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The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature Paperback – April 29, 2003

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4.4 1,047 ratings

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“A terrific book, witty and lucid, and brimming with provocative conjectures.” (Wall Street Journal) from the author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller Genome

Brilliantly written, The Red Queen compels us to rethink everything from the persistence of sexism to the endurance of romantic love.

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

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Popular Highlights in this book

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Human nature is a product of culture, but culture is also a product of human nature, and both are the products of evolution.
Highlighted by 757 Kindle readers
In history and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things.
Highlighted by 704 Kindle readers
Animal altruism is a myth. Even in the most spectacular cases of selflessness it turns out that animals are serving the selfish interests of their own genes—if sometimes being careless with their bodies.
Highlighted by 649 Kindle readers

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From the Back Cover

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.

About the Author

Matt Ridley's books have sold over a million copies, been translated into 31 languages and won several awards. His books include The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist and The Evolution of Everything. His book on How Innovation Works was published in 2020, and Viral: the Search for the Origin of Covid-19, co-authored with Alina Chan, was published in 2021. He sat in the House of Lords between 2013 and 2021 and served on the science and technology select committee and the artificial intelligence select committee. He was founding chairman of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle. He created the Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal in 2010, and was a columnist for the Times 2013-2018. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in Northumberland.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0060556579
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (April 29, 2003)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780060556570
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0060556570
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.7 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 0.94 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #144,697 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #53 in Evolutionary Psychology (Books)
- #412 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)
- #3,634 in Personal Transformation Self-Help

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Matt Ridley

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Matt Ridley's books have been shortlisted for six literary awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (for Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters). His most recent book, The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture, won the award for the best science book published in 2003 from the National Academies of Science. He has been a scientist, a journalist, and a national newspaper columnist, and is the chairman of the International Centre for Life, in Newcastle, England. Matt Ridley is also a visiting professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

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C. Carlson

Interesting and Informative

Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2011

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It's been over two years since I read The Red Queen, but recently I decided I would do my part to go back and review the books I've read in order to better educate others who might be interested in them. The Red Queen was an interesting read. At times it got a little dry, but over all I found it engaging and interesting. I easily get bored if a book starts to sound too much like a doctoral thesis. This book avoids that. The dialog flows nicely, most things are explained simply in terms anyone can understand, and the material is very interesting.

Generally the topic, as far as I recall, is about the development and evolution of sex throughout the history of the world. The first few chapters were about sexual practices of non-human species; I beleive it covered some plants, but definitly it touched on sexual practices of many animals. Eventually it touched on animals more closely related to humans. Finally it covered human sexual behavior and how it relates to our evolutional history. A very interesting topic and a great read. Hope you enjoy.

-Szen

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Reinold F.

Fascinating albeit outdated and plagued with naggering errors.

Reviewed in the United States on October 9, 2021

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Trust: that is the issue. This is a good book, with very interesting and complex information that illuminates much of what we are, but although important I think is better to take it as a reference, nevertheless there are many mistakes, I am not a geneticist or biologist but I have some issues with unsupported data in the book even from the introduction. It starts with a reference of a civilization that arrived to a place thousands of years ago, searching through Wikipedia (which itself is a biased and unreliable source) I cannot find correspondence with that data. Then we have a declaration against religious people and politically correct people, in a tone that to be honest is a bit unsettling for its intolerant expression. I am neither religious nor politically correct but surely a scientist has a better way to clarify his posture without lowering himself to mock other beliefs. Besides the author although says to be against political correctness he is too a politically correct individual. Similar to the description of Californians moving to Texas, described in a New York Times article, they are conservative only by virtue of being a bit less progressives than their fellow Californian citizens of the big cities. The author will look for objective data in several topics except when we get to the topic of race he starts: he distractedly accepts there are racial differences in the chapter of beauty or in page 73 in chapter of the power of parasites, but when talking about evolutionary terms he changes his tune to something akin to "there are no differences because I say so", he closes his tender eyes to reality, documentation, papers and statistics that make him uncomfortable and we get him with the wishful thinking that somebody like me, with thousands of years of Peruvian ancestry, is closer to a man with thousands of years of ancestry in Bretagne, than to my neighbor. Without reliable data to me that posture is as wrong as a physicist declaring that the double slit experiment in the quantum scale means you always cross two doors at the same time; the reality is that my neighbor and me have traits that allows us to survive in a place where the gentleman from Bretagne probably would require a tank of oxygen, and vice versa, in Brittany I would be vulnerable to heart attacks.

According to my limited knowledge these are the mistakes I found, as you can see all outside the especiality of the author:
1- He writes twice (in page 173 and 195) that civilization in the Andes started with the "ancient" Inca empire in 15th century, this is false, the oldest city, with the modern definition of city, is Caral dated to have been founded around 3000 B.C., many empires raised and the broke into kingdoms, then a new empire surged that would break and the cycle continued, the Inca empire just happened to be the last empire in existence from an old chain of civilizations until the arrive of Europeans. He speaks of harems for powerful men in the Inca empire, for what I have read women of power had harems too, which contradicts the points explained by the author. In page 198 he will mention the Inca empire as one where men would get all the power, this is inaccurate and due that when Spaniards registered the rich and powerful people they did it following their customs: that is without registering the women. The Inca empire was a matriarchal-patriarchal society and some of those traits survive even today. And happens in another historical examples too, in page 276 the author is a bit sloppy in declaring that men and women have always the same preferences, ignoring important chapters as the Hellenistic world where the body of the male body was considered more beautiful than the female body, and were men used to initiate boys themselves in their sexual life. In page 297 the author talks about choosing partners by beauty but monarchies around the world mostly choose political bonds and convenience for the State, and before that kingdoms would marry only relatives as they had to maintain the illusion of being from a divine nature or class, or at least that seems to indicate the evidence. In page 316 he mentions the Jamesian experiment about letting a baby to grow without language to prove the natural language would be Hebrew, which is strange as in a classic piece of data, mentioned by Herodotus, a king (from Babylon if I recall well) made the same experiment with children, they "coincidently" ended talking the language of the maid that gave them food, so that would be a far earlier example.

