198: Geoffrey Miller on Signaling, Mating, and Morality

What It Covers

Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller explores signaling theory across human behavior, from sexual selection and creativity to political ideology and virtue signaling. The conversation examines polyamory, neurodiversity, effective altruism, existential risks, and how evolutionary psychology explains modern courtship, morality, and social dynamics through the lens of game theory and mate selection.

Key Questions Answered

• •Sexual Selection and Creativity: Human intelligence, humor, art, and music evolved not primarily for survival but as courtship displays to attract mates. These traits function as reliable signals of genetic quality and brain function, similar to peacock plumage or birdsong. This explains why people invest enormous energy in creative pursuits that lack obvious survival benefits but generate sexual and social attention.
• •Proximate vs Ultimate Motives: The evolutionary function of behavior differs from conscious motivation. A painter may experience pure intrinsic joy while creating art kept private, yet the capacity for creativity itself evolved because it historically increased reproductive success. Understanding this distinction prevents reducing all behavior to conscious mate-seeking while recognizing evolutionary origins shaped these capacities over thousands of generations.
• •Virtue Signaling Spectrum: Virtue signaling ranges from cheap talk like bumper stickers to reliable costly signals like dedicating one's life to solving major problems. The most effective signals are authentic and heartfelt, not performative. Moral outrage functions as a signal of non-negotiable values, making it feel indistinguishable from genuine conviction. Both good and bad human behavior involve signaling.
• •Neurodiversity and Speech Codes: Implicit social taboos and unstated ideological boundaries discriminate against people with Asperger traits who cannot read between the lines. Requiring self-censorship based on unwritten rules asks neurodivergent individuals to perform cognitively impossible tasks. This eliminates creative eccentrics from public culture and STEM fields, where many naturally aspie individuals contribute breakthrough innovations.
• •Scope Insensitivity Bias: Humans cannot emotionally process large-scale suffering. One suffering kitten triggers strong empathy, but ten billion factory-farmed chickens killed annually remains inconceivable. Effective altruism requires cognitive augmentation through graphs, charts, and mathematical reasoning to overcome Pleistocene-era minds and think rationally about existential risks like pandemics, nuclear war, and artificial intelligence.
• •Polyamory vs Monogamy Evolution: Humans evolved pair bonding instincts over millions of years, but lifelong sexual exclusivity represents a cultural overlay, not biological imperative. Ethical polyamory involves multiple ongoing committed relationships with full knowledge and consent of all parties, distinct from casual hookups or polygyny. Individual differences in sociosexuality do not capture this dimension, requiring new research frameworks.