The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley

Summary

Matt Ridley’s first book on biology and natural selection, full of logical flaws and sloppy arguments. Read his much better Genome instead.

Key Takeaways

• Time always erodes advantage.
• The Red Queen: the faster you run, the more the world moves with you and the less you make progress. All progress is relative.
• Sex is recombination plus outcrossing.
• The struggle for existence never gets easier. Success only makes one species a more tempting target for a rival species.
• Parasites are deadlier than predators.
• Parasites and their hosts are locked in a close evolutionary embrace: advantages are temporary and swing between the two parties.
• Evolution is more about reproduction of the fittest than survival of the fittest.
• People cannot be adapted to the present or the future; they can only be adapted to the past.
• Human institutions cannot be understood without understanding their internal politics.
• Baldwin effect: people specialize in what they are good at and so create conditions that suit their genes.
• Learning implies plasticity, whereas instinct implies preparedness.

What I got out of it

This month I read all of Matt Ridley’s books in chronological order, starting with this one. 

The Red Queen served as a nice starting point into the world of biology and natural selection…but ultimately taught me little else than:

• The Red Queen: all progress is relative.
• Parasites are deadlier than predators.
• Baldwin effect: people specialize in what they are good at and so create conditions that suit their genes.

All 3 of these return in Ridley’s later works. Together with Ridley’s flawed logic, assumptions and manipulative writing style, I can only say: skip this book and read his much better Genome instead.

Summary Notes

Human Nature

Implications of sex for human nature:

• The uniqueness of the individual.
• The basic asymmetry of gender leads to natures that suit the particular role of each gender. For instance, men are more aggressive than women.
• Every other human being alive today is a potential source of genes for your children. And we are descended from only those people who sought the best genes, a habit we inherited from them. Therefore, people are attracted to people of high reproductive and genetic potential—the healthy, the fit, and the powerful.

Adaptationist: somebody who believes that animals and plants, their body parts and their behaviors, consist largely of designs to solve particular problems.

Time always erodes advantage: every invention sooner or later leads to a counterinvention. 

Progress and success are always relative: when the land was unoccupied by animals, the first amphibian to emerge from the sea could get away with being slow, lumbering, and fishlike, for it had no enemies and no competitors.

This concept, that all progress is relative, has come to be known in biology by the name of the Red Queen: the faster you run, the more the world moves with you and the less you make progress. 

In the world of the Red Queen, any evolutionary progress will be relative as long as your foe is animate and depends heavily on you or suffers heavily if you thrive.

The Red Queen will be especially hard at work among predators and their prey, parasites and their hosts, and males and females of the same species.

The Enigma 

What is the purpose of sex? Why must a baby be the product of two people? Why not three, or one? Need there be a reason at all?

Chunks of one set are swapped with chunks of the other in a procedure called “recombination.”

One whole set is then passed on to the offspring to be married with a set from the other parent—a procedure known as “outcrossing.”

Sex is recombination plus outcrossing; this mixing of genes is its principal feature. The consequence is that the baby gets a thorough mixture of its four grandparents’ genes (because of recombination) and its two parents’ genes (because of outcrossing). Between them, recombination and outcrossing are the essential procedures of sex. Everything else about it—gender, mate choice, incest avoidance, polygamy, love, jealousy—are ways of doing outcrossing and recombination more effectively or carefully.

Darwin’s ideas were later fused with the discoveries of Gregor Mendel, who had proved that heritable features came in discrete packages, which became known as genes, forming a theory that was able to explain how new mutations in genes spread through a whole species.

But when the fittest are struggling to survive, with whom are they competing? With other members of their species or with members of other species?

Almost all biologists agreed that no creature could ever evolve the ability to help its species at the expense of itself. Only when the two interests coincided would it act selflessly.

Where selfishness brings higher rewards than altruism, selfish individuals leave more descendants, so altruists inevitably become extinct. But where altruists help their relatives, they are helping those who share some of their genes, including whatever genes had caused them to be altruistic. So without any conscious intention on the part of individuals, such genes spread.

For many generations in a row water fleas are asexual: 

• They are all female, they give birth to other females, they never mate. 
• Then as the pond fills up with water fleas, some start to give birth to males, which mate with other females to produce “winter” eggs that lie on the bottom of the pond and regenerate when the pond is flooded again. 
• Water fleas can turn sex on and off again, which seems to prove that it has some immediate purpose beyond helping evolution to happen. 
• It is worth an individual water flea’s while to have sex at least in certain seasons.

Every gene normally consists of a strand of DNA and its complementary copy closely entwined in the famous double helix. Special enzymes move up and down the strands, and where they find a break, repair it by reference to the complementary strand. DNA is continually being damaged by sunlight and chemicals. If it were not for the repair enzymes, it would quite quickly become meaningless gobbledygook.

