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.
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.
Oh, the problems of social science survey data. Given that most of us are entirely un_self-aware it's remarkable that careers continue to be made from asking us what drives us to the positions we assert.
So its basically just genetic similarity theory - women prefer men similar to themselves, and women are about 95IQ on average and cluster close to the mean - so 130IQ boys are too dissimilar. Rushton is right again.
I agree with Dr. Miller except I would like to bring focus to the point that women are most certainly attracted to men with WEALTH--this is a replicated finding and a human universal, and wealth of course is correlated with intelligence, with the causal direction going from intelligence to wealth (per Herrnstein & Murray). Yes, it takes intelligence to be interesting, too, and a nice house and nice car are "interesting" to women. It seems to be the most plausible reason why humans became the most intelligent species--runaway sexual selection for male wealth. Dr. Miller seems to think that that the relevant variable is the ability to make interesting conversation--maybe that would follow from the self-report data but not from evolutionary theory.
If intelligent men are more attractive for being wealthier, that doesn't mean male intelligence correlates so well with sexual success or reproductive success. There is an offspring quantity/quality trade-off, and the more capable prospective parents tend to delay reproduction and have fewer children for the sake of greater survival probability per child (Kim Hill and Hillard Kaplan, 1999).
The one man you have in mind within that picture probably is not the smartest within that group, but he almost most certainly has intelligence above 100, and for that reason he had high reproductive success. So, that example is perhaps self-defeating. Yes, I agree that women are not attracted to intelligence per se. If a man has a high IQ, then it won't do him much good if he is not a capable provider. If I were to take a guess, then I would expect that every single man within that picture scores better than the average man in the dating market. If one of them wants to compete with some tall chiseled jock at a bar, then he pulls out that picture and says, "This is me, and this is Elon Musk, who fired half my coworkers at Twitter, but not me. Where do you work?"
"Intelligence is one of the most attractive qualities that women look for in a partner. They are drawn to men with a good education, men who think critically, and men who can engage in interesting conversation. "
Where can I meet a woman like this? I don't think that the author of this article lives in the same universe as me.
"If intelligence was an attractive quality in a mate, more beautiful people would choose the smartest partner, and their offspring would become smarter and more intelligent than average thanks to cross-trait assortative mating."
"Stulp and Barrett, 2016" is inconsistent with the bibliography.
-I'm pretty confident (without having read the studies) that the speed dating clips from uni students are probably a power failure. The g-loadedness of social skills/humour is low, but probably not zero.
-The thing about intelligent teens/adults not having sex or kissing is almost certainly due to self-selection, given those individuals are less impulsive. This is different from other individuals not wanting to mate with them due to them being too smart.
-Intelligence undoubtedly corresponds to educational/income attainment, but there is dysgenic selection for intelligence which is ~-.1 in men and ~-.2 in women (in NLSY97 I believe). If I had to guess religiosity, educational attainment in women, and impulsivity push the correlation downward, while income/social status pushes the relationship upward. In this sense, intelligence is being selected against, but I doubt that humans actually prefer less intelligent partners.
This comment thread is old, but for the benefit of future readers, I'd like to recommend Gregory Clark's book The Son Also Rises, which looks at unique last names to trace familial success over long periods of time, finding absolutely massive effect sizes for what he deems "social competence", aka status / success (of which intelligence is probably a large factor, along with things like conscientiousness, risk appetites, and other things).
It was easily the best book I read last year in terms of being surprising, relatively well researched, and interesting.
As for it's application to the present discussion, I think that the results that it highlights would argue that within elite families, there is indeed reliable selection for intelligence down the generations. But this is likely just standard assortative mating, and high-status people selecting similar talent rather than explicitly going for outsize talent on an intelligence dimension.
Humans consists of multiple groups ranging from fast to slow-life history strategies.
Intelligence is a purposeful, intentful trait that increases the success rate of actions over long-term generations, which requires more cooperation, more investment, more energy. The improvement of society, the improvement of technology,
the improvement of infrastructure, the augmentation of efficiency of exploitation of energy-dense sources; these all require a large laborious force and precursors that do not pay off immediately unless you were able
to transmit this knowledge. Culturally, socially, politically, epigenetically, economically, ideologically. You invest more in the quality of your offspring, and the future generations of your offspring
and the environment of your progeny -- ultimately it is increasing the insensitivity to the environment, or inversely, it can be said to be increasing the sensitivity to the change in volatility of the environment if one is to look
at the lens of evolutionary changes of the 'innate' code transmitted through time, abstracted at higher levels into cognition, psychology, information, entropy-dynamics.
