The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

Art originally evolved to help us advertise our survival surplus and, from the consumer’s perspective, to gauge the survival surplus of others. By distilling time and effort into something non-functional, an artist effectively says, “I’m so confident in my survival that I can afford to waste time and energy.”

nature aggressively weeds out costly behaviors unless they somehow pay for themselves by providing survival or reproductive advantages. In other words, if a costly behavior is universal, it typically indicates positive selection pressure. Finally, art is old enough, in evolutionary terms, for selection to have had plenty of time to work its magic.

Miller argues that while ecological selection (the pressure to survive) abhors waste, sexual selection often favors it. The logic, as you may recall from Chapter 2, is that we prefer mates who can afford to waste time, energy, and other resources

Today there’s a stigma to wearing uniforms, in part because it suppresses our individuality. But the very concept of “individuality” is just signaling by another name.

No matter how fast the economy grows, there remains a limited supply of sex and social status—and earning and spending money is still a good way to compete for it.

But notice that our access to Google hasn’t made much of a dent in our hunger for news; if anything we read more news now that we have social media feeds, even though we can find a practical use for only a tiny fraction of the news we consume.

In casual conversation, listeners have a mixture of these two motives. To some extent we care about the text, the information itself, but we also care about the subtext, the speaker’s value as a potential ally. In this way, every conversation is like a (mutual) job interview, where each of us is “applying” for the role of friend, lover, or leader

our instincts for using language didn’t evolve to help us do science or build empires. Language evolved among our foraging ancestors at least 50,000 years ago (if not far earlier), long before we became the undisputed masters of the planet.

At some point during her development, however, she’ll exhaust the learning opportunities around bodily norms, and they’ll cease to be a fertile source of play. And soon she’ll graduate to the grown-up world, where we’re concerned mostly with social, sexual, and moral norms. These are an endless source of fascination, in part because there are so many of them, with so many nuances, that we can never hope to learn all of their boundaries and edge cases. But they’re also fascinating because they’re always shifting around as circumstances and attitudes change.

Consider a five-year-old girl who finds potty humor hilarious. She knows it’s rude to perform (or talk about) certain bodily functions in front of others, and that she risks being punished if she does. But at the same time, she can’t take every rule at face value; she needs to probe her boundaries. Just how serious are these norms, really? If she soils her pants, of course, she may feel legitimately ashamed—and thus, no laughter. But if she merely farts, she’ll quickly learn that the danger is quite small;