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predicting reactions—is all there in the chimps and baboons, too.
As Geoffrey Miller, a psychologist at the University of Stanford, has put it, 'All apes and monkeys show complex behavior replete with communication, manipulation, deception, and long-term relationships; selection for Machiavellian intelligence based on such social complexities should again predict much larger brains in other apes and monkeys than we observe: "48
There have been several answers to this puzzle, none of which is entirely convincing. The first is Humphrey 's own answer, which is that human society is more complex than ape society because it needs a "polytechnic school " in which young people can learn the practical skills of their species. This seems to me merely a retreat to the toolmaker theory: The second is the suggestion that alliance building among unrelated individuals is a key to success in human beings and that this complication vastly increases the rewards of intellect: To which comes the response: What about dolphins? There is growing evidence that dolphin society is based on shifting alliances of males and of females so that, for example, Richard Connor observed a pair of males that came across a small group of other males that had kidnapped a fertile female from her group. Instead of fighting them for the female, the pair went away and found some allies, came back, and with superior numbers stole the female from the first group: 49 Even in chimps the rise of a male to the alpha position and his tenure there is determined by his ability to command the loyalty of allies.'° So the alliance theory once more seems too general to explain the sudden increase in human intelligence. Moreover, like most of these theories, it explains language, tactical thinking, social exchange, and the like, but it does not explain some of the things to which human beings devote much of their mental energy: music and humor, for example: WITTINESS AND SEXINESS
At least the Machiavelli theory proposes an adversary for the human brain that is its equal, however clever it gets: Few of my readers will need reminding of the ruthlessness that human beings
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can show when in pursuit of self-interest: There is no such thing as being clever enough just as there is no such thing as being good enough at chess. Either you win or you do not: If winning pits you against a better opponent, as it does in the evolutionary tournament generation after generation, then the pressure to get better and better never lets up. The way the brains of human beings have gotten bigger at an accelerating pace implies that some such within-species arms race is at work:
So argues Geoffrey Miller: After laying bare the inadequa-cies of the conventional theories about intelligence, he takes a surprising turn.
I suggest that the neocortex is not primarily or exclu-sively a device for toolmaking, bipedal walking, fire-using, warfare, hunting, gathering, or avoiding savanna predators: None of these postulated functions alone can explain its explosive development in our lineage and not in other closely related species.:.. The neocortex is largely a courtship device to attract and retain sexual mates: Its specific evolutionary function is to stimulate and entertain other people, and to assess the stimula-tion attempts of others:"
The only way, he suggests, that sufficient evolutionary pressure could suddenly and capriciously be sustained in one species to enlarge an organ far beyond its normal size is sexual selection. "Just as the peahen is satisfied with nothing less than a visually brilliant display of peacock plumage, I postulate that hominid males and females became satisfied with nothing less than psychologically brilliant, fascinating, articulate, entertaining companions." Miller 's use of the peacock is deliberate: Wherever else in the animal kingdom we find greatly exaggerated and enlarged ornaments, we have been able to explain them by the runaway, sexy-son, Fisher effect of intense sexual selection (or the equally powerful Good-genes effect, as described in chapter 5): Sexual selection, as we have seen, is very different from natural selection in its effects, THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME
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for it does no? solve survival problems, it makes them worse: Female choice causes peacocks ' tails to grow longer until they become a burden—then demands that they grow longer stilclass="underline" Miller used the wrong word: Peahens are never satisfied: And so, having found a force that produces exponential change in ornaments, it seems perverse not to consider it when trying to explain the exponential expansion of the brain:
Miller adduces some circumstantial evidence for his view: Surveys consistently place intelligence, sense of humor, creativity, and interesting personality above even such things as wealth and beauty in lists of desirable characteristics in both sexes." Yet these characteristics fail entirely to predict youth, status, fertility, or parental ability, so evolutionists tend to ignore them—but there they are, right at the top of the list: Just as a peacock 's tail is no guide to his ability as a father but despotic fashion punishes those who cease to respect it, so Miller suggests that men and women dare not step off the treadmill of selecting the wittiest, most creative and articulate person available with whom to mate. (Note that conventional "intelligence " as measured by examinations is not what he is talking about.)
Likewise, the manner in which sexual selection capriciously seizes upon preexisting perceptual biases fits with the fact that apes are by nature naturally "curious, playful, easily bored, and appreciative of simulation. " Miller suggests that to keep a husband around long enough to help in raising children, women would have needed to be as varied and creative in their behavior as possible, which he calls the Scheherazade effect after the Arabian storyteller who entranced the Sultan with I,001 tales so that he did not abandon her (and execute her) for another courtesan. The same would have applied to males who wanted to attract females, which Miller calls the Dionysus effect after the Greek god of dance, music, intoxication, and seduction: He might also have called it the Mick Jagger effect; he admitted to me one day that he could not understand what made strutting, middle-aged rock stars so attractive to women. In this respect Don Symons noted that tribal chiefs are both gifted orators and highly polygamous men. 53
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Miller notes that the bigger the brain became, the more necessary long-term pair bonds were. A human infant is born helpless and premature. If it were as advanced at birth as an ape, it would be twenty-one months in the womb." But the human pelvis is simply incapable of bearing a child with a head that big, so it is born at nine months and treated like a helpless, external fetus for the next year, not even beginning to walk until it is at the age when it would expect to enter the world. This helplessness further enhances the pressure on women to keep men around to help feed them when encumbered with a child—the Scheherazade effect.
Miller finds that the most commonly voiced objection to the Scheherazade effect is that most people are not witty and creative but are dull and predictable. True enough, but compared to what? Our standards for what is considered entertaining have, if Miller is right, evolved as fast as our wit: "I think male readers may find it hard to imagine some four-foot-tall, half-hairy, flat-chested, hominid females being sexier than similar hominids, " wrote Miller in a letter to me (referring to "Lucy "). "We 're spoiled because sexual selection has already driven us so far that it 's hard to appreciate how any point we 've passed could have been considered an improvement: We are positively turned off by traits that half a million years ago would have been considered irresistibly sexy.'