2- In page 324 he says that an archeologist one million years in the future would call our time "the concrete age" because that would be the only thing that would remain of our civilization, which is totally mistaken; there are Roman concrete buildings that last to these days because they are a pure and still not totally replicated concrete, in our modern times our version of concrete is used with steel, and in that combination the rust deteriorates the concrete, modern concrete buildings have a lifespan of 50-100 years, far less than the million years declared by the author.

3- In the chapter about Monogamy (page 238) in reference to infidelity by gender, he quotes as an example a literary work... of course good literature resembles life but it is whatever the author chooses to write, is not life.

4- Much of the book is sourced from different studies, sadly we have to rely in the trustfulness of the source and is clear in some cases there are agendas and bias. For example in page 179 prostitution is defined according to terms of polygamy that really don't explain its nature. In page 200 he will define that measures taken by rich people were to make sure they would have many children, but poor people has many children too, at least one explanation is to compensate for high child mortality and birth issues. In page 201 he writes that serving maids in medieval Europe were a kind of harem, honestly it sounds rather like fitting reality into an ideological frame than speaking about reality itself. In page 218 the author says that women deny any attraction to nymphomania, or any visual attraction to men, is easy just to check comments about singers, famous actors, mugshots of handsome inmates and even videos of gym trainers on YouTube to notice that women can express their visual aroussement by very handsome men. In the fictional world of this book (page 218) women never seek pleasure and always look for progeny.

In the end the four stars of my rating is not due my ideological differences with the author. I am mature enough to difference between a respectable "I think this" from a dictatorial "you should think what I think." The author is in the former and he doesn't fall consciously in the latter. In part is due the mistakes I detected, they are mostly in fields outside the expertise of the author, at most I can say the rest is not that trustworthy. But mainly the rating is due the time it was written, the book is already outdated, as the statistics about choice of professions by genders in page 260, most of the sources at most are from the 90's, even before the human genome had been mapped. The last chapters are more about the subjective ideas of the writer (he explains his theories with :"to me") than hard science. It feels a bit forced because clearly they are not ideas that were developed by the author and he tries to hastily fit them in his main hypothesis of the red queen.

29 people found this helpful

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Syruptitious

This will change your perception of what you are

Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2023

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I believe that humans (and) all living things have a spiritual aspect and that we cannot fully actualize without understanding and embracing that reality. At the same time, our bodies are essentially computers programmed to do certain things until that programming is interrupted and overridden by our higher consciousness in the prefrontal cortex.

This book gives valuable insight into the hidden programming that explains a lot about our nature that may seem confounding if you do not understand the underlying causes. I think the most fascinating part for me is the section about the behavior of genes. The interaction of genes is as complex and nuanced as any interaction between humans in our society. There is deception, alliances and strategies that are truly incredible. Our outward behavior as humans is basically a manifestation of our collective gene behavior; that is until our higher consciousness intervenes.

This is an excellent compliment to "The Biology of Belief" by Bruce Lipton

7 people found this helpful

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Tony

This book has a political agenda.

Reviewed in France on August 30, 2022

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Knowing nothing about the author, after a few pages, I suspected he was a libertarian, free-market, no such thing as a society, kind of guy. After googling his name, my suspicions were confirmed. His libertarian views did not prevent him to ask (and get) billions from the State when the Northern Rock bank he was a chairman of, collapsed because of his risky business strategy.
So, get some information about the guy before you buy this book.

One person found this helpful

Hemant Bhardwaj

Wow, awesome book!

Reviewed in India on November 12, 2021

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I find the topic of 'evolution of human behavior' very fascinating, particularly evolution of sexual behavior. I used to think that various theories of physics are most fundamental, but now I am convinced that theory of evolution is most fundamental thing humans have discovered. This book is very thought provoking with great knowledge on this subject. One of my favorite line from this book is "A hen is an egg's way of making more eggs".

5 people found this helpful

YAEL

Lo amo

Reviewed in Mexico on March 25, 2019

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Es uno de mis favoritos. Llego sin fallas. Muy bonita la impresion de la portada

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D. I. Werner Eisenmenger

Sehr interessant und verständlich geschrieben, regt zum Denken an

Reviewed in Germany on September 29, 2020

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Wer sich auch nur ein wenig für die Frage "Warum sind wir Menschen, wie wir sind?" interessiert, kommt um dieses Buch nicht herum. Matt Ridley beschreibt in lockerem Plauderton - sehr fundiert - den aktuellen Stand der Forschung und stellt einige gut argumentierte Möglichkeiten vor.

Klare Kauf- und Leseempfehlung!

One person found this helpful

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Bryan

Thought Provoking

Reviewed in Canada on August 19, 2018

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An interesting and wide ranging analysis of the things that make us human, and that drive our evolution and sexuality.

One person found this helpful

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