The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

I read the celebrated "Moral Animal" some 10 years ago, re-read it and underlined it at least twice. Finally I had found a theory of human nature and psychology I could wholeheartedly believe in. Ten years later, I have now found "Red Queen" - more of the same, but specialized particularly in the huge role sexual selection played during our evolutionary history. Experienced scientist and science journalist Matt Ridley compiled these findings of evolutionary psychology (EP) for the lay reader in 1993 - and "Red Queen" is still a timely treatise. Disclaimer: For those who are offended by the very suggestion that our behavior evolved from a pre-ape ancestor - and that our behavior is an elaborate, sophisticated manifestation of language and socialization which evolved by natural selection along with a huge brain - you won't like this book. I realize the following assessments of mine are anecdotal, but here goes: I have seen how men and women preen, peacock-like, showing off their best (?) sides during courtships, and how they pair off in society according to commonly accepted determinants of status, differing depending on sex. I have seen how the competitive, power-seeking behavior of men is drastically tempered by marriage. I have seen how married men who are careful in all other endeavors will take uncharacteristic risks for a sexual fling. I have observed how women tend to choose (in a mate) financial success and stability over looks (if they have to choose), whereas men tend to choose beauty over all else. I have seen how men and women differ in their outlooks: Men (generally) want to be practical, shrewd, assertive, dominating, competitive, critical, and self-controlled. Women (usually) want to be loving, affectionate, impulsive, sympathetic, and generous. One in three men said they had fantasized about having sex with more than a thousand women in their lives. Women overwhelmingly fantasize about having sex with a familiar partner. I have read about and subsequently observed how people (unconsciously?) score each other during their social interactions, rating relationship values for the future. Finally, game theory concepts are widely known to be utilized by humans in sexual and social interactions. All these concepts are predicted by EP. I could go on with other examples, but in short, I'm a sucker for EP. Recently, I have read about resistance in university humanities departments to EP - humans being so special and all. We are - in the sense that our intelligence has given us free reign over our world - but humans are still very imperfect. We are poorly designed in many ways (backs, knees, tendency to war, self-delusion) - exactly what one would expect from evolution. Cockroaches or certain scorpions, which can live without food and water for almost a year, are also impressive. There is every reason to believe that our (at times) unethical sexual behavior as well as our superior intelligence evolved in just as Rube-Goldberg

To summarize anything I might say below - this is an incredible book. Mind-blowing. If you're reading reviews (as I do) trying to find the few people who didn't love the book so you can have an "unbiased" view, very good for you. (that's how I choose books, usually) My unbiased view is this - I *very rarely* give out fives. This is one of the few books that deserves it.Matt Ridley explains in the epilogue of The Red Queen that half of his ideas are probably wrong, just like those of Freud, Jung, and many others. But this common-sense attitude, projected onto the evolution of reproduction, is EXACTLY what about this book makes it so incredible.Ridley is grounded in a reality unfettered by religion, social science, social mores, or really any sort of external "moral" influence. (Not that he's the antichrist or anything - he's just not letting standard social concepts influence his ideas.) A few people who don't usually want to accept reality (ultra-conservatives) will hate this book. Fine. If you believe in creationism, go elsewhere. Otherwise, read this book! This is not a political or an ideological work - this is a scientific text on human evolution, and how it has been influenced by sex.I have been able to RIVET people with discussions of facts and theories from this book. It's the best money I've spent on a single book in quite a long while. And in case I sound like way too much of a suck-up - I haven't read any of Ridley's other works, not because I haven't bought them, but because I looked through them in bookstores, and every one I looked at seems either uninteresting, wrong, or awful. But this one is GREAT!

Matt Ridley's Red Queen is both a terrific introduction into the burgeoning field of evolutionary psycholgy and a scientific explanation for why the sexes differ. Ridley's book is based entirely off other scientists ideas, but his great contribution is to put them all together in a cohent and readable form. Ridley is a gifted writer with a knack for making the difficult accesible. But what makes this book so wonderful is its central thesis: That human gender differences are biological, stemming from divergent interests in the way males and females in the animal world seek to reproduce. While this has been well-established in other places, what is even more interesting is Ridley's examination of human reproductive strategies. Men seek beauty and youth in women, while women seek wealth and stablity in men. Every single assertion Ridley makes is backed up by a wealth of scientific date, ranging from experiments to human history and deductive logic. The scientific rigor of this book is impressive, and mostly irrefutalble. There are other implications of this book as well. The most obvious is that it destroys environmental explantions for male-female differences, and culturally constructed views of beauty. But the implications range far beyond that, to our very perception of gender roles in society, and how we should deal with them. Finally, this book is a great introduction into evolutionary pyschology, a new field that is improving by leaps and bounds every year. Evolutionary Pschologists continue to probe into human behavior, helping us understand the biological, and immutable, sources of the human condition. We can expect even more breakthroughs in the years to come, and I certainly hope Matt Ridley chooses to write another book explaining the newest thinking.

"Men and women have different minds - says Matt Ridley in one of the central chapters of his book-. The differences are the direct result of evolution. Women's minds (and bodies, as he states in a previous pharagraph) evolved to suit the demands of beraring and rearing children and of gathering plant and food. Men's minds (and bodies) evolved to suit the demands of rising in a male hierarchy, fighting over women and providing meat to a family". To arrive to this and other conclusions, Ridley goes a long and difficult way through biology, genetics and continents, starting with a basic question: why is there sex at all? After all, many species reproduce without it. The first three or four chapters of "The Red Queen" may be a little onerous, but apparently they are necessary to support the last ones. This is a book about evolution with a focus on human sexuality and the human mind. Everything on humans - our bodies, our behavior towards the opposite sex, even our minds and social rules - is a direct result of a process called sexual selection that allows the reproduction of the fittest, therefore transmiting their genes to the next generations. When answering why there is sex at all and how men and women's bodies and minds evolved in the last million years, we come to many uncomfortable truths about adultery, rape, incest and life. Why do more rich men marry beautiful women and not the other way around? Why have the attempts to sell pornogrphy to women and romantic novels to men failed? And above all this: why did evolution produce different minds in men a women?Take all of the above and pack it with a red cover, and you have one of the most amazing readings of the year.

This book is absolutely filled with interesting theories on the evolution of sexual behavior and of the effects of selection preferences on the evolution of various species. I found particularly interesting the notion that gender is not a necessity for reproduction nor even necessarily a good plan for projecting one generation's genes into the future. It hardly occurs to a member of a species that places so much emphasis on sex and gender that their occurence and persistance actually need some explanaton. Ridley does this with flare, illustrating with examples from other species what is possible and mathematically what is likely to occur genetically with various approaches to reproduction. He also provides an overview of most of the theories of why gender occurs and reasons why most theories don't quite hold up when examined against what actually occurs in nature. His own theory of parasite and infectious disease resistance and an "arms race" of sorts between host and parasite seems quite plausible as an explanation for the rise of gender. He also gives a thorough account of how selection of certain noncounterfitable traits exhibiting the health of prospective mates has caused a similar Red Queen stalemate between the sexes and has led to the types of behavior seen as characteristic of male and female humans. An interesting book.