SEXUAL SELECTION FOR MORAL VIRTUES

@article{Miller2007SEXUALSF,
  title={SEXUAL SELECTION FOR MORAL VIRTUES},
  author={Geoffrey F. Miller},
  journal={The Quarterly Review of Biology},
  year={2007},
  volume={82},
  pages={97 - 125}
}
  • G. Miller
  • Published 1 June 2007
  • Psychology
  • The Quarterly Review of Biology
Moral evolution theories have emphasized kinship, reciprocity, group selection, and equilibrium selection. Yet, moral virtues are also sexually attractive. Darwin suggested that sexual attractiveness may explain many aspects of human morality. This paper updates his argument by integrating recent research on mate choice, person perception, individual differences, costly signaling, and virtue ethics. Many human virtues may have evolved in both sexes through mutual mate choice to advertise good… 
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248 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
23
Background Citations
134
Methods Citations
3
Results Citations
4

248 Citations

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It is argued that the “mating intelligence” theory, as a theory about the evolution of morality, comes too dangerously close to being unfalsifiable because it embodies some auxiliary hypotheses and vague definitions which make it practically immune to every possible empirical finding concerning sex differences in human moral traits.
Altruism and fairness: Unnatural selection?
The Blessing of Sexuality: Evolution of Altruism with Mating Preference
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The basic hypothesis is that altruism is a sexually attractive virtue, and the concepts of altruistic punishment and the behaviour-based sexual attractiveness are employed to develop a gender-based evolutionary model where mating preference acts as the compensation to the male punishers from females in the given public goods game.
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Runaway social selection resulting from partner choice may have shaped aspects of human cooperation and complex sociality that are otherwise hard to account for. Social selection is the subtype of…
Altruism predicts mating success in humans
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The results suggest that altruists have higher mating success than non-altruists and support the hypothesis that altruism is a sexually selected costly signal of difficult-to-observe qualities.
Chinese undergraduates' preferences for altruistic traits in mate selection and personal advertisement: Evidence from Q‐sort technique
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When Chinese participants chose a mate or advertised themselves to a potential mate, kin altruism was considered to be the most important trait; altruistic traits were more preferred by males than by females and females tended to advertise themselves as more altruistic.
Morality: An Evolutionary Account
  • D. Krebs
  • Psychology
    Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science
  • 2008
Refinements in Darwin's theory of the origin of a moral sense create a framework equipped to organize and integrate contemporary theory and research on morality. Morality originated in deferential,…
Explaining financial and prosocial biases in favor of attractive people: Interdisciplinary perspectives from economics, social psychology, and evolutionary psychology
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Multiple lines of evidence suggest that mating motives play a more important role in driving financial and prosocial biases toward attractive adults than previously recognized.
Mutual mate choice drives the desirability of altruism in relationships
Although previous research has found that altruism is an important trait in human mate choice, much of this has concentrated on female preferences only. Subsequently, the current study explored how…
The influence of mate choice motivation on non-financial altruism
Several studies have found that individuals are more altruistic towards potential mates than others, suggesting altruistic behavior may be a mating signal. Much of the literature focuses on financial…
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