Colin Tudge
IT PAYS TO BE NICE
Spent: Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerism
By Geoffrey Miller (William Heinemann 384pp £20)

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Around 1990 the marketing manager of an organisation of which I was a trustee assured me that her specialty was an exact science. She had an MSc in flogging stuff, she said, and knew exactly what she was doing. Since the organisation was on the point of bankruptcy I had my doubts. Twenty years later, Geoffrey Miller tells us that we were both right - and both wrong. Marketing could indeed be much more of a science than it is, but the science that is currently brought to bear on it is hopelessly wide of the mark. What's really needed is evolutionary psychology.

Evo psy has not had a good press, nor done itself many favours - but in principle Miller is surely right. As the Ukrainian-American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky commented in 1973, 'Nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution' - and biology includes animal and human psychology.

For our behaviour is heavily influenced by experience but also, to a significant and measurable extent, it has a heritable, genetic base. Since all human beings partake of a common gene pool we all share some distinctively human traits - so there really is such a thing as 'human nature', as writers and philosophers since ancient times have agreed. Beneath our pretensions, too, we are beasts; and, like any beast, we are obliged in the end to behave in ways that help us to survive and pass on our genes. Whether or not there's an outside arbiter to enforce such behaviour is a matter for theologians. But it's clear that creatures that don't do the things that help them to live and reproduce, die out.

Evolutionary psychologists seek to identify what we really need to do to get by and produce offspring, and what states of mind we need, and to trace the selective forces, deep in our past, that have shaped our predilections and capabilities. Such thinking suggests that the Freudian and behaviourist psychology now applied to marketing and to the economy in general is too eccentric or crude by half. For all its apparent success, marketing does not really press the right buttons, and most economic systems do not make us happy even when they are intended to.

So in our consumer economy it's assumed above all that people like stuff. 'Darwinians' (albeit the kind that Darwin would surely disown) then tell us that it is 'natural' above all to compete - consumers flaunting bigger and better stuff, and producers vying to produce more stuff than anyone else. Stir in the device of money - cash can buy anything - and we finish up with a dogfight, with everyone battling to outstrip the rest, and marketeers helping the process along.

But, says Miller, human psychology is both more complex than this, and more heartening. To find mates we must signal our mate-worthiness. This is best achieved not by shows of toughness and belligerence, but by displaying what are now recognised as 'the big six' qualities: intelligence, openness to ideas, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability, and extraversion. In short, it pays to be nice, funny and creative. People like big cars partly because (I would say) some people really do like big cars, and some people really are impressed by simple demonstrations of potency. But (says Miller) big cars work as mating signals mainly because they signal success - which, the observers assume, at least implies some measure of conscientiousness (working hard) and intelligence (becoming a company director).

Miller's thesis is encouraging. Basically we are nice - or at least we want to seem nice, and are impressed by niceness. Marketing would be far more successful if geared to the big six manifestations of niceness - we might call them virtues. Contrary to the general impression, marketing does not have to lead to rampant consumerism and a gobbling up of precious resources. Its techniques, rooted in accurate psychology, can just as soon promote good ideas as damaging ones.

If we applied similar psychology to the economy as a whole, then, says Miller - borrowing ideas from the radical economist Robert Frank - we could devise an economy that remains capitalist (capitalism has many advantages) but also ensures fairness. The essence is to shift taxation from income to purchase, and to make the tax progressive: the more expensive (and potentially damaging) the commodity, the higher the tax - not just in absolute terms, but as a percentage of the price.

Overall, Miller's thesis is ingenious, and brilliantly argued. He proves his point - that evo psy really is worth taking seriously; and that we would all be much better off if politicians and economists used science more adroitly, and certainly less cack-handedly.

Yet I am left uneasy. Is it really true that astute marketing could in practice sell good ideas as readily as big and shiny stuff? Marketing is expensive. So the people who can afford to do it best are those who set out, not to spread sweetness and light, but to make as much money as possible. This is where Darwinism at its crudest takes over. For the people who can sell most stuff to the richest consumers can afford to do the best marketing, and so can sell even more stuff, and so on and so on - a 'positive feedback loop' of the most grisly kind. Thus it's the internal logic of the market that leads us towards rampant consumerism rather than human intent, whether of the producers or the buyers. So yes, we should get the psychology right. But perhaps the thing that really matters has nothing very much to do with psychology at all.

More broadly, Miller's economic theory seems to demonstrate the limitations of science, and indeed of the rationality of which science is commonly taken to be the exemplar. Thus, his progressive taxation should indeed produce greater equality, but although most of us surely prefer equality, the 10 per cent who are now doing well out of the status quo presumably don't. Consciously or unconsciously, they use their disproportionate wealth to ensure that they stay at the top, and the rest of us shouting 'Foul!' does no good at all - as the history of the past thirty years surely demonstrates. The real issue here is not scientific but moral: should society be more egalitarian? Plato thought not: in defining justice he expressly rejected equality. Nietzsche thought the world ought to be ruled by a tough and talented elite. So we come to the core question of all politics that was posed by Lenin: 'Who whom?' Science really doesn't have much to say on all this. Science is necessary, but never sufficient.

COLIN TUDGE's latest book, 'Consider the Birds', is available from Penguin.