Why Accountants are Dull and Guitarists are Glamorous - The End of Intellectual Property | ||||||||
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| The answer was worked out a few years ago by the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller. He realised that the human mind did | ||||||||
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not just evolve as a problem-solving device, it also evolved by sexual selection - like the peacock's tail - to waste resources in a way that cannot be faked. Peahens admire peacocks with fancy tails, because those peacocks are strong enough to waste the resources needed to grow the tail and to drag it about. That peacock has good genes for strength, growth, and endurance, and so is worth mating with. Parts of the human mind are for wasting glucose in a way that cannot be faked. Your brain dumps about 20% of your body's energy budget out of your head every second of your life. You cannot pretend to paint a picture well, or pretend to | |||||||
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not just evolve as a problem-solving device, it also evolved by sexual selection. The peacock's tail is the most famous example of this. The tail is an extension of a signal of health (shiny plumage) to absurd lengths. Peahens admire peacocks with fancy tails because their ancestors admired peacocks with shiny plumage, so the shiniest males got to father all the offspring, and the females among those offspring inherited an admiration for shininess. The whole thing went into positive feedback, a phenomenon first explained by Darwin. Parts of the human mind are there for the same reasons. It obviously makes sense for women to want to have children with the most clever practical men. Add a few tens of thousands of years of positive feedback and we all arrive at the place we are now, where parts of our intellect are like the spots on the peacock's tail. You cannot pretend to paint a picture well, or pretend to | |||||||
| write a quatrain of iambic pentameters well - | ||||||||
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you cannot pretend to be witty. You need to waste real glucose to do those things, all of which have no utilitarian value. | |||||||
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you cannot pretend to be witty. You need to exert real intellectual effort to do those things, all of which - like the tail spots - have no utilitarian value. | |||||||
| "But hang on," you say. "If that were so, then you would expect only men to be talented, because sexual selection works through the power of female choice selecting the best males. But everyone | ||||||||
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| for a woman to judge if a man is clever is for her to be equally clever herself - the transmitting device and the receiving device are the same: their minds. That is why the most important four letters in lonely-hearts columns | ||||||||
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are GSOH, why musicians, painters, authors, and actors (who all do nothing actually useful, and so who waste great mental energy) are so | |||||||
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are GSOH, why musicians, painters, authors, and actors (who all exhibit extravagant - though useless - tail-spot-like creativity) are so | |||||||
| attractive to the opposite sex, why bank managers, engineers and computer programmers (who don't waste their intellect, but use it for | ||||||||
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gainful things) are considered geeky and unattractive, and why we all | |||||||
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gainful things like a now-imaginary peacock with a sensible tail) are considered geeky and unattractive, and why we all | |||||||
| want to tell people any inspired idea as soon as it comes into our head. Showing off | ||||||||
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cleverness by frittering it away is one of the main things our brains are for. | |||||||
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cleverness by broadcasting it is one of the main things our brains are for. | |||||||
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This article originally appeared in Time Compression Technology Magazine, volume 15, issue 3, p33 in June 2007. | |||||||
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This is a slightly modified version of an article that originally appeared in Time Compression Technology Magazine, volume 15, issue 3, p33 in June 2007. | |||||||
| -- AdrianBowyer - 26 Jun 2007 | ||||||||