One of the best #book I read in a long time: The Mating Mind, by Geoffrey Miller
George Miller is a professor of Evolutionary Psychology, and the main thesis in this book is that our astonishing mental capacities come (mostly) from sexual selection.
In order to prove that, Miller takes the reader in a trip around the history of the theory of evolution, especially of sexual selection of course, and I tell you: I've done multiple exams on Evolution, Miller is the one who really gave me a good idea of how, how much, when and what sexual selection is all about.
It's packed with juicy, easy to chew paragraphs like how we think the courting worked in the paleolithic, what are the current hypothesis about the origin of the mind, why Wallace was after all a creationist (he denied sexual selection and thought the soul was given to us by a god), and so on. And in some moments I laughed hard, the guy has a razor-sharp humor.
The case he makes lacks evidence here and there, by his own admission, but frankly I'm sold on this hypothesis now.
I totally recommend it, a beautiful read
@jasper I watched 10 minutes so far. I don't like how he keeps quoting EP like it's one body of poeple "the EPs say this, think that...", it's like saying "biologist think that".
I think Miller has a better understanding of sexual selection than many. I haven't read anything that sounded weird, and the book mentioned in this video, the one from Futuyma, was my evolution textbook, I kinda had to learn it by heart =D
I also feel there are some drawbacks to EP, specifically the difficulty in testing the hypothesis, and sometimes the lack of compared psychology studies with other primates, but AFAIK they are being worked on
@arteteco might want to watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osEiblC7Itw ( https://mastodon.nl/@jasper/104235003155990971 )