The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature [Paperback]

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!

The "red queen" is a metaphor for an arms race. In an arms race both sides run as fast and as hard as they can to stay in the same place relatively speaking. In evolution the arms race is between parasite and host or between predator and prey. Both are running as fast as they can just to keep up, because when one gets an advantage, the other finds a counter. The red queen comes from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) since that monarch ran as fast as she could but never got anywhere at all. The red queen is also a metaphor for the theory that there is no "progress" in evolution, that "...species do not get better at surviving... Their chances of extinction are random" (p. 64).

Ridley covers a lot of territory here, ranging from sex to the handicap principle to gossip to why our brains are big (to figure out what the other person is up to!). The Red Queen answers the question, "Why is there sex?" Apparently we have sexuality rather than asexuality because of the arms race between microbes and our immune systems. Sex is a way of storing defenses against parasites in the gene pool of the species and then mixing them anew each generation to fool the microbes. Without the gene pool and the DNA mixing, the microbes would quickly evolve a way around the organism's defenses; but with sexuality the organism juggles its "locks" every generation and so is able to keep up with the fast-mutating microbes. When again the microbes evolve the keys to these locks, the gene pool is mixed again and the organism comes up with an old lock that the microbes again have to evolve a key to.

Some of the fun is the incisive way Ridley presents the ideas, and the ideas he chooses to present. For example, note how effectively he demolishes Freud's naive incest taboo theory on pages 282-286. Also interesting is his presentation of the idea that it is not thinness in women per se that attracts men, but a low ratio of waistline to hip line that fetches them. There are chapters entitled "Polygamy and the Nature of Men," and "Monogamy and the Nature of Women." In Chapter 9, "The Uses of Beauty," Ridley goes into some detail on why men prefer thin and blond women. And on pages 217-218 he explains why women cuckold their mates: "This is because her husband is, almost by definition, usually not the best male there is-else how would he have ended up married to her?" She wants the parental care of her husband and some other man's superior-she thinks-genes.

Ridley is rather modest and says that most of the ideas in the book are not his and at any rate many of them will undoubtedly be proven wrong. This is refreshing to read when I think about all the delusive ideas so proudly trumpeted by popular books on evolution and human behavior in the past. Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape (1967) and Elaine Morgan's The Aquatic Ape: A Theory of Human Evolution (1982) come to mind, both fine books, but now seen to be substantially mistaken.

Written in an engaging and lucid style, The Red Queen really is the best of a number of books on evolutionary psychology to appear over the last decade and one that is a delight to read.

Although I don't agree with everything in Mr. Ridley's book, it adds a dimension to the debate that I hadn't really considered, which is that almost all human behavior is driven by sexual urges and reproduction at an evolutionary level. The behaviors that lead to successful reproduction are likely to be passed to later generations, while the only trait that cannot be passed along is abstinence. From this model, people will engage in all kinds of seemingly irrational behavior when doing so is biologically advantageous.

My fundamental distress with this premise is that it diminishes the value of human reason, which is something that evolved through generations just as much as the biological drive to reproduce. While Mr. Ridley premise is that one of the main values of being smart is that it allows the brainy people to outwit their sexual competitors, I get depressed when I think of us as essentially no more than reproductive machines.

Mr. Ridley writes a good story that adds some nice twists to understanding human behavior. The writing did not move as quickly as I would have hoped, and some of the details about other species' sexual behavior dragged at times, but I recommend this book to anyone who is looking for explanations for behaviors that might not otherwise make sense.