The Power of Parasites 

Sex gives variety, so sex makes a few of your offspring exceptional and a few abysmal, whereas asex makes them all average.

He found exactly the opposite. Asexual species tend to be small and live at high latitudes and high altitudes, in fresh water or disturbed ground. They live in unsaturated habitats where harsh, unpredictable conditions keep populations from reaching full capacity. Indeed, even the association between sex and hard times in aphids and rotifers turns out to be a myth. Aphids and monogonont rotifers both turn sexual not when winter or drought threaten but when overcrowding affects the food supply. 

Lottery models predict that sex should be most common where in fact it is rarest—among highly fecund, small creatures in changeable environments. On the contrary, here sex is the exception; but in big, long-lived, slow-breeding creatures in stable environments sex is the rule: In a saturated economy, it pays to diversify.

The fallacy of affirming the consequent: Because sprinklers can wet the drive does not prove that they did wet the drive. Because the tangled bank is consistent with the facts does not prove it is the cause of the facts.

Huge false assumption lies at the core of most popular treatments of evolution. The old concept of the ladder of progress still lingers on in the form of a teleology: Evolution is good for species, and so they strive to make it go faster. Yet it is stasis, not change, that is the hallmark of evolution.

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. Success only makes one species a more tempting target for a rival species.

Red Queen theories hold that the world is competitive to the death. It does keep changing. But did we not just hear that species are static for many generations and do not change? The point about the Red Queen is that she runs but stays in the same place. The world keeps coming back to where it started; there is change but not progress.

Sex, according to the Red Queen theory, has nothing to do with adapting to the inanimate world—becoming bigger or better camouflaged or more tolerant of cold or better at flying—but is all about combating the enemy that fights back.

Parasites have a deadlier effect than predators for two reasons:

1. There are more of them.
2. The second reason, which is the cause of the first, is that parasites are usually smaller than their hosts, while predators are usually larger. This means that the parasites live shorter lives and pass through more generations in a given time than their hosts. As a consequence, they can multiply faster than their hosts and control or reduce the host population: The predator merely follows the abundance of its prey.

Parasites and their hosts are locked in a close evolutionary embrace: The more successful the parasite’s attack, the more the host’s chances of survival will depend on whether it can invent a defense. The better the host defends, the more natural selection will promote the parasites that can overcome the defense. So the advantage will always be swinging from one to the other: The more dire the emergency for one, the better it will fight: This is truly the world of the Red Queen, where you never win, you only gain a temporary respite.

Three ways for animals to defend their bodies against parasites:

• Grow and divide fast enough to leave them behind.
• Sex. 
• An immune system, used only by the descendants of reptiles. 
• Plants and many insects and amphibians have an additional method: chemical defense.They produce chemicals that are toxic to their pests.

Antibiotics are chemicals produced naturally by fungi to kill their rivals: bacteria. But when man began to use antibiotics, he found that, with disappointing speed, the bacteria were evolving the ability to resist the antibiotics.

The longer your generation time, the more genetic mixing you need to combat your parasites.

Genetic Mutiny and Gender 

Society is not all cooperation; a measure of competitive free enterprise is inevitable. If a gene has the effect of enhancing the survival of the body it inhabits but prevents that body from breeding or is never itself transmitted through breeding, then that gene will by definition become extinct and its effect will disappear.

From the point of view of an individual gene, sex is a way to spread laterally as well as vertically: If a gene were able to make its owner-vehicle have sex it would have done something to its own advantage, even if it were to the disadvantage of the individual: Just as the rabies virus makes the dog want to bite anything, thus subverting the dog to its own purpose of spreading to another dog, so a gene might make its owner have sex just to get into another lineage.

Not all animals have sex chromosomes and there are at least three better ways to determine your gender:

• For sedentary creatures, is to choose the gender appropriate to your sexual opportunities. 
• Leave it to the environment. In some fish, shrimp, and reptiles, gender is determined by the temperature at which the egg is incubated.
• For the mother to choose the sex of each child. One way of achieving this is peculiar to monogonont rotifers, bees, and wasps: Their eggs become female only if fertilized: Unfertilized eggs hatch into males.

This is the theory of sex allocation: Animals choose the appropriate gender for their circumstances unless forced to rely on the genetic lottery of sex chromosomes: But in recent years biologists have begun to realize that the genetic lottery of sex chromosomes is not incompatible with sex allocation.

Trivers-Willard effect, known in the trade as a local-resource competition model. 

There are many well-established natural factors that bias the sex ratio of human offspring, proving that it is at least possible. The most famous is the returning-soldier effect. 

• Valerie Grant’s theory suggests a hormonal explanation for the returning-soldier effect: that during wars women adopt more dominant roles, which affects their hormone levels and their tendency to have sons.
• A hormone theory would tackle one of the most persistent objections to the Trivers-Willard theory: that there seems to be no genetic control of the sex ratio.

