The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

Why sex? Surely there are features of human nature other than this one overexposed and troublesome procreative pastime: True enough, but reproduction is the sole goal for which human beings are designed;

Tags: #biology

Human nature was as carefully designed by natural selection for the use of a social, bipedal, originally African ape as human stomachs were designed for the use of an omnivorous African ape with a taste for meat

example, males usually compete for access to females, rather than vice versa. There are good evolutionary reasons for this, and there are clear evolutionary consequences, too; for instance, men are more aggressive than women.

For example, males usually compete for access to females, rather than vice versa. There are good evolutionary reasons for this, and there are clear evolutionary consequences, too; for instance, men are more aggressive than women.

Tags: #biology

Therefore, if you spot somebody with good genes, it is your inherited habit to seek to buy some of those genes; or, put more prosaically, people are attracted to people of high reproductive and genetic potential—the healthy, the fit, and the powerful

Why has that man fallen in love with that woman? Because she’s pretty. Why does pretty matter? Because human beings are a mainly monogamous species and so males are choosy about their mates (as male chimpanzees are not); prettiness is an indication of youth and health, which are indications of fertility: Why does that man care about fertility in his mate? Because if he did not, his genes would be eclipsed by those of men who did. Why does he care about that? He does not, but his genes act as if they do. Those who choose infertile mates leave no descendants. Therefore, everybody is descended from men who preferred fertile women, and every person inherits from those ancestors the same preference.

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When the land was unoccupied by animals, the first amphibian to emerge from the sea could get away with being slow, lumbering, and fishlike, for it had no enemies and no competitors. But if a fish were to take to the

Evolutionary history is no different. Progress and success are always relative: When the land was unoccupied by animals, the first amphibian to emerge from the sea could get away with being slow

When the land was unoccupied by animals, the first amphibian to emerge from the sea could get away with being slow, lumbering, and fishlike, for it had no enemies and no competitors

Every creature on earth is in a Red Queen chess tournament with its parasites (or hosts), its predators (or prey), and, above all, with its mate

The leader of the molecular biologists is Harris Bernstein of the University of Arizona. His argument is that sex was invented to repair genes

Bell reckons that being sexual was a prerequisite for being big (and therefore few), or, conversely, sex is unnecessary if you stay small

Asexual species tend to be small and live at high latitudes and high altitudes, in fresh water or disturbed ground

Tags: #evolution

Bell concluded from his exhaustive survey of sex and asex in the animal kingdom that the tangled bank was the most promising of the ecological theories for

Bell concluded from his exhaustive survey of sex and asex in the animal kingdom that the tangled bank was the most promising of the ecological theories for sex.’ Z

Because they are so short-lived compared with their hosts, parasites can be quicker to evolve and adapt. In about ten years, the genes of the AIDS virus change as much as human genes change in 10 million years

turning our fields over to monocultures of increasingly inbred strains of wheat and maize, we are inviting the very epidemics of disease that can only be fought by the pesticides we are forced to use in ever larger quantities

By turning our fields over to monocultures of increasingly inbred strains of wheat and maize, we are inviting the very epidemics of disease that can only be fought by the pesticides we are forced to use in ever larger quantities

Hamilton built a computer model of sex and disease, a slice of artificial life. It began with an imaginary population of two hundred creatures. They happened to be rather like humans—each began breeding at fourteen, continued until thirty-five or so, and had one offspring every year. But the computer then made some of them sexual—meaning two parents had to produce and rear each child— and some of them asexual: Death was random: As expected, the sexual race quickly became extinct every time they ran the computer. In a game between sex and asex, asex always won, other things being equal: ;9 Next, they introduced several species of parasites, two hundred of each, whose power depended on “virulence genes” matched by “resistance genes” in the hosts. The least resistant hosts and the least virulent parasites were killed in each generation: Now the asexual race no longer had an automatic advantage. Sex often won the game, mostly if there were lots

