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Geoffrey Miller's avatar

As the author of Miller (2000), 'The Mating Mind', I'd just encourage everybody to read the actual chapters in that book where I talk about sexual selection for intelligence, language, and creativity -- rather than relying on second- or third-hand accounts of what I wrote.

I emphasized, repeatedly, that selection for intelligence tends to happen over a period of days, weeks, and months, rather than in the first few minutes of speed-dating or video clips. Often, we're not so much selecting _for_ intelligence, as _against_ boredom and incompetence. Stupidity takes a while to reveal itself.

If you've ever dated someone who seemed beautiful and thrilling at first, but then you found their company tedious, uninspiring, and lame after a few weeks, due to a lack of intelligence, and then you broke up with them, then congratulations, you imposed sexual selection for intelligence on them.

A small percent of humans are consciously 'sapiosexual', and explicitly attracted to intelligence per se. A much larger percent seem to be turned off by lower intelligence over the longer term -- and it's the longer term that really counts in terms of pair bond formation, reproduction, and parenting.

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George Menyhei's avatar

There's sex and there's reproduction.

I have some strong - vital - anecdotal evidence that female choice for childbearing is driven by different priorities than big city mating done mostly for stress relief.

In fact, the population of modern women are becoming two distinct groups regarding the importance of sex vs. reproduction. The mom and the wine aunt, once besties, speak a different language by 35.

To mothers, as far as their offspring goes, smartness still seems to be the most precious trait. Everything else can be solved by cosmetics later.

Maybe it's a Hungarian thing: here you can be poor and pretty, and stay poor, but if you're smart, the sky is the limit. So women chose their partners for reproduction differently.

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