The Peacock’s Tale 

Sex is merely a genetic joint venture. We are highly selective and it is a complicated, nonrandom business.

The urge to have sex is in us because we are all descended from people who had an urge to have sex with each other; those that felt no urge left behind no descendants. 

• The goal for every female animal is to find a mate with sufficient genetic quality to make a good husband, a good father, or a good sire. 
• The goal for every male animal is often to find as many wives as possible and sometimes to find good mothers and dams, only rarely to find good wives.

The sex that invests most in rearing the young—by carrying a fetus for nine months in its belly, for example—is the sex that makes the least profit from an extra mating: The sex that invests the least has time to spare to seek other mates. Therefore, males invest less and seek quantity of mates, while females invest more and seek quality of mates.

The problem of greatest choosiness in the species where choice least matters reappears: The “lek paradox.” It is the hurdle that all modern theories of sexual selection attempt to leap.

Polygamy and the Nature of Men 

To summarize the argument so far: evolution is more about reproduction of the fittest than survival of the fittest.

The four commandments of mating system theory: 

1. If females do better by choosing monogamous and faithful males, monogamy will result…
2. Unless men can coerce them. 
3. If females do no worse by choosing already-mated males, polygamy will result…
4. Unless already-mated females can prevent their males from mating again, in which case monogamy will result.
5. The surprising conclusion of game theory is that males, despite their active role in seduction, may be largely passive spectators at their marital fate.

People cannot be adapted to the present or the future; they can only be adapted to the past.

Human institutions cannot be understood without understanding their internal politics.

All six of the early emperors were monogamously married. They always raised one mate above all the others as a “queen.” This is characteristic of human polygamous societies: Wherever there are harems, there is a senior wife, who is treated differently from the others: She is usually noble-born, and crucially, she alone is allowed to bear legitimate heirs.

Monogamy and the Nature of Women 

The social pattern of female monkeys and apes is determined by the distribution of their food, while the social pattern of males is determined by the distribution of females. Thus:

• Female orangutans choose to live alone in strict territories, the better to exploit their scarce food resources. 
• Males also live alone and try to monopolize the territories of several females: The females that live within his territory expect their “husband” to come rushing to their aid if another male appears.

The chimpanzee has further refined the anti-infanticide strategy by inventing a different social system: 

• Because they eat scattered but abundant food such as fruit and spend more time on the ground and in the open, chimps live in larger groups (a big group has more pairs of eyes than a small group) that regularly fragment into smaller groups before coming back together. 
• These “fission-fusion” groups are too large and too flexible for a single male to dominate. 
• The way to the top of the political tree for a male chimp is by building alliances with other males, and chimp troops contain many males. 
• So a female is now accompanied by many dangerous stepfathers. Her solution is to share her sexual favors more widely with the effect that all the stepfathers might be the father. 
• As a result, there is only one circumstance in which a male chimp can be certain an infant he meets is not his: when he has never seen the female before.

Compared to our ape cousins, we have somehow reinvented monogamy and paternal care without losing the habit of living in large multimale groups: Like gibbons, men marry women singly and help them to rear their young, confident of paternity, but like chimpanzees, those women live in societies where they have continual contact with other men: There is no parallel for this among apes.

Zoologists have long known that most mammals are polygamous and most birds are monogamous. 

• They put this down to the fact that the laying of eggs gives male birds a much earlier opportunity to help rear his children than a male mammal ever has. 
• In a mammal, by contrast, there is not much he can do to help even if wants to: He can feed his wife while she is pregnant and thereby contribute to the growth of the fetus, and he can carry the baby about when it is born or bring it food when it is weaned, but he cannot carry a fetus in his belly or feed it milk when it is born. 
• The male is often better off expending his energy on an attempt to be a polygamist. 
• Only when opportunities for further mating are few and his presence increases the baby’s safety—as in gibbons—will he stay.

Women’s genes seem to have gone to inordinate lengths to conceal the moment of ovulation: With concealed ovulation came continual sexual interest.

Compared with many animals, we are astonishingly hooked on copulation.

In more stratified societies the poor often favor their daughters over their sons. This is not because of certainty of paternity but because poor daughters are more likely to breed than poor sons. 

But at the top of society, the opposite prejudice prevailed:

• Medieval lords banished many of their daughters to nunneries.
• Rich men have always favored their sons and often just one of them. A wealthy or powerful father, by leaving his status or the means to achieve it to his sons, is leaving them the wherewithal to become successful adulterers with many bastard sons. 

To acquire and maintain wealth through generations: 

• Marriage. Marrying an heiress was always the quickest way to wealth.
• To keep marriage within the family, practiced commonly among slave-owning dynasties in the American South.
  • Wealth concentration works better for land, whose value depends on its scarcity, than for business fortunes, which are made and lost in many families in parallel.