On the other hand, you could invest in energies elsewhere than the brain, strength, speed, perceptual acuity, fast maturation times -- something very favoured by low intelligence and low investment/fast life history strategies.
The majority of the population in the developed countries fall into two extremes, because reproductive fitness is higher in the middle due to evolutionary mismatches of society with present civilizational capacities. (i.e. Us
deriving pleasure from sugar, and taking an overabundance of it even when we don't need it due to it benefiting us in the past with scarcity of calories; that is we are always delayed by n+1 generations of delayed effects for selection
or even more if the generational times/gestation times/maturation times/time until reproduction are longer in-between generations, especially on alleles within populations).
You produce more offspring today all because it feels good to have sex. You moderately care about your offspring, but kick them out of the house once they reach age 18. (European-Nordic) vs staying in an intergenerational household
to raise offspring and invest (NE-Asian) -- not necessarily due to economic necessity (i.e. overcrowding in India). One can certainly derive a series of notable characteristics that most women prefer from looking at
teen fiction, romantic films/movies, animes/mangas and whatnot media (and yes Machavillian men that are sexually attractive (of high genetic-fitness age) tend to re-occur throughout time in society).
Regardless, humans organize themselves into castes whether they like it or not. There is some violation of the Herdy-Weinburg equilibrum with gene-flow due to the reduction in borders nowadays, but for the most part people remain
distinctive genetic clusters. The reason for this is reasoned as follows. Geographically and demographically, historically humans were separated much more, and the energetic-costs to travel/traverse/start new colonies were pretty high,
so you basically lived your entire life in a village (although not too-different from modern days equivalent in mega-cities). The alleles were more isolated, so outsiders (ethnocentrism) were seen as less favourable as Dawkin said
you are a representation of your genetic interests within that society you reside in. While outbreeding might contribute to social altruism in certain Nordic groups, with the social contract being the norm, this is not an ubiqitous
attitude shared everywhere (i.e. the Chinese, Ashkhenazi Jews, Indians). Other groups are more ethnocentric with more in-breeding, hence stabilizating selection. If you inter-mingled enough, you did form hybridized peoples but you
see these people are usually ostrachized or relegated to less economically successful areas in every country when they are a minority, because they were displaced by the native populations that conquered there, with the exception
of highly traversive populations (i.e. Chinese in Africa or Indonesia).
Sex is a mechanism to interchange genes, and is ubiqitous in nature because there is variation in the environment and responding to variations in the environment is a necessary component of existence, both at the fast-time frame levels
and generational-time frame levels (eons). However, you can pursue chaotic strategies (many mutations) or stable strategies (less mutations, high conservation/conserved sequences, similar genetic architectures). Humans
are mostly of the latter nature, therefore this lower-ordered process is implicated up the chain (i.e. mitochrondria-Krebs cycle, universal emotional-response drives, differentiated sensitivities of neuro-receptors) onto human societies.
Thus conserved cultures, conserved interests tend to fare better in stable environments that are not changing. (i.e. farmers possessing high work-ethic attitudes/tolerance for manual labour) and vice versa. There is a trade-off
for loss of transmissibility of information, loss of fidelity of information that is recouped/balanced with gain of information (i.e. change in industrial organization, change in social hierachies), change in mating strategies.
The core principle is not that SMV is a two-dimensional gaussian distribution of just x,y,z variables and that that sole determinant of observable offspring is that of a sexual dimorphic process that is unilaterally traversing to a coincident value of higher IQ; it is the fact that there is latent processes at work to select for intrinsic inclinations that are conserved overtime by
the environment which may or may not be beneficial to the present-time frame and for which modus operandi (i.e. psychological architecture, emotional processing, sociodemographic tendencies, sociocultural tendencies) are representations
of these lower-level abstracted processes acting in concertion at higher levels of organization of life (i.e. religions abandoning harsher punitions in favour of forgiving --> similar equivalence to AI agents developing 'fitness' functions to Tit-for-tat with contrition/forgiveness as higher value than Tit-for-tat only).
Interesting article, but wrong tense. If you asked not “Do women... but "DID women select for intelligence?", then probably, yes. Across human evolutionary history, sexual selection probably did help to drive the rapid encephalisation of our species. But all traits involve fitness trade-offs. At a certain level of braininess, probably about where we are now, diminishing returns set it. Other factors also have to be taken into account in mate selection: resource potential, social status, ambition, reliability, compatibility, kindness etc, as well as physical and intellectual condition. Failure to find current utility in higher intelligence does not contradict an evolutionary dynamic.
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.
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.
