable personal traits current social norms for displaying those mental traits through certain kinds of credentials, jobs, goods, and services current technological abilities and constraints certain social institutions and ideologies historical accident and cultural inertia = early twenty-first-century consumerist capitalism

The "Sensible Model" that he champions has a lot of moving parts, and he discusses how his model compares to other, more well-known models that have been used to explain how humans go about satisfying their desires. One of the big ones is Maslow's hierarchy, which he has issues with to the extent that it "mixes innate drives (breathing, eating, seeking status, acquiring knowledge) and learned concerns (seeking financial security, self-esteem, and increased intelligence). It does not 'cut nature at the joints' in terms of the key selection pressures that shaped human behavior: survival and reproduction." I've had similar thoughts before; the basic insight that some human needs are more fundamental than others is hard to argue with, but for any theory to attain at least the veneer of science, the devil is in the details. Miller's framework makes a lot more sense, or at least it's more clearly grounded in the behaviors which seem more fundamental. When it comes to our desires as consumers, it usually all comes back to sex appeal:

"The most desirable traits are not wealth, status, and taste - these are just vague pseudo-traits that are achieved and displayed in widely different ways across different cultures, and ones that do not show very high stability within individual lives, or very high heritability across generations. They exist at the wrong level of description to be scientifically useful in connecting consumer psychology to evolutionary psychology. Rather, the most desirable traits are universal, stable, heritable traits closely related to biological fitness - traits like physical attractiveness, physical health, mental health, intelligence, and personality."

Physical attractiveness is easy for people to assess, no matter the particulars of cultural standards, but much of the middle part of the book is devoted to the more difficult task of explaining how we unconsciously demonstrate aspects of our personalities and seek like-minded others through our purchases, in a more consumerist version of Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life. He models this with the Central Six, abbreviated GOCASE: general intelligence plus the Big Five of openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability, and extroversion. I've always been fascinated by personality tests, from the semi-respectable like MMPI or Myers-Briggs to the absurd like astrology. Much like with Maslow's hierarchy, nearly all of them seem like they're capturing something "true-ish" about ourselves, but the fact that there are dozens, maybe hundreds of incompatible measures out there makes Clickhole's parodies like "Are You an Introvert, an Extrovert, or a Sea Monster?" or "Which Blade of Grass Are You?" probably the best ones out there. However, the GOCASE framework explains a great deal across many domains, and most importantly, is stable and consistent enough to be the gold standard for psychologists trying to measure real aspects of our personalities. It's the distinct permutations of those six factors which make up the variety of people that we see in the world.

And it's often highly specific combinations that we're seeking in our partners, even if we couldn't consciously articulate what, exactly. Some people like high agreeableness (if you see your partner as a refuge from the world), some like low agreeableness (if you want someone who will challenge you), some like it in between. Some people aren't too picky (especially if you score poorly on the G factor), while others demand such exotic configurations of the Central Six that it takes them a while to find a partner. Anyone who's read Matt Ridley's The Red Queen or merely done some dating knows that the endless sexual arms race of signaling/counter-signaling/fake-signaling involves a frustrating amount of discerning signal from noise, even in matters of taste: "Personal taste should not just attract like-minded individuals; it should also repulse differently minded ones. To be effective, it must be a high-risk, high-gain form of taste signaling, rather than a meek nod to the least common denominator." Or, in another interesting passage where he compares attempts to maintain the glamour of diamonds in the face of alternatives like zirconia:

"Advances in gem production raise the possibility that in biological evolution, too, traits that began as fake alternatives to certain signals of quality may have evolved to be more useful and even more desirable than the original traits ever were. For example, verbal humor may have originated as a way for subordinate youths to imitate and mock older, more physically dominant sexual rivals - until eventually, humor became even more attractive than dominance, just as Moissanite achieved higher brilliance and fire than diamonds."

Some signals are unquestionably better than others, at least for most people. For example, one of the best ways to make a connection with someone you're attracted to is to discuss your shared aesthetic tastes, especially music. How is it that having a similar music phase in middle school or a shared guilty pleasure make you want to have offspring with someone? A big part of it is the subconscious recognition of which personality traits that the bands embody - everyone knows that a punk is different from a pop fan, a metalhead from a classical aficionado, a folkie from a country lover, and so on - but few are willing to say outright that your playlists are your personality type, or are able to explain why exactly finding some with the same reaction to the same artist means so much to them. Miller runs with that idea, for example arguing that a minor taste for the avant-garde is a good indicator of openness, but that too much might be a warning sign: "An individual with a longstanding appreciation of Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) is therefore a safer bet than one with a newly acquired enthusiasm for Inland Empire (2006)." (Remember that the book was published in 2008; insert your favorite cutting edge "safe weird" vs "weird weird" examples here).

