The Red Queen
Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
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4.0 • 37 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“A terrific book, witty and lucid, and brimming with provocative conjectures.” (Wall Street Journal) from the author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller Genome
Brilliantly written, The Red Queen compels us to rethink everything from the persistence of sexism to the endurance of romantic love.
Referring to Lewis Carroll's Red Queen from Through the Looking-Glass, a character who has to keep running to stay in the same place, Matt Ridley demonstrates why sex is humanity's best strategy for outwitting its constantly mutating internal predators. The Red Queen answers dozens of other riddles of human nature and culture—including why men propose marriage, the method behind our maddening notions of beauty, and the disquieting fact that a woman is more likely to conceive a child by an adulterous lover than by her husband. The Red Queen offers an extraordinary new way of interpreting the human condition and how it has evolved.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Why do we have sex? One of the main biological reasons, contends Ridley, is to combat disease. By constantly combining and recombining genes every generation, people ``keep their genes one step ahead of their parasites,'' thereby strengthening resistance to bacteria and viruses that cause deadly diseases or epidemics. Called the ``Red Queen Theory'' by biologists after the chess piece in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass which runs but stays in the same place, this hypothesis is just one of the controversial ideas put forth in this witty, elegantly written inquiry. Ridley, a London-based science writer and a former editor of the Economist , argues that men are polygamous for the obvious reason that whichever gender has to spend the most time and energy creating and rearing offspring tends to avoid extra mating. Women, though far less interested in multiple partners, will commit adultery if stuck with a mediocre mate. In Ridley's not wholly convincing conclusion, even human intellect is chalked up to sex: virtuosity, individuality, inventiveness and related traits are what make people sexually attractive. Photos. BOMC and QPB alternates.
