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The Red Queen
After laying our souls (and chromosomes!) bare in Genome, Ridley swiftly moves on to a topic that is variously fascinating and taboo: Sex. Every Slashdot user it seems wants more information about it. Ridley immediately tackles the Paradox of Sex: In an asexual organism, every individual of the species can create offspring. In sexual creatures (like people!), only the female can produce young. What's so great about sex then, that overcomes this obvious numerical handicap? In eleven brisk chapters, Ridley unravels the riddles with examples of how and why other species Do It (or Don't It), and what it all means.
Topics explored (though not claimed to be definitively explained) include mitochondrial DNA, dowries, the genetic foundations of harems, how males of a species could develop flagrant 'handicaps' like bright coloration or songs, monogamy, polygamy, adultery and a small species of New Zealand snail that suffers from a parasite named (I'm not making this up) Microphallus. One of the most compelling concepts is that a species' strongest competitor (and driving force behind their evolution) is their own kind, not their foes. In the end it is this argument, called The Red Queen (after a Lewis Carrol character that runs quickly but never gets ahead) that explains so much of our evolutionary hodgepodge of DNA and instinctive behaviour.
Around the world The Red Queen hustles, dissecting the environmental clues given by the mating rituals and biology of various species, asexual, sexual, heterosexual, hermaphroditic and otherwise, comparing them to Homo Sapiens, "the sexiest primate alive" (except for bonobos). As for humans, Ridley divulges how walking upright and our large brains are connected to our comparatively slow maturation, long lifespan and lack of hair. Always in the background is the unquestionable tenet: No one is descended from a celibate organism.
Ridley daringly takes on feminism and gender equality by pointing out that males and females DO differ genetically (duh!) and that in other species the effect of this difference is quite marked. Rather than degenerating into a misogynistic orgy of gender-bashing, he exposes the reasons why (among other differences) men might actually be better at reading maps and women might be more social. Both genders have to get along in order to continue the species, so understanding our differences may be a boon to all. While in the mood for controversy, Ridley delves into the reasons for the genetic-confounding phenomena of homosexuality in a species.
You don't need to have read Genome to read Red Queen, but if you have, you might find all of the puzzles fitting together into an even bigger picture, to be further sketched out in The Origins of Virtue and Nature Via Nurture. This book is not illustrated and probably won't help you get a date next weekend, but it might explain why you're instinctively attracted to those three young blondes at the bar. And why they're all more interested in the cinderblock quarterback of the football team. And despite what my inbox tells me, it has nothing to do with the size of a certain part of your anatomy, but rather the size of ... well, go read the book.
Table of Contents
- Human Nature
- The Enigma
- The Power of Parasites
- Genetic Mutiny and Gender
- The Peacock's Tale
- Polygamy and the Nature of Men
- Monogamy and the Nature of Women
- Sexing the Mind
- The Uses of Beauty
- The Intellectual Chess Game
- The Self-Domesticated Ape
You can purchase The Red Queen from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I'll assume this is some sort of dig on the idea of homosexual marriage. I'm not gay, but I'll bite.
If Evolution is true, marriage (1 Man/1 Woman) is a result of natural selection and therefore is right and good.
Wouldn't homosexuality also be the result of natural selection and therefore right and good? If it was detrimental it would have been selected away and wouldn't exist, right? This is as opposed to continuing to exist across centuries and civilizations. Bigotry on the other hand, is rapidly growing obsolete in the modern age.
If Creation is true marriage (1 Man/1 Woman) is from God and therefore is right and good.
If creation is true we've got a lot more to worry about than the proper definition of marriage. Also, the definition of right and good vary strongly across individuals despite their belief in creation. Some believe in the Bible, others the Koran, others the Torah. Some take their scripture literally, others with a grain of salt.
Marriage is a government certification that confers special privileges to certain citizens (including tax relief, coverage under health insurance, etc. etc.). I really don't give a damn about the argument of pro or anti homosexuality. If the government is going to allow marriage between a male and a female citizen, it should allow it for homosexual citizens also. What business is it of the government what gender you are? If the religious right is so disgusted by this notion that they would rather abolish government-recognized marriage, that is just fine with me...I don't think it is any of the governments business who you live/eat/sleep with.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
> The review (while otherwise good) implies that Genome predates Red Queen, when in fact the former came out in 2000 and the latter in 1995.