Less controversial is the idea that your taste in something like pets can show off something about you, as someone with a big active breed of dog is more likely to have the high conscientiousness required to keep up with the necessary feeding, walking, and exercising than someone with a tiny toy dog, with the obvious implications for potential willingness to expend time and energy on children. And as attributes like conscientiousness becomes ever more important in the modern world, ways of displaying and measuring it will be more important in turn: "School, work, and credit - three pillars of consumer capitalism - are also, not coincidentally, the most reliable and conspicuous indicators of conscientiousness. All other consumer purchasing depends on these three pillars, so they are fundamental to conspicuous consumption." Seen in that light, the fact that much of what we buy and consume serves to signal to potential mates that we're the type of person that they'd really like to have sex with makes perfect sense.

However, much of what we buy seems to offer limited value for our money. Some of the funniest parts of the book are where Miller skewers how our attempts to flaunt ourselves go awry. For example, how much benefit do guys trying to impress babes really get out of status objects like sports cars?

"Even if male Corvette drivers do manage to attract a little extra female attention, the math doesn't work out very well for them. Suppose a male driver enjoys an average of one extra short-term mating per year attributable to his choice of car. The Chevrolet Corvette Z06 ($70,000) has a $50,000 price premium over the comparable-size Chevrolet Malibu sedan ($20,000), and both cars are designed to become obsolete in about five years. Rational car-buyers could then calculate that the Corvette’s price premium of $50,000 yields an expected five extra sexual encounters during its five-year product life, or $10,000 per encounter. By contrast, a typical encounter with a professional sex worker costs about $200, or fifty times less. Instead of paying the Corvette's price premium, which might yield one encounter per year, the driver could just buy the Malibu and, with the cash he saved, have one encounter per week. The prospective male Corvette-buyer must accordingly either be wildly overoptimistic about the car's attractiveness to women, or be very bad at math, or strongly prefer sexual encounters with amateurs rather than professionals."

We're also bad at math when it comes to our health, in a way that reminds me of the cartoonish catering towards our basest desires in the movie Idiocracy:

"For example, Costco sells M&M candies in sixty-four-ounce bags for about $8. I like M&Ms, so that seems like a great impulse purchase if I think I deserve a treat. However, at 142 calories per ounce, that bag contains about 9,000 calories of milk chocolate, which, knowing myself, I would eventually eat. An intensive aerobics class burns only 500 calories an hour, so it would take eighteen hours of aerobic lessons, at $10 per hour, to counteract the fat gain. So, rationally, I should be willing to pay about $180 to the Costco cashier - or my wife, or anyone - to restrain me from buying the $8 bag of M&M's."

Are there acid tests for personality traits?

"For example, it may be hard to judge a daughter's boyfriend's agreeableness (kindness, warmth, generosity) if we meet him in a quiet, air-conditioned steak house. Much better to invite him over for a midsummer extended-family barbecue at which he is in encouraged to drink several beers, and then assaulted chaotically on all sides by children, dogs, footballs, and stinging insects. If, under these more difficult, disinhibited, and diagnostic conditions, he becomes irritable to the point of throwing the footballs at the dogs and squirting mustard at the children, we know his agreeableness level is rather low (and that he might have a short temper with our daughter's future babies). Conversely, if he remains calm, cheerful, and helpful as the sweat rolls down his beer-flushed, mosquito-stung, dog-licked face, we know his agreeableness level is rather high. The cultural evolution of such occasions for accurate personality assessment may explain why major social rituals (dates, job interviews, parties, banquets, holidays, weddings, honeymoons) entail such long durations, high stress levels, and disinhibiting drugs such as alcohol. These conditions bring out both the best and the worst in us."

And what do pickup lines sound like when stripped down to their bare essentials?

"If I say on a second date that 'the sugar maples in Harvard Yard were so beautiful every fall term,' I am basically saying 'my SAT scores were sufficiently high (roughly 720 out of 800) that I could get admitted, so my IQ is above 135, and I had sufficient conscientiousness, emotional stability, and intellectual openness to pass my classes. Plus, I can recognize a tree.' The information content is the same, but while the former sounds poetic, the latter sounds boorish."

