Geoffrey Miller, “The Mating Mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature”

The mind-as-computer metaphor

The mind-as-computer metaphor drew attention away from questions of evolution, individual differences, motivation, emotion, creativity, social interaction, sexuality, family life, culture, status, money, power, birth, growth, disease, insanity, and death. As long as you ignore most of human life, the computer metaphor is terrific. Computers are human artifacts designed to fulfill human needs, such as increasing the value of Microsoft stock. They are not autonomous entities that evolved to survive and reproduce. This makes the computer metaphor very poor at helping psychologists to identify mental adaptations that evolved through natural and sexual selection. «Processing information» is not a proper biological function—it is just a shadow of a hint of an abstraction across a vast set of possible biological functions. The mind-as-computer metaphor is evolutionarily agnostic, which makes it nearly useless as a foundation for evolutionary psychology. At the very least, the metaphor of the mind as a sexually selected entertainment system identifies some selection pressures that may have shaped the mind during evolution.