You're right, The Red Queen predates Genome. The Viking edition is from 1993, by the way - 10 years of scientific research have passed since then, and I would very much appreciate an updated edition taking into account the new insights gathered since then.
See this older post of mine for some remarks on Ridley's books.
By the way, I echo the recommendation -- reading this book profoundly changed how I think about evolution and genetics. The only comparably assumption-shattering biology book I can think of is Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life.
Reading Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" and Ridley's "The Red Queen" was a disturbing and exciting experience for me, because it shattered many beliefs I held about mankind and society. I have since read many more books on the subject, and here are a few I can recommend if you're interested in contemporary scientific views on evolution and related fields of study:
Matt Ridley: The Origins of Virtue (*)
Steven Pinker: How the Mind Works, The Language Instinct
Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable
Geoffrey Miller: The Mating Mind
(*) with a caveat: he lets his political views influence his writing a little too much in this one
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
Bonobos are very bisexual, have sex frequently (VERY frequently--several times a day) mostly just for pleasure, females run the show, female-female sex is very common, and men must beg or earn sexual pleasure from the females.
They are the closest animals to humans (genetically speaking) walk upright fairly often, similar size, etc.
Once you've studied bonobos for awhile, you start to get the feeling that about 99% of our sexual taboos are strictly cultural, developed over time as a function of the need for societal control, either to limit disease propagation or to assert power hierarchies, probably to keep a large pool of females available for the wealthy patriarchs.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Locusts and ants are different, as are other animals because they reach an equalibrium with their environment. This may be more of the case with animals such as deer because if they consume too many of their resources they die off because there isn't enough food to support them. Insects like locusts may consume and move, consume and move, but they have such a short life-span compared to us and compared to other animals that I think their impact is lessoned.
Humans have had a population explosion that just keeps going and going and going- eventually we will reach a critical mass and then things like the black plague and war happen. The only thing that enables this planet to sustain so many humans is our technology- maybe that is what will keep us going into the 22nd century.
Maybe your company is able to find resources where others have not, but what about resources like oil that take thousands of years to create? We will have used up all the oil in only a couple hundred years (starting around the late 1800s to the 2000s)
Maybe the Green organizations are over-hyped, but there is some credability to their claim. Also- wouldn't you rather be safe than sorry? There is no point in being wasteful. Reduce, reuse and recycle.
You never know, you know.
The problem with both Dawkins and Riley is that they don't account for the validity of intermingling the levels of analysis. Not doing so is a failure of scientific methodology. The social dimension of human behaviour is not isolatable simply by observing other species or genetic behaviour without further explanation. You can argue for 'selfish' behaviour on the genetic level, but that doesn't link it to 'selfish' behaviour on the human level without further explanation.
Somehow I doubt, rkz, that you are also Gilly Collinson from North Yorkshire who wrote this review on Amazon.co.uk over two years ago, and are just duplicating it here for the edification of us all.
Mod the parent down. Moderators, please stop smoking the crack.
this is a sig.
Calling something an "illness" is just semantics. Simply applying a pejorative term does not explain why homosexual behavior is so common, not merely in humans but in many other species. And by the way, vulnerability to real diseases, such as those caused by viruses and bacteria is influenced by genetic predisposition.
The fact that homosexuals would have self-selected themselves out of the gene pool long ago shows evolution to be false
Except that there are many, many ways in which genes that favor homsexual behavior can be maintained under natural selection:
1) Heterozygote advantage: A gene may promote homosexuality when homozygous, but confer a reproductive advantage on heterozygotes (similar to the way heterozygotes for sickle cell anemia are resistant to malaria).
2) Nepotism: Homosexuals could propagate their genes by assisting their blood relatives.
3) Sex-specific effects: A gene could, for example, confer enhanced reproductive success when present in females, but homosexual behavior when present in males, or vice versa.
4) Multi gene effects: A gene might might induce homosexual behavior when present with certain alleles of other genes, but confer enhanced reproductive success when present with different alleles.