Could ‘Survival Of The Wittiest’ Be The Real Secret Behind Human Evolution?

Forget brute strength or even being the most likable person in the room. A linguist at Wayne State University argues that what drove human evolution may be the ability to be funny with words.

Ljiljana Progovac makes that case in a perspective paper published in PNAS Nexus, arguing that sexual selection for wit, wordplay, and humor was a primary force behind the emergence of human language, and with it, the cognitive leaps that make humans genuinely distinct from every other species. Two popular theories have long competed here, “survival of the fittest” and the more recent “survival of the friendliest,” but Progovac argues both may not fully capture what it means to be human, especially when it comes to language.

Her argument leans on Charles Darwin himself. Darwin believed language evolved gradually through sexual selection and described it as “half art, half instinct.” Modern researchers, Progovac contends, have largely abandoned that artistic dimension, treating language primarily as a logical tool for expressing ideas. Humor, metaphor, and the pleasure of a well-landed insult have all been sidelined.

Wittiness as a Sexual Selection Strategy

So what does wit have to do with sex? Across traditional societies worldwide, from the Maori of New Zealand to the Mursi of Ethiopia, the most eloquent speakers often hold higher status or influence. Among the Amuesha people of Central Peru, a true leader is described as “the one who is powerful due to his or her words.” In South America more broadly, “it can be said not that the chief is a man who speaks, but that he who speaks is a chief.”

Status is often linked to reproductive success in evolutionary theory. Individuals who could out-talk, out-insult, or out-humor rivals were out-competing them through language rather than physical force. At least one study the paper draws on suggests that men increase their linguistic creativity both in the presence of attractive women and in the presence of male competitors, pointing to a plausible connection between verbal performance and mating pressure.

Humor carries its own biological weight. Research cited in the paper shows it actively reduces cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone. Women, according to one analyzed study, were twice as likely to seek a funny partner as to offer humor in return. A separate study found that “women preferred those who produced humor for all types of relationships, whereas men preferred those who were receptive to their own humor.” That asymmetry is often interpreted as a hallmark of sexual selection, mirroring patterns seen across the animal kingdom.

Ancient Insults as Fossils of the Earliest Wittiness

To trace this back to language’s origins, Progovac draws on what she calls “living fossils,” word structures preserved in modern languages that approximate the very earliest human grammar. Rather than full sentences, that proto-grammar consisted of just two elements: a verb and a noun. Think “kill-joy,” “rattle-snake,” “cry-baby,” or “scatter-brain.” These compound words are treated by Progovac as evolutionary artifacts, relics of the moment humans first began combining words into meaning.

What our ancestors chose to do with these compounds is the revealing part. Across English, Serbian, Berber, and Twi, they cluster around the same themes: insults, mockery, derogatory nicknames, and body humor. Serbian has “spin-butt” for a fidgety person and “muddy-water” for a troublemaker; Twi has a compound for a pickpocket; Berber has one for a miser. Medieval records document thousands of such compounds in English alone, many of them, as one historical linguist noted, showing “unquotable coarseness.” Among the earliest surviving forms, many appear tied to mockery and playful insult. Across vastly different cultures and millennia, that behavior was not merely entertainment. It was competition.

Brain Science Connects Wittiness to Deep Evolution

Brain imaging research adds a compelling dimension. Some studies suggest different brain regions may activate when people process these ancient-style compound words compared to modern sentence structures. One area that appears involved handles both face recognition and the figurative thinking behind metaphor. Progovac sees that as consistent with the idea that early grammar and the ability to name and recognize people evolved together, a reasonable proposition given that coining a devastating nickname for a rival is as much a social act as it is a linguistic one.

On the genetic side, the brain network responsible for complex grammar developed stronger connections relatively recently in human evolution, a change tied to the FOXP2 gene, often associated with language ability. That points toward evolution selecting specifically for language skills, not just general intelligence.

Rather than dismissing the “survival of the friendliest” hypothesis, Progovac proposes that wit and self-domestication co-evolved in a feedback loop. As verbal competition replaced physical aggression, it reinforced selection for less reactive, less aggressive individuals. Humor, by lowering cortisol and defusing tension, may have actively accelerated that shift. Wittiness, in other words, may have helped tame us.

“Rightly or wrongly, we often consider eloquence to be correlated with intelligence, but regrettably perhaps, being witty cannot be equated with being intelligent or wise, in the sense of making the best decisions, or solving problems in an optimal way,” Progovac writes. Quick-wittedness is immediate and observable. A sharp quip is far faster to evaluate than someone’s capacity for long-term judgment. It may look like a shallow skill, like the elaborate structures male bowerbirds build during mating season, but if generations of humans selected for it, the attraction runs deeper than it appears. Humans may, quite literally, be wired for it.

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