Deep in the mind of the modern man is a simple male hunter-gatherer rule: Strive to acquire power and use it to lure women who will bear heirs; strive to acquire wealth and use it to buy other men’s wives who will bear bastards.

Deep in the mind of a modern woman is the same basic hunter-gatherer calculator: Strive to acquire a provider husband who will invest food and care in your children; strive to find a lover who can give those children first-class genes. Only if she is very lucky will they be the same man.

Sexing The Mind 

Men and women have different bodies and minds as a result of evolution: 

• Women’s bodies evolved to suit the demands of bearing and rearing children and of gathering plant food. 
• Men’s bodies evolved to suit the demands of rising in a male hierarchy, fighting over women, and providing meat to a family.

Three reasons why evolution produced different mentalities in men and women:

1. Men and women are mammals, and all mammals show sexual differences in behavior.
2. Men and women are apes, and in all apes there are great rewards for males that show aggression toward other males, for males that seek mating opportunities, and for females that pay close attention to their babies. 
3. Men and women are human beings, and human beings are mammals with one highly unusual characteristic: a sexual division of labor.

4 mental features that are – persistently in scientific tests – different between men and women: 

1. Girls are better at verbal tasks.
2. Boys are better at mathematical tasks.
3. Boys are more aggressive. 
4. Boys are better at some visuo-spatial tasks and girls at others.
   1. Put crudely, men are better at reading a map and women are better judges of character and mood—on average.

Baldwin effect: people specialize in what they are good at and so create conditions that suit their genes.

Nurture always reinforces nature; it rarely fights it.

Testosterone is an ancient chemical that determines aggressiveness so exactly that in birds with reversed sex roles, such as phalaropes and in female-dominated hyena clans, it is the females that have higher levels of testosterone in the blood. 

Testosterone masculinizes the body from the testicles at puberty, whatever its womb experience. But the mind is immune to testosterone unless it was exposed to a sufficient concentration (relative to female hormones) in the womb.

Fed on identical diets, two genetically different men will not grow to the same height: Fed on different diets, two identical twins will grow to different heights. Nature is the length of the rectangle, nurture the width. There can be no rectangle without both: The genes for height are really only genes for responding to diet by growing.

While women pay attention to cues of wealth and power, men pay attention to cues of health and youth.

Visual images of the partner(s) were more important for men than touching, the partner’s response, or any feelings and emotions: The reverse was true of women, who were more likely to focus on their own responses and less likely to focus on the partner.

Every other study of sexual fantasy has concluded that:

• Male sexual fantasies tend to be more ubiquitous, frequent, visual, specifically sexual, promiscuous, and active.
• Female sexual fantasies tend to be more contextual, emotive, intimate, and passive.

The Uses of Beauty 

The instinct not to mate with childhood companions is nature, but the features by which you recognize them are nurture.

Ever since the work of Nikolaas Tinbergen and Peter Marler in the 1960s, it has been well known that animals do not learn anything and everything; they learn what their brains “want” to learn. Men are instinctively attracted to women thanks to the inter-action of their genes and hormones, but that tendency is much influenced in a critical period by role models, peer pressure, and free will: There is learning, but there are predispositions.

Within reason, a man will find almost any weight of a woman attractive as long as her waist is much thinner than her hips.

What draws women to certain men? Male handsomeness is affected by the same trinity as female beauty—face, youth, and figure. But in study after study, women consistently agree that these factors matter less than personality and status. Men consistently place physical features above personality and status when considering women; women do not when considering men. The single exception is height: Tall men are universally considered more attractive by women than short men.

Whatever determines sexual attraction, the Red Queen is at work: in each generation women became that little bit more beautiful and men that little bit more dominant. But their rivals did, being descendants of the same successful couples. So standards rose, too.

The depressing part of Darwin’s insight is that it shows how beauty cannot exist without ugliness: all people are always looking for greater beauty or handsomeness than they find around them.

The Intellectual Chess Game 

Learning implies plasticity, whereas instinct implies preparedness.

Instincts combine with learning. None of our instincts is inevitable; none is insuperable. Morality is never based upon nature. “Thou shalt not kill” is not a gentle reminder but a fierce injunction to men to overcome any instincts they may have or face punishment.

Neoteny: the retention of juvenile features into adult life.

If you want to understand human motives, read Proust or Trollope or Tom Wolfe, not Freud or Piaget or Skinner. “Our intuitive commonsense psychology far surpasses any scientific psychology in scope and accuracy” – Don Symons. Great literary minds are, almost by definition, great mind-reading minds: Shakespeare was a far better psychologist than Freud, and Jane Austen a far better sociologist than Durkheim