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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.
If Evolution is true, marriage (1 Man/1 Woman) is a result of natural selection and therefore is right and good.
If Creation is true marriage (1 Man/1 Woman) is from God and therefore is right and good.
QED Marriage (1 Man/1 Woman) is right and good wherever we came from.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
This book sounds pretty interesting. I wonder if it delves into human pornography, and the fact that humans (and other animals) get excited by looking at pictures of a member of the opposite sex.
Desmond Morris has a series on TLC called The Human Animal in which he describes in termendous detail how and why humans have sex. There's even a nipple in the show! Beyond the perversion of watching it simply because it talks about sex, its really interesting.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
It has enough sex talk in it to satisfy your prurient interests. Not the gross squshy kind, but the clean, technical sex that will hit /.ers right in the honeypot.
Ooh baby... you extended my phenotype!
While I've read none of the books mentioned in the parent, if you're interested in this topic you should try The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. Wright attempts to explain human nature including sexual behaviour, monagomy, polygamy, friendship, altruism, jealousy, etc, from an evolutionary psychological perspecitive. Essential his thesis is that there is a fundamental human nature driven by our genes, and he uses this to try to explain day-to-day human experience.
All in all, it's a balanced, very interesting read.
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"The only comparably assumption-shattering biology book I can think of is Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life"
SJG is not quite so fondly thought of among evolutionary biologists (see reviews of his book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by people like John Maynard Smith).
My recommendations for related reading posted under a threat by that name.
I'll bite -- what's his theory?
AFAIK, the evolutionary origin of bipedalism is a completely unsolved problem. There have been various theories, but none of them really hold water. A popular idea for a long time was that it allowed us to have our hands free for tool use, but now we know that bipedalism evolved a million years before big brains and tool use. (Australopithecus was basically a human from the neck down, a chimp from the neck up.) It can't be explained by the ability to get your eyes high off the ground and see far away, because chimps and gorillas can stand up too when they want to look around. It's probably not efficient locomotion, because the most efficient walkers and runners are quadrupeds like dogs and horses. (There were some experiments that purported to show humans walked more efficiently than chimps, but they were flawed.)
There was also a theory by Lovejoy that bipedalism was the result of sexual selection, and maybe that's what the story is referring to. The Lovejoy theory was that females were choosing who to mate with, and males, in order to get laid, were using their hands to bring tasty food as gifts to the females. The problem with this theory is that austrolapithecines had strong sexual dimorphism -- males were about 50% bigger than females. This kind of dimorphism is typical of species where the male controls a harem, defending it against other males.
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