Oh, the problems of social science survey data. Given that most of us are entirely un_self-aware it's remarkable that careers continue to be made from asking us what drives us to the positions we assert.
So its basically just genetic similarity theory - women prefer men similar to themselves, and women are about 95IQ on average and cluster close to the mean - so 130IQ boys are too dissimilar. Rushton is right again.
Very interesting article, followed
I agree with Dr. Miller except I would like to bring focus to the point that women are most certainly attracted to men with WEALTH--this is a replicated finding and a human universal, and wealth of course is correlated with intelligence, with the causal direction going from intelligence to wealth (per Herrnstein & Murray). Yes, it takes intelligence to be interesting, too, and a nice house and nice car are "interesting" to women. It seems to be the most plausible reason why humans became the most intelligent species--runaway sexual selection for male wealth. Dr. Miller seems to think that that the relevant variable is the ability to make interesting conversation--maybe that would follow from the self-report data but not from evolutionary theory.
If intelligent men are more attractive for being wealthier, that doesn't mean male intelligence correlates so well with sexual success or reproductive success. There is an offspring quantity/quality trade-off, and the more capable prospective parents tend to delay reproduction and have fewer children for the sake of greater survival probability per child (Kim Hill and Hillard Kaplan, 1999).
The one man you have in mind within that picture probably is not the smartest within that group, but he almost most certainly has intelligence above 100, and for that reason he had high reproductive success. So, that example is perhaps self-defeating. Yes, I agree that women are not attracted to intelligence per se. If a man has a high IQ, then it won't do him much good if he is not a capable provider. If I were to take a guess, then I would expect that every single man within that picture scores better than the average man in the dating market. If one of them wants to compete with some tall chiseled jock at a bar, then he pulls out that picture and says, "This is me, and this is Elon Musk, who fired half my coworkers at Twitter, but not me. Where do you work?"
"Intelligence is one of the most attractive qualities that women look for in a partner. They are drawn to men with a good education, men who think critically, and men who can engage in interesting conversation. "
Where can I meet a woman like this? I don't think that the author of this article lives in the same universe as me.
"If intelligence was an attractive quality in a mate, more beautiful people would choose the smartest partner, and their offspring would become smarter and more intelligent than average thanks to cross-trait assortative mating."
"Stulp and Barrett, 2016" is inconsistent with the bibliography.
You might want to fix orthography.
-I'm pretty confident (without having read the studies) that the speed dating clips from uni students are probably a power failure. The g-loadedness of social skills/humour is low, but probably not zero.
-The thing about intelligent teens/adults not having sex or kissing is almost certainly due to self-selection, given those individuals are less impulsive. This is different from other individuals not wanting to mate with them due to them being too smart.
-Intelligence undoubtedly corresponds to educational/income attainment, but there is dysgenic selection for intelligence which is ~-.1 in men and ~-.2 in women (in NLSY97 I believe). If I had to guess religiosity, educational attainment in women, and impulsivity push the correlation downward, while income/social status pushes the relationship upward. In this sense, intelligence is being selected against, but I doubt that humans actually prefer less intelligent partners.
This comment thread is old, but for the benefit of future readers, I'd like to recommend Gregory Clark's book The Son Also Rises, which looks at unique last names to trace familial success over long periods of time, finding absolutely massive effect sizes for what he deems "social competence", aka status / success (of which intelligence is probably a large factor, along with things like conscientiousness, risk appetites, and other things).
It was easily the best book I read last year in terms of being surprising, relatively well researched, and interesting.
As for it's application to the present discussion, I think that the results that it highlights would argue that within elite families, there is indeed reliable selection for intelligence down the generations. But this is likely just standard assortative mating, and high-status people selecting similar talent rather than explicitly going for outsize talent on an intelligence dimension.
It is not besides the point.
Humans consists of multiple groups ranging from fast to slow-life history strategies.
Intelligence is a purposeful, intentful trait that increases the success rate of actions over long-term generations, which requires more cooperation, more investment, more energy. The improvement of society, the improvement of technology,
the improvement of infrastructure, the augmentation of efficiency of exploitation of energy-dense sources; these all require a large laborious force and precursors that do not pay off immediately unless you were able
to transmit this knowledge. Culturally, socially, politically, epigenetically, economically, ideologically. You invest more in the quality of your offspring, and the future generations of your offspring
and the environment of your progeny -- ultimately it is increasing the insensitivity to the environment, or inversely, it can be said to be increasing the sensitivity to the change in volatility of the environment if one is to look
at the lens of evolutionary changes of the 'innate' code transmitted through time, abstracted at higher levels into cognition, psychology, information, entropy-dynamics.
