Matt Ridley

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The Red Queen

TO CHOOSE

One of Charles Darwin 's more obscure ideas was that animals '

mates can act like horse breeders, consistently selecting certain types and so changing the race: This theory, known as sexual selection, was ignored for many years after Darwin 's death and has only recently come back into vogue: Its principal insight is that the goal of an animal is not just to survive but to breed. Indeed, where breeding and survival come into conflict, it is breeding that takes precedence; for example, salmon starve to death while breeding.

And breeding, in sexual species, consists of finding an appropriate partner and persuading it to part with a package of genes. This goal is so central to life that it has influenced the design not only of the body but of the psyche. Simply put, anything that increases reproductive success will spread at the expense of anything that does not—even if it threatens survival.

Sexual selection produces the appearance of purposeful

' design ' as surely as natural selection does( Just as a stag is designed by sexual selection for battle with sexual rivals and a peacock is designed for seduction, so a man 's psychology is designed to do things that put his survival at risk but increase his chances of acquiring or retaining one or more high-quality mates: Testosterone itself, the very elixir of masculinity, increases susceptibility to infectious disease. The more competitive nature of men is a consequence of sexual selection: Men have evolved to live dangerously because success in competition or battle used to lead to more or better sexual conquests and more surviving children. Women who live dangerously merely put at risk those children they already have.

Likewise, the intimate connection between female beauty and female reproductive potential (beautiful women are almost by definition young and healthy; compared with older women, they are therefore both more fertile, and have a longer reproductive life ahead of them) is a consequence of sexual selection acting on both men's psyches and women 's bodies: Each sex shapes the other.

Women have hourglass-shaped bodies because men have preferred them that way: Men have an aggressive nature because women have HUMAN NATURE

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preferred them that way (or have allowed aggressive men to defeat other men in contests over women—it amounts to the same thing).

Indeed, this book will end with the astonishing theory that the human intellect itself is a product of sexual rather than natural selection, for most evolutionary anthropologists now believe that big brains contributed to' reproductive success either by enabling men to outwit and outscheme other men (and women to outwit and outscheme other women) or because big brains were originally used to court and seduce members of the other sex.

Discovering and describing human nature and how it differs from the nature of other animals is as interesting a task as any that science has faced; it is on a par with the quest for the atom, the gene, and the origin of the universe. Yet science has consistently shied away from the task: The greatest 'experts ' our species has produced on the subject of human nature were people like Buddha and Shakespeare, not scientists or philosophers. The biologists stick to animals; those who try to cross the line (as Harvard 's Edward Wilson did in his book Sociobiology in 1975) are vilified with accusa-tions of political motives.' Meanwhile, human scientists proclaim that animals are irrelevant to the study of human beings and that there is no such thing as a universal human nature. The consequence is that science, so coldly successful at dissecting the Big Bang and DNA, has proved spectacularly inept at tackling what the philosopher David Hume called the greatest question of all: Why is human nature what it is?

Chapter 2

THE ENIGMA

Birth after birth the line unchanging runs,

And fathers live transmitted in their sons;

Each passing year beholds the unvarying kinds,

The same their manners, and the same their minds:

Till, as erelong successive buds decay,

And insect-shoals successive pass away,

Increasing wants the pregnant parent vex

With the fond wish to form a softer sex. . .

—Erasmus Darwin, ' The Temple of Nature'

Zog the Martian steered her craft carefully into its new orbit and prepared to reenter the hole in the back of the planet, the one that had never been seen from Earth: She had done it many times before and was not so much nervous as impatient to be home. It had been a long stay on Earth, longer than most Martians made, and she looked forward to a long argon bath and a glass of cold chlorine. It would be good to see her colleagues again. And her children. And her husband—she caught herself and laughed. She had been on Earth so long she had even begun to think like an earthling. Husband indeed! Every Martian knew that no Martian had a husband.

There was no such thing as sex on Mars. Zog thought with pride of the report in her knapsack: ' Life on Earth: The Reproduction Enigma Solved. ' It was the finest thing she had ever done; promotion could not be denied her now, whatever Big Zag said.

A week later, Big Zag opened the door of the Earthstudy Inc. committee room and asked the secretary to send Zog in: Zog entered and sat in the seat assigned to her: Big Zag avoided her eyes as she cleared her throat and began.

' Zog, this committee has read your report carefully, and we are all, I think I can say, impressed with its thoroughness. You have certainly made an exhaustive survey of reproduction on Earth.

Moreover, with the possible exception of Miss Zeeg here, we are all agreed that you have made an