According to Miller, large areas of the highest human activity - linguistic display, art, science, ideology and religion - have the same fundamental origin [as the peacock's tail]: the need to impress potential mates. "Human culture is mostly courtship effort," he says. Borrowing the idea of "conspicuous consumption" from the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen, he says that "the only reliable way to advertise one's fitness is to produce a signal that costs a lot of fitness".
"Non-jealous men and women ... are not our ancestors, having been left in the evolutionary dust by rivals with different passionate sensibilities."
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