Geoffrey Miller

The healthy brain theory suggests that our brains are different from those of other apes not because extravagantly large brains helped us to survive or to raise offspring, but because such brains are simply better advertisements of how good our genes are. The more complicated the brain, the easier it is to mess up. The human brain’s great complexity makes it vulnerable to impairment through mutations, and its great size makes it physiologically costly. By producing behaviors such as language and art that only a costly, complex brain could produce, we may be advertising our fitness to potential mates. If sexual selection favored the minds that seemed fit for mating, our creative intelligence could have evolved not because it gives us any survival advantage, but because it makes us especially vulnerable to revealing our mutations in our behaviour.

Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, New York, 2000, p. 104