Geoffrey Miller

Geoffrey Miller was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He studied biology and psychology at Columbia University and earned a PhD in cognitive psychology at Stanford in 1993. He then held research posts at the University of Sussex, the Max Planck Institute in Munich and University College London. He has taught at the University of New Mexico since 2001.

His field is evolutionary psychology, and his main idea is that sexual selection shaped the human mind. The Mating Mind (2000) argues that art, humor, language and morality grew partly as displays to attract mates. Spent (2009) applies the same idea to what people buy.

Mate (2015), written with the author Tucker Max, turns that research into dating advice for young men. It tells them to build real traits that women value instead of learning pickup tricks. The two also ran a podcast, The Mating Grounds. In 2013 his university censured him over a tweet that mocked obese PhD applicants, and he apologized.