The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race

Half the ideas in this book are probably wrong.

Sex is not about reproduc-tion, gender is not about males and females, courtship is not aboutpersuasion, fashion is not about beauty, and love is not about affec-tion. Below the surface of every banality and cliche there lies irony,cynicism, and profundity.

How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience.

There is no nature that exists devoid of nurture; there is no nurture that develops without nature. To say otherwise is like saying that the area of a field is determined by its length but not its width. Every behavior is the product of an instinct trained by experience. The study of human beings remained resolutely unreformed by these ideas until a few years ago. Even now, most anthropologists and social scientists are firmly committed to the view that evolution has nothing to tell them. Human bodies are products of "culture," and human culture does not reflect human nature, but the reverse. This restricts social scientists to investigation only differences between cultures and between individuals--and to exaggerating them. Yet what is most interesting to me about human beings is the things that are the same, not what is different--things like grammatical language, hierarchy, romantic love, sexual jealousy, long-term bongs between the genders ("marriage", in a sense). These are trainable instincts peculiar to out species and are just as surely the products of evolution as eyes and thumbs.

The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene

Genes are biochemical recipes written in a four-letter alphabet called DNA.

Nature is the length of the rectangle, nurture the width. There can be no rectangle without both.

Anaxagoras’ belief that lying on the right side during sex would produce a boy was so influential that centuries later some French aristocrats had their left testicles amputated.

Why has that man fallen in love with that woman? Because she’s pretty. Why does pretty matter? Because human beings are a mainly monogamous species and so males are choosy about their mates (as male chimpanzees are not); prettiness is an indication of youth and health, which are indications of fertility. Why does that man care about fertility in his mate? Because if he did not, his genes would be eclipsed by those of men who did. Why does he care about that? He does not, but his genes act as if they do. Those who choose infertile mates leave no descendants. Therefore, everybody is descended from men who preferred fertile women, and every person inherits from those ancestors the same preference. Why is that man a slave to his genes? He is not. He has free will. But you just said he’s in love because it is good for his genes. He’s free to ignore the dictates of his genes. Why do his genes want to get together with her genes anyway? Because that’s the only way they can get into the next generation; human beings have two sexes that must breed by mixing their genes. Why do human beings have two sexes? Because in mobile animals hermaphrodites are less good at doing two things at once than males and females are at each doing his or her own thing. Therefore, ancestral hermaphroditic animals were outcompeted by ancestral sexed animals.

people are attracted to people of high reproductive and genetic potential—the healthy, the fit, and the powerful.

I don’t have to,” replies the philosopher. “I only have to outrun you.”)

What was the secret that the serpent told Eve? That she could eat a certain fruit? Pah. That was a euphemism. The fruit was carnal knowledge, and everybody from Thomas Aquinas to Milton knew it. How did they know it? Nowhere in Genesis is there even the merest hint of the equation: Forbidden fruit equals sin equals sex. We know it to be true because there can only be one thing so central to mankind. Sex.

The struggle for existence never gets easier. However well a species may adapt to its environment, it can never relax, because its competitors and its enemies are also adapting to their niches. Survival is a zero-sum game.

What was the secret that the serpent told Eve? That she could eat a certain fruit? Pah. That was a euphemism. The fruit was carnal knowledge and everybody from Thomas Aquinas to Milton knew it.

Just as human nature is the same everywhere, so it is recognizably the same as it was in the past. A Shakespeare play is about motives and predicaments and feelings and personalities that are instantly familiar. Falstaff’s bombast, Iago’s cunning, Leontes’s jealousy, Rosalind’s strength, and Malvolio’s embarrassment have not changed in four hundred years. Shakespeare was writing about the same human nature that we know today. Only

When I watch Anthony and Cleopatra, I am seeing a four-hundred-year-old interpretation of a two-thousand-year-old history. Yet it never even occurs to me that love was any different then from what it is now. It is not necessary to explain to me why Anthony falls under the spell of a beautiful woman. Across time just as much as across space, the fundamentals of our nature are universally and idiosyncratically human.

We are perforce in some sense constrained, goaded, or at least affected by the accumulated impact of selective decisions made over thousands of generations.

All Britons are descended from the same set of people a mere thirty generations ago.

Far from being choosy, female primates seemed to be initiators of much promiscuity. Hrdy began to suggest that there was something wrong with the theory rather than the females.

story of a philosopher who runs when a bear charges him and his friend.

It’s no good, you’ll never outrun a bear,” says the logical friend.

Free will was not created for fun; there was a reason that evolution handed our ancestors the ability to take initiatives (...) eventually to be in a better position to reproduce and rear children than human beings who do not reproduce.

Humanity is, of course, morally free to make and remake itself infinitely, but we do not do so.

We now know that Lamarckism cannot work because bodies are built from cakelike recipes, not architectural blueprints, and it is simply impossible to feed information back into the recipe by changing the cake.

You are descended not from your mother but from her ovary. Nothing that happened to her body or her mind in her life could affect your nature

Because bodies do not replicate themselves but are grown, whereas genes do replicate themselves, it inevitably follows that the body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene, rather than vice versa.