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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.
What's so great about sex then, that overcomes this obvious numerical handicap?
;)
If you don't know, you're probably too young for me to explain it to you!
My journal has hot
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
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.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
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
There's a trilogy ("Titan","Wizard","Demon") by (um), John Varley that explores the concept of a group of women deciding to procreate through artifical insemention.
If you're looking for a "today" example, there is a group of lizards that reproduce through parthenogesis that live in Arizona.
Karma: Food Fight (Mostly affected by Date Plate).
Yes, I read 1984 too.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
...so that when I read "In an asexual organism I don't leave out an "ni", then procede to try to perform one myself.
males and females DO differ genetically
It has been noted that the difference between the XX and XY chromosomes in the human males and females amounts to about 3% of genetic material.
Note also that in general the human species only differs about 3% from chimpanzies.
From this some have inferred that a human male is more similar to a male chimpanzee than to a human female.
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!
The Red Queen - named after a theory which is itself named for the 'Alice' character, who must run as fast as she can simply to keep pace with the world around her - fascinated from beginning to end. Looking at the evolution of sex, it is filled with intriguing facts, remarkable examples, and frequently alarming revelations. From why the peacock has that remarkable tail (it's probably to do with sexy sons) to why polygamy benefits females rather than males, the book is a real eye-opener. Once you've learned the secret of the lek, the local disco will never seem the same again. And, given that a man's testicular size is evidence that neither he nor his partner evolved for true monogamy, you may not find this book terribly reassuring. Polygyny, polyandry, incest, infanticide, and group-bonking bonobos: it may leave you thinking that, in comparison to even some of our closest relatives, we humans have very conservative sex lives indeed. And we may only have started doing it at all so that we don't fall prey to parasites! A great read, and real incentive to read anything else available by Matt Ridley.
There is no god
There's an interesting video interview with Matt Ridley where he talks about his latest book 'Nature via Nurture' on edge.org http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ridley03/ridley_in dex.html
Is this where the "Red Queen" in resident evil got her name?
C:\earth\humans\del *.m0ronz
What you postulate would be a step backwards. Nature has tried that and found it wanting.
Like a big parking lot, a barren desert, or one hell of an ocean, I'm not sure which.
However the last is unlikely IMHO.
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
//Red Queen Reference from Resident Evil//
/mod_up
Just a side note, the red queen was added in the movie and is not featured in the PS or GC consoles.
Maybe you mean Brave new world?
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
I'm thinking of the point in the book where Black (? -- is that his name? it's been a while) argues that Party scientists will eventually do away with sex as a means of reproduction. Sex and love are used as metaphors for rebellion.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
i'm really not sure what to make of your sig
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Buy.com is the same price, only with lower shipping costs.
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.
Smith. Winston Smith. But yes, I remember. Sorry for doubting you :)
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
$9.99 Spanking new from Overstock.com, if you really want to pinch ze pennies. Cheapskate!
this is a great book. especially interesting is the part about how women choose mates. it talks about how a survey in the UK revealed that women with extra-marital affairs are actually more likely to conceive on the days they sleep with their lovers.
basically, women choose a husband based on his abilities as a provider. but they frequently choose a sex partner based on his physical attributes. the idea is that their offspring will have great physical attributes, but will be raised (unwittingly) by the nice-guy, caretaker husband. doesn't make as much sense now with paternity testing, but interesting nonetheless.
another cool part is how ridley explains the promiscuous history of men. the idea that men lust after hordes of young (even underage) women is frowned upon by society, but makes perfect evolutionary sense considering the males' goals-- he is looking to fertilize as many women as possible, preferrably young women who are at the height of their fertility.
I think everyone should read this book. the insight into human relationships is immense.
No, you'd have to directly inject the genes of one egg into another--insemination is just a turkey baster. What happens in the books? I think earthworms are the best example of what I'm talking about today. They have both male and female organs, and just trade.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
It's the division. You can have something like earthworms where they fuck each other and both have kids.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Bonobos are probably the most sexual primates. They use sex the same way we shake hands. Females practice "GG (genital-to-genital) rubbing" with each other as way of strengthing interpersonal bonds (they have *enlarged* equipment). Also, they are the only other primates (i think) besides humans that practice face-to-face sex on a somewhat consistent basis.
Unfortunately, their native habitat is being destroyed and they are endangered. The parent post is totally correct in saying they are very close to us genetically; and we've still got a long ways to go until we are like them sexually:) here's an interesting link.
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.
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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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.
Apologies in advance for the yucky HTML that LaTeX2HTML produced in those days. If I can find the original source, I'll see if I can generate a usable PDF.
(And let me fix a few of the broken links in that before I hit the submit button).
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Disease and parasites can drive populations in bad directions solely for the infection resistance that mutations causing cells to present different markers and the like can bring.
It's always a trite example, but the bad recessive disorder sickle-cell anemia confers resistance to the malaria parasite if you have inherited only one copy of the gene, but deformed blood cells that aren't as efficient if you get two copies.
Some have said it's the same sort of story with Tay-Sachs and tuberculosis, but the jury's still out on whether there's been enough time for the mutation to become that prevalent - I'm sure there will be a few re-estimations of just how fast some mutations occur and spread in future, though, so it remains within the realm of possibility.
You have to wonder what, if anything, the Black Plague might have done to us.
Or computers, for that matter :)
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
(a) Millions of seahorses around the world are reading this and saying "what are we, chopped liver"?
(b) Saying "only the female can produce young" is a bit moronic anyway when you were just talking about asexual reproduction, where one thing really can produce young. The whole point of sexual reproduction is that neither can produce young alone.
It is true that in most species the female body has a much more significant role as a host of the parasitic new thing that is created when the egg is fertilized.
Liberty uber alles.