Geoffrey Miller, a new psychology faculty member at UNM, said coming to the desert from the green landscape of Surrey, England, has been an aesthetic re-education.
Miller, who was a researcher at the London School of Economics, said UNM’s interdisciplinary program in the evolutionary study of human nature and his experiences in the state brought him to the University.
“I think what UNM offers is the incredible potential to have the world’s strongest research network concerning human nature,” he said.
Miller, an internationally known evolutionary social psychologist, is featured on the eight-part PBS series “Evolution,” which is running on KNME Channel 5. Miller discusses sexual selection by our ancestors and human evolution in an episode of the series.
He covered those topics in his first book, “The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature,” which has been published in seven languages and has people around the world talking.
“I think the controversial aspect of my first book, ‘The Mating Mind,’ was that it offered a vision of our prehistoric ancestors being intelligent and choosy, with sexual relationships as complex as our own,” Miller said. “They fell in love; they judged each other based on personality, and that’s a fairly new idea, I think, because we have the stereotype from Hollywood films like ‘One Million Years B.C.’ where we think of cavemen dragging cavewomen off.”
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Miller described evolutionary psychology as a growing field, which offers psychology’s first theoretical framework that links it to other fields.
“It offers a way of understanding human nature based on us in relation to other animals and us in relation to sexual and family challenges and parenting challenges,” Miller said. He discussed a resistance to a narrow version of evolutionary psychology.
“I think there’s a backlash against evolutionary psychology in America,” Miller said. “I think people misunderstand it widely and one of the aims of my book was to broaden peoples’ notions of it.”
Miller earned his bachelor’s degree with double honors in biology and psychology from Columbia University in 1987 and his doctorate in cognitive psychology from Stanford in 1993. He also has been a researcher at the University of Sussex; the University of Nottingham in England; the Max Plank Institute in Munich, Germany; and was a visiting professor at UCLA.
He said he has always been attracted to academic centers with strong interdisciplinary focuses on human nature.
“In each case, I just enjoyed working with colleagues from diverse backgrounds,” he said.
