Recent reading on sexual selection and the evolutionary origin of the human mind

So, when I was in high school, I had this chum named Geoffrey Miller or he had me as a chum, or whatever. I like to think it was a reciprocal relationship. He was my immediate predecessor as editor of the school's literary magazine. One of the ways he first impressed me was by describing to me an idea he had about the evolution of the human mind. See, way back when he was in high school he had this idea that humans developed the ability to dance, sing, make music, make pictures, crack wickedly funny jokes, etc. because these things are sexy hot.

In 2000, he published a book about it, called The Mating Mind. In recent months it had been bothering me that I had put off reading it for seven years, so when a good friend gave me an amazon.com gift certificate for my birthday, I decided to get it and a couple of other books that I had been putting off reading, Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker and Matt Ridley's The Red Queen, which introduces Miller's ideas (credited to Miller) in its last couple of chapters.

In this post I'm going to attempt capsule reviews of all three books. I'm very pleased with my choice of accompanying books: I'd recommend that anyone who finds Miller's book heavy going read the Dawkins and the Ridley first.

(ETA: I'm no longer going to attempt that in this post, but while I'm thinking about doing it, I'm changing this post from my-eyes-only to public.)