Virtue Signaling: Essays on Darwinian Politics & Free Speech by Geoffrey Miller

Author:Geoffrey Miller [Miller, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambrian Moon
Published: 2019-09-16T22:00:00+00:00

Sexual Choosiness as a Moral Virtue

In traditional sexual selection theory, from Darwin onwards, there is a crisp distinction between mate preference and preferred trait. However, if mate choice started to favor human sexual fidelity, chastity, and choosiness as moral virtues, the stage would be set for a new positive-feedback process. Just as poor taste in one’s friends and associates can reflect moral inadequacy, poor taste in one’s previous mates can. Thus, in our highly social species, given capacities for observing, remembering, and gossiping about other people’s sexual relationships, a conspicuously excellent capacity for mate choice could come under sexual selection as a preferred trait – perhaps even becoming a costly moral signal in its own right. The resulting evolutionary dynamics of such meta-selection (sexual selection for sexual choosiness) have not, to my knowledge, been explored.

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