I could go on and on. Miller's conclusion is that to stop such senseless waste, we not only have to recognize it for what it is, but also agree collectively to take concrete political action. Some suggestions are radical enough to be right out of science fiction, like the "trait tattoos" that would encode your Central Six measurements visibly, thus completely removing the need for most conspicuous consumption since at a glance you would be able to see who's compatible with you: "Mass social transparency sounds frightening and embarrassing, but it is what humans have been striving for ever since the prehistoric development of gossip, reputation, 'face', and status symbols. It would allow at least some rational people, some of the time, to choose their friends, mates, co-workers, and neighbors more quickly and accurately." The Gattaca-type incentives for people to fake their tattoos are obvious, yet the idea is worth some thought. More politically respectable, at least in some regards, is the idea of more consumption taxes. The politics of this are extremely tricky - the FairTax as currently proposed is primarily supported by libertarians opposed to income taxes, the bullet tax he proposes to solve the negative externalities of gun crimes would be absolutely opposed by conservatives, while it's mainly liberals who seem to support soda taxes to combat obesity - yet the logic behind the idea of taxing the hell out of grotesque status symbols like megayachts seems mostly unimpeachable. There are five main reasons he presents for consumption taxes, none of them illogical or unsupported by empirical evidence:

First, people would reduce, reuse, and recycle more;
Second, the consumption tax would also create incentives for people to buy longer-lasting goods that have a higher resale value in the secondary market;
Third, the consumption tax would encourage people to buy products that consume less energy and matter to operate;
Fourth, the consumption tax would promote social capital and neighborly camaraderie;
Finally, the consumption tax would increase savings, investment, and charity

As a popular social science work, this one earns its place among the top tier by being carefully argued, well-sourced, provocative, and well-written. Evolutionary psychology is still in its infancy as a discipline, yet Miller's explanation of how it relates to consumer capitalism is both intuitively true as well as widely applicable. I can't believe I found an author with something actually new to say about the endless "do opposites really attract, or do birds of a feather really flock together?" debate.… (plus d'informations)

MUST HEAVE

Read carefully: this work's own review is in its own text, written by Narcissus himself.

p8 '...including most social Darminists, Austrian School economists (Ludwig von Mises, Fredrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard), Chicago School economists (George Stigler, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker), Darwin libertarians, globalization advocates, management gurus and marketers.' p9 '... diverse visionaries throght history: Buddha, Laozi, Epicurus, Thoreau, Engels, Gandhi, Margaret Mead and the Unabomber.' p16 '...a traditional that includes such names as John Locke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Daniel Defore, William Wilberforce, Hendy David Thoreau, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Margaret Sanger, Thorstein Veblen, John Kenneth Galbraith, Alfred Kinsey, Germaine Freer and Peter Singer.'

p17 'The things I find most exciting about consumerism capitalism include: almonst croissants, Tori Amos concerts, skiing at Telluride, houses designed by Bart Prince, the BWM 550i, Provigil, iPods full of Outkast and Radiohead songs, and the Microsoft Ergonomic keyboard on which I'm typing.' p32 'Just for the record, I'm a secular humanist, and antiwar internationalist. an animal-rights environmentalist, a pro-gay feminist...I enjoy anticonsumerism books by Thomas Frank and Juliet Schor, but I also subscribe to the Economist and Wired. I enjoy lefty-radical-feminist music by Ani DiFranco and Tori Amos, but I have immense respect for the business world, and gratitude for the workers, managers, and investors who provide our necessities, luxuries and entertainments.'' p35 'I became fascinated by inclusive portrayals of the consumerism lifestyle in movies such as The Matrix, Existenz, Amercian Beauty and Idiocracy and in novels by Chuch Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland, Nicholson Baker and J.G. Ballard... (and) reveal somethng new about consumerism: Architectural Digest, AutoWeek, the Baffler, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Consumer Reports, the Economist. Gourmet, Harper's, Maxim, Men's Fitness, Money, PC Games, Premier, Rolling Stone, Stuff, Wired, Worth, the Utne Retailer, and Vanity Fair.'

It's then on p84-85 that the author nails the core of his thesis, along with much of the academic world angling for a blockbuster:

"Consumerism has become our most potent ideology because it contemptuously dismisses our natural human modes of trait display, and it keeps us too busy - working, shopping and product displaying - to remember what we can signal without all the products.

"Consumerism actually promotes two big lies. One is that above average products can compensate for below-average traits... A second big lie...consumerism assumes that better products are more effect signals."

Plenty of above average names; chapter on chapter with reference on reference - all hoping it will compensate and be more effective. Half as long would be twice as good - and call for less time in the flotation tank (p 332).… (plus d'informations)