The Mating Mind Hypothesis
Sexual selection may have contributed to human cognitive and social traits.
The Mechanism: Geoffrey Miller proposed that sexual selection could have favored costly displays of cognitive skill, creativity, language, and social awareness. The hypothesis complements other explanations and remains debated.
The Philosophical Pivot: A trait can be adaptive in more than one sense: it may help solve practical problems and shape social attraction. Explaining a possible function does not reduce a person's expression to a mating strategy.
The Horizon: The hypothesis challenges accounts of intelligence based only on survival tasks, but it may overreach when applied to every human capacity. Evidence must distinguish sexual selection from cooperation, learning, and other pressures.
The framing also requires care around gender: evolutionary claims should not turn social expectations into biological necessities.
A theory can widen the story of intelligence while narrowing it again if every form of creativity becomes a display for approval.
A possible evolutionary function is not a complete account of a human motive.
When I explain intelligence as a way to attract others, what forms of curiosity, cooperation, or meaning might I be erasing?