Geoffrey Miller

Geoffrey Miller, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in Psychology at the University of New Mexico. He wrote The Mating Mind and Spent, and co-edited the book Mating Intelligence. Nerd by nature, he got a B. A. from Columbia and a Ph.D. from Stanford, then worked at University of Sussex, MPI for Psychological Research in Munich, University College London, and UCLA, before moving to glamorous Albuquerque.

Intellectually ADHD, he’s written over 100 publications on seemingly random topics in evolutionary psychology, sexual selection, mate choice, ovulatory cycles, consumer behavior, behavior genetics, intelligence, personality, creativity, humor, music, art, moral virtues, genetic algorithms, neural networks, and artificial life. He’s a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and is on the editorial boards of Intelligence and Evolutionary Psychology. A grumpy introvert, he’s somehow given over 120 invited talks around the world, from Harvard to Hyderabad.

His most embarrassing paper won the 2008 Ig Nobel Prize in Economics, and his research has been featured in Psychology Today, Nature, Science, Time, Wired, New Scientist, The Economist, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and on NPR radio, BBC radio, CNN, PBS, Discovery Channel, Learning Channel, National Geographic Channel, BBC, and Channel 4. He consults regularly for Fortune 500 companies, ad agencies, and social media analytics start-ups, then writes guilt-fuelled anti-consumerism diatribes.

Inspired mostly by Darwin, Galton, Nietzsche, Veblen, Spearman, Pearson, Heidegger, Hayek, Maynard Smith, Trivers, Dawkins, Cosmides, Tooby, Buss, Pinker, Gigerenzer, and Thaler, he probably had the genes to become a libertarian atheist anyway. He loves skiing, good art, hard science fiction, stand-up comedy, smartphones (in principle), and his family.