The Red Queen Sex And The Evolution Of Human Nature

THE RED QUEEN Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature MATT RIDLEY Dedication For Matthew CONTENTS Cover Title Page Dedication Chapter 1: HUMAN NATURE Chapter 2: THE ENIGMA Chapter 3: THE POWER OF PARASITES Chapter 4: GENETIC MUTINY AND GENDER Chapter 5: THE PEACOCK’S TALE Chapter 6: POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN Chapter 7: MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN Chapter 8: SEXING THE MIND Chapter 9: THE USES OF BEAUTY Chapter 10: THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME Epilogue: THE SELF-DOMESTICATED APE Bibliography Acknowledgments Notes Searchable Terms About the Author Praise Copyright About the Publisher Chapter 1 HUMAN NATURE The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. “I wonder if all the things move along with us?” thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried, “Faster! Don’t try to talk!” —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass When a surgeon cuts into a body, he knows what he will find inside. If he is seeking the patient’s stomach, for example, he does not expect to find it in a different place in every patient. All people have stomachs, all human stomachs are roughly the same shape, and all are found in the same place. There are differences, no doubt. Some people have unhealthy stomachs; some have small stomachs; some have slightly misshapen stomachs. But the differences are tiny compared with the similarities. A vet or a butcher could teach the surgeon about a much greater variety of different stomachs: big, multichambered cow stomachs; tiny mouse stomachs; somewhat human looking pig stomachs. There is, it is safe to say, such a thing as the typical human stomach, and it is different from a nonhuman stomach. It is the assumption of this book that there is also, in the same way, a typical human nature. It is the aim of this book to seek it. Like the stomach surgeon, a psychiatrist can make all sorts of basic assumptions when a patient lies down on the couch. He can assume that the patient knows what it means to love, to envy, to trust, to think, to speak, to fear, to smile, to bargain, to covet, to dream, to remember, to sing, to quarrel, to lie. Even if the person were from a newly discovered continent, all sorts of assumptions about his or her mind and nature would still be valid. When, in the 1930s, contact was made with New Guinea tribes hitherto cut off from the outside world and ignorant of its existence, they were found to smile and frown as unambiguously as any Westerner, despite 100,000 years of separation since they last shared a common ancestor. The “smile” of a baboon is a threat; the smile of a man is a sign of pleasure: It is human nature the world over. That is not to deny the fact of culture shock. Sheeps’ eyeball soup, a shake of the head that means yes, Western privacy, circumcision rituals, afternoon siestas, religions, languages, the difference in smiling frequency between a Russian and an American waiter in a restaurant—there are myriad human particulars as well as human universals. Indeed, there is a whole discipline, cultural anthropology, that devotes itself to the study of human cultural differences. But it is easy to take for granted the bedrock of similarity that underlies the human race—the shared peculiarities of being human. This book is an inquiry into the nature of that human nature. Its theme is that it is impossible to understand human nature without understanding how it evolved, and it is impossible to understand how it evolved without understanding how human sexuality evolved. For the central theme of our evolution has been sexual. Why sex? Surely there are features of human nature