Geoffrey Franklin Miller (born 1965) is an American evolutionary psychologist, author, and associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico. He is known for his research on sexual selection in human evolution.
Education, career, and personal life
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Miller graduated from Columbia University in 1987, where he earned a BA in biology and psychology. He received his PhD in cognitive psychology from Stanford University in 1993, under the guidance of Roger Shepard.
Miller has held positions as a postdoctoral researcher in the evolutionary and adaptive systems group in the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the University of Sussex (1992–94); lecturer in the department of psychology at the University of Nottingham (1995); research scientist at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research, Munich, Germany (1995–96); and senior research fellow at the Centre for Economic Learning and Social Evolution, University College London (1996–2000). He has worked at the University of New Mexico since 2001, where he is associate professor. In 2009, he was visiting scientist at the Genetic Epidemiology Group, Queensland Institute of Medical Research, Australia.
In 2015, in collaboration with writer Tucker Max, Miller launched The Mating Grounds, a podcast and blog offering advice about men's sexual strategies.
Miller has an adult daughter and also helped raise two teenage stepchildren from a previous relationship.
On November 29, 2019, he married fellow American evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman. The couple had earlier appeared together in an interview, advocating for polyamory. They had their first child together in the spring of 2022.
Research
Human cognition
Miller's 2003 book, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, proposes that human mate choices, courtship behavior, behavior genetics, psychometrics, and life cycle patterns support the survival value of traits related to sexual selection, such as art, morality, language, and creativity. According to Miller, the adaptive design features of these traits suggest that they evolved through mutual mate choice by both sexes to advertise intelligence, creativity, moral character, and heritable fitness. He also cites the Fisherian runaway, a model created by Ronald Fisher to explain phenomena such as the peacock's plumage as forming through a positive feedback loop through sexual selection, as well as the handicap principle.
In an article entitled What should we be worried about? Miller talked about eugenics in China and how Deng Xiaoping instigated the one-child policy, "partly to curtail China's population explosion, but also to reduce dysgenic fertility". He argued that if China is successful, and given what he calls the lottery of Mendelian genetics, it may increase the IQ of its population, perhaps by 5–15 IQ points per generation. In an evaluation of Chinese population policy, he openly supports it by stating:There is unusually close cooperation in China between government, academia, medicine, education, media, parents, and consumerism in promoting a utopian Han ethno-state. Given what I understand of evolutionary behavior genetics, I expect — and hope — that they will succeed. The welfare and happiness of the world's most populous country depends upon it.He concludes that if these politics are successful, it "would be game over for Western global competitiveness" within a couple of generations, and hopes the West will join China in this eugenic experiment rather than citing "bioethical panic" in order to attack these policies.
Consumerism
In his 2009 book, Spent: Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerism, Miller used Darwinism to gain an understanding of consumerism and how marketing has exploited our inherited instincts to display social status for reproductive advantage. He argues that in the modern marketing-dominated culture, "coolness" at the conscious level, and the consumption choices it drives, is an aberration of the genetic legacy of two million years of living in small groups, where social status has been a critical force in reproduction. Miller's thesis is that marketing persuades people—particularly the young—that the most effective way to display that status is through consumption choices, rather than conveying such traits as intelligence and personality through more natural means of communication, such as simple conversation.