On the other hand, you could invest in energies elsewhere than the brain, strength, speed, perceptual acuity, fast maturation times -- something very favoured by low intelligence and low investment/fast life history strategies.
The majority of the population in the developed countries fall into two extremes, because reproductive fitness is higher in the middle due to evolutionary mismatches of society with present civilizational capacities. (i.e. Us
deriving pleasure from sugar, and taking an overabundance of it even when we don't need it due to it benefiting us in the past with scarcity of calories; that is we are always delayed by n+1 generations of delayed effects for selection
or even more if the generational times/gestation times/maturation times/time until reproduction are longer in-between generations, especially on alleles within populations).
You produce more offspring today all because it feels good to have sex. You moderately care about your offspring, but kick them out of the house once they reach age 18. (European-Nordic) vs staying in an intergenerational household
to raise offspring and invest (NE-Asian) -- not necessarily due to economic necessity (i.e. overcrowding in India). One can certainly derive a series of notable characteristics that most women prefer from looking at
teen fiction, romantic films/movies, animes/mangas and whatnot media (and yes Machavillian men that are sexually attractive (of high genetic-fitness age) tend to re-occur throughout time in society).
Regardless, humans organize themselves into castes whether they like it or not. There is some violation of the Herdy-Weinburg equilibrum with gene-flow due to the reduction in borders nowadays, but for the most part people remain
distinctive genetic clusters. The reason for this is reasoned as follows. Geographically and demographically, historically humans were separated much more, and the energetic-costs to travel/traverse/start new colonies were pretty high,
so you basically lived your entire life in a village (although not too-different from modern days equivalent in mega-cities). The alleles were more isolated, so outsiders (ethnocentrism) were seen as less favourable as Dawkin said
you are a representation of your genetic interests within that society you reside in. While outbreeding might contribute to social altruism in certain Nordic groups, with the social contract being the norm, this is not an ubiqitous
attitude shared everywhere (i.e. the Chinese, Ashkhenazi Jews, Indians). Other groups are more ethnocentric with more in-breeding, hence stabilizating selection. If you inter-mingled enough, you did form hybridized peoples but you
see these people are usually ostrachized or relegated to less economically successful areas in every country when they are a minority, because they were displaced by the native populations that conquered there, with the exception
of highly traversive populations (i.e. Chinese in Africa or Indonesia).
Sex is a mechanism to interchange genes, and is ubiqitous in nature because there is variation in the environment and responding to variations in the environment is a necessary component of existence, both at the fast-time frame levels
and generational-time frame levels (eons). However, you can pursue chaotic strategies (many mutations) or stable strategies (less mutations, high conservation/conserved sequences, similar genetic architectures). Humans
are mostly of the latter nature, therefore this lower-ordered process is implicated up the chain (i.e. mitochrondria-Krebs cycle, universal emotional-response drives, differentiated sensitivities of neuro-receptors) onto human societies.
Thus conserved cultures, conserved interests tend to fare better in stable environments that are not changing. (i.e. farmers possessing high work-ethic attitudes/tolerance for manual labour) and vice versa. There is a trade-off
for loss of transmissibility of information, loss of fidelity of information that is recouped/balanced with gain of information (i.e. change in industrial organization, change in social hierachies), change in mating strategies.
The core principle is not that SMV is a two-dimensional gaussian distribution of just x,y,z variables and that that sole determinant of observable offspring is that of a sexual dimorphic process that is unilaterally traversing to a coincident value of higher IQ; it is the fact that there is latent processes at work to select for intrinsic inclinations that are conserved overtime by
the environment which may or may not be beneficial to the present-time frame and for which modus operandi (i.e. psychological architecture, emotional processing, sociodemographic tendencies, sociocultural tendencies) are representations
of these lower-level abstracted processes acting in concertion at higher levels of organization of life (i.e. religions abandoning harsher punitions in favour of forgiving --> similar equivalence to AI agents developing 'fitness' functions to Tit-for-tat with contrition/forgiveness as higher value than Tit-for-tat only).
Interesting article, but wrong tense. If you asked not “Do women... but "DID women select for intelligence?", then probably, yes. Across human evolutionary history, sexual selection probably did help to drive the rapid encephalisation of our species. But all traits involve fitness trade-offs. At a certain level of braininess, probably about where we are now, diminishing returns set it. Other factors also have to be taken into account in mate selection: resource potential, social status, ambition, reliability, compatibility, kindness etc, as well as physical and intellectual condition. Failure to find current utility in higher intelligence does not contradict an evolutionary dynamic.