Hamilton built a computer model of sex and disease, a slice of artificial life. It began with an imaginary population of two hundred creatures. They happened to be rather like humans—each began breeding at fourteen, continued until thirty-five or so, and had one offspring every year. But the computer then made some of them sexual—meaning two parents had to produce and rear each child— and some of them asexual: Death was random: As expected, the sexual race quickly became extinct every time they ran the computer. In a game between sex and asex, asex always won, other things being equal: ;9 Next, they introduced several species of parasites, two hundred of each, whose power depended on “virulence genes” matched by “resistance genes” in the hosts. The least resistant hosts and the least virulent parasites were killed in each generation: Now the asexual race no longer had an automatic advantage. Sex often won the game, mostly if there were lots of genes that determined resistance and virulence in each creature

the tangled bank was right and competition between snails was the cause of sex, he would find more males in lakes than in streams because lakes are stable, crowded habitats; if the Red Queen was right, he would find more males where there were more parasites

Finding the right balance between cooperation and competition has been the goal and bane of Western politics for centuries

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Each gene is descended from a gene that unwittingly jostled to get into the next generation by whatever means was in its power. Cooperation between them is marked, but so is competition. And it is that competition that led to the invention of gender

Gender, then, was invented as a means of resolving the conflict between the cytoplasmic genes of the two parents. Rather than let such conflict destroy the offspring, a sensible agreement was reached: All the cytoplasmic genes would come from the mother, none from the father. Since this made the father ‘s gametes smaller, they could specialize in being more numerous and mobile the better to find eggs. Gender is a bureaucratic solution to an antisocial habit

To summarize the argument so far, evolution is more about reproduction of the fittest than survival of the fittest; every creature on earth is the product of a series of historical battles between parasites and hosts, between genes and other genes, between members of the same species, between members of one gender in competition for members of the other gender. Those battles include psychological ones, to manipulate and exploit other members of the species; they are never won, for success in one generation only ensures that the foes of the next generation are fitter to fight harder: Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race

Which woman would not rather be John Kennedy ‘s third wife than Bozo the Clown’s first?” said one (female) evolutionist

By I.6 million years ago, when Homo erectus was living in Africa, he was without question the most carnivorous monkey or ape the world had ever known

The gradual synonymy of sex and sin in Christendom is surely based more on the fact that sex often leads to trouble rather than that there is anything inherently sinful about sex

Monogamy, enforced by law, religion, or sanction, does seem to reduce murderous competition between men

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If war is something we inherited directly from the hostility between groups of male apes over female apes, with territory as merely a means to the end—sex—then it follows that tribal people must be going to war over women rather than territory. For a long time anthropologists insisted that war was fought over scarce material resources, in particular protein, which was often in short supply

Marriage is a child-rearing institution

Women’s bodies evolved to suit the demands of bearing and rearing children and of gathering plant food. Men’s bodies evolved to suit the demands of rising in a male hierarchy, fighting over women, and providing meat to a family

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Men look for sources that are mobile, distant, and unpredictable (usually meat), while women, burdened with children, look for sources that are static, close, and predictable (usually plants)

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This phenomenon—that people specialize in what they are good at and so create conditions that suit their genes—is known as the Baldwin effect

It would be easy to engineer a society with no sex difference in attitude between men and women: Inject all pregnant women with the right dose of hormones, and the result would be men and women with normal bodies but identical feminine brains: War, rape, boxing, car racing, pornography, and hamburgers and beer would

It would be easy to engineer a society with no sex difference in attitude between men and women: Inject all pregnant women with the right dose of hormones, and the result would be men and women with normal bodies but identical feminine brains: War, rape, boxing, car racing, pornography, and hamburgers and beer would soon be distant memories: A feminist paradise would have arrived

Women are likely to be different: Having sex with a stranger not only encumbered a Pleistocene woman with a possible pregnancy before she had won the man ‘s commitment to help rear the child, but it also exposed her to probable revenge from her husband