The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

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. Brilliantly written, The Red Queen offers an extraordinary new way of interpreting the human condition and how it has evolved.

To arrive to this and other conclusions, Ridley goes a long and difficult way through biology, genetics and continents, starting with a basic question: why is there sex at all? After all, many species reproduce without it. The first three or four chapters of "The Red Queen" may be a little onerous, but apparently they are necessary to support the last ones.

This is a book about evolution with a focus on human sexuality and the human mind. Everything on humans - our bodies, our behavior towards the opposite sex, even our minds and social rules - is a direct result of a process called sexual selection that allows the reproduction of the fittest, therefore transmiting their genes to the next generations.

When answering why there is sex at all and how men and women's bodies and minds evolved in the last million years, we come to many uncomfortable truths about adultery, rape, incest and life. Why do more rich men marry beautiful women and not the other way around? Why have the attempts to sell pornogrphy to women and romantic novels to men failed? And above all this: why did evolution produce different minds in men a women?

Take all of the above and pack it with a red cover, and you have one of the most amazing readings of the year.


Superb Read   September 6, 2000
Atheen M. Wilson (Mpls, MN United States)
35 out of 40 found this review helpful

This book is absolutely filled with interesting theories on the evolution of sexual behavior and of the effects of selection preferences on the evolution of various species. I found particularly interesting the notion that gender is not a necessity for reproduction nor even necessarily a good plan for projecting one generation's genes into the future. It hardly occurs to a member of a species that places so much emphasis on sex and gender that their occurence and persistance actually need some explanaton. Ridley does this with flare, illustrating with examples from other species what is possible and mathematically what is likely to occur genetically with various approaches to reproduction. He also provides an overview of most of the theories of why gender occurs and reasons why most theories don't quite hold up when examined against what actually occurs in nature. His own theory of parasite and infectious disease resistance and an "arms race" of sorts between host and parasite seems quite plausible as an explanation for the rise of gender. He also gives a thorough account of how selection of certain noncounterfitable traits exhibiting the health of prospective mates has caused a similar Red Queen stalemate between the sexes and has led to the types of behavior seen as characteristic of male and female humans. An interesting book.


Excellent Overview of Evolutionary Psychology   January 25, 2001
E. Gartman (Rockville, MD USA)
22 out of 23 found this review helpful

Matt Ridley's Red Queen is both a terrific introduction into the burgeoning field of evolutionary psycholgy and a scientific explanation for why the sexes differ. Ridley's book is based entirely off other scientists ideas, but his great contribution is to put them all together in a cohent and readable form. Ridley is a gifted writer with a knack for making the difficult accesible. But what makes this book so wonderful is its central thesis: That human gender differences are biological, stemming from divergent interests in the way males and females in the animal world seek to reproduce. While this has been well-established in other places, what is even more interesting is Ridley's examination of human reproductive strategies. Men seek beauty and youth in women, while women seek wealth and stablity in men. Every single assertion Ridley makes is backed up by a wealth of scientific date, ranging from experiments to human history and deductive logic. The scientific rigor of this book is impressive, and mostly irrefutalble. There are other implications of this book as well. The most obvious is that it destroys environmental explantions for male-female differences, and culturally constructed views of beauty. But the implications range far beyond that, to our very perception of gender roles in society, and how we should deal with them. Finally, this book is a great introduction into evolutionary pyschology, a new field that is improving by leaps and bounds every year. Evolutionary Pschologists continue to probe into human behavior, helping us understand the biological, and immutable, sources of the human condition. We can expect even more breakthroughs in the years to come, and I certainly hope Matt Ridley chooses to write another book explaining the newest thinking.


Informative, witty and fun to read   August 23, 2004
Dennis Littrell (SoCal)
13 out of 14 found this review helpful

This is the book that first demonstrated to me the power of evolutionary psychology to help us understand ourselves. Published a year before Robert Wright's The Moral Animal, which covers much of the same territory, this is to my mind a more sophisticated and more direct exposition. Both books are characterized by a sly wit and an incisive expression, but Ridley meanders less among the relics of Freud and Darwin and is less concerned about whether we're moral or not and more concerned with what's sexy and why. He had a lot of fun with this book and it shows.

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. With the same logic, and in a larger sense, sex has evolved as a means to randomly pit many phenotypes against the environment.

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 in recent years and one that is a delight to read.


If you're deciding whether to buy this book...   November 21, 2003
David Relyea (Glendale, CA)
22 out of 23 found this review helpful

To summarize anything I might say below - this is an incredible book. Mind-blowing. If you're reading reviews (as I do) trying to find the few people who didn't love the book so you can have an "unbiased" view, very good for you. (that's how I choose books, usually) My unbiased view is this - I *very rarely* give out fives. This is one of the few books that deserves it.

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!