About the Author MATT R I D L E Y is the author of Nature Via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human; the critically acclaimed national bestseller Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters; The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation; and the New York Times Notable Book The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. His books have been short-listed for six literary awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Formerly a scientist, journalist, and a national newspaper columnist, he is a visiting professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and the chairman of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle, England: THE RED QUEEN Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature MATT RIDLEY Perennial An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers For Matthew This book was first published in Great Britain in 1993 by Penguin Books Ltd: 1t is here reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Putnam. THE RED QUEEN: Copyright © 1993 by Matt Ridley: All rights reserved: Printed in the United States of America: No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Penguin Putnam, 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014: HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use: For information please write: Special Markets Depart- ment, HarperCollins Publishers 1nc., to East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022: First Perennial edition published 2003. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ridley, Matt. The red queen : sex and the evolution of human nature / Matt Ridley.—1st Perennial ed: p: cm. 1 Originally published: London: Viking, 993 : Includes bibliographical references and index: 0 06 ISBN - -0 55 6 57-9 1: Human evolution. z. Social evolution: 3: Sex 1: Title: GN365.9•R53 2.003 -dc21 599 . 93 '8 2003 04335 6 04 05 o6 07 o8 09 RRD 12. 11 to 9 8 CONTENTS Acknowledgments ::: vii Chapter 1 ::: HUMAN NATURE ::: I Chapter 2 ::: THE•ENIGMA ::: 23 Chapter 3 ::: THE POWER OF PARASITES ::: 53 Chapter 4 ::: GENETIC MUTINY AND GENDER ::: 89 Chapter 5 ::: THE PEACOCK ' S TALE ::: 129 Chapter 6 ::: POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN ::: 171Chapter 7 ::: MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN ::: 209 Chapter 8 ::: SEXING THE MIND ::: 245 Chapter 9 ::: THE USES OF BEAUTY ::: 277 Chapter to ::: THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME ::: 307 Epilogue ::: THE SELF-DOMESTICATED APE ::: 345 Notes ::: 351 Bibliography ::: 369 Index ::: 395 . ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is crammed with original ideas—very few of them my own. Science writers become accustomed to the feeling that they are intellectual plagiarists, raiding the minds of those who are too busy to tell the world about their discoveries. There are scores of people who could have written each chapter of my book better than I. My consolation is that few could have written all the chapters. My role has been to connect the patches of others ' research togeth- er into a quilt. But I remain deeply indebted and grateful to all those whose minds I raided. I have interviewed more than sixty people in the course of researching this book and have never met with any- thing but courtesy, patience, and infectious curiosity about the world. Many became friends. I am especially grateful to those whom I interviewed repeatedly and at length until I had almost picked their minds clean: Laura Betzig, Napoleon Chagnon, Leda Cosmides, Helena Cronin, Bill Hamilton, Laurence Hurst, Bobbi Low, Andrew Pomiankowski, Don Symons, and John Tooby. Among those who agreed to interviews in person or by telephone, I would like to thank Richard Alexander, Michael Bailey, Alexandra Basolo, Graham Bell, Paul Bloom, Monique Borgehoff Mul- der, Don Brown, Jim Bull, Austin Burt, David Buss, Tim Clutton- Brock, Bruce Ellis, John Endler, Bart Gledhill, David Goldstein, Alan Grafen, Tim Guilford, David Haig, Dean Hamer, Kristen Hawkes, Elizabeth Hill, Kim Hill, Sarah Hrdy, William Irons, William James, Charles Keckler, Mark Kirkpatrick, Jochen Kumm, Curtis Lively, John Maynard Smith, Matthew Meselson, Geoffrey ::: viii ::: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Miller, Anders Moller, Atholl McLachlan, Jeremy Nathans, Magnus Nordborg, Elinor Ostrom, Sarah Otto, Kenneth Oye, Margie Profet, Tom Ray, Michael Ryan, Dev Singh, Robert Smuts, Randy Thornhill, Robert Trivers, Leigh Van Valen, Fred Whitam, George Williams, Margo Wilson, Richard Wrangham, and Marlene Zuk. My sincere thanks also to those who corresponded with me or sent me their papers and books: Christopher Badcock, Robert Foley, Stephen Frank, Valerie Grant, Toshikazu Hasegawa, Doug Jones, Egbert Leigh, Daniel Perusse, Felicia Pratto, and Edward Tenner. Other minds I raided more subtly, even surreptitiously. Among those who have given advice or helped to clear my thoughts in many conversations are Alun Anderson, Robin Baker, Horace Barlow, Jack Beckstrom, Rosa Beddington, Mark Bellis, Roger Bing- ham, Mark Boyce, John Browning, Stephen Budiansky, Edward Carr, Geoffrey Carr, Jeremy Cherfas, Alice Clarke, Nico Colchester, Charles Crawford, Francis Crick, Martin Daly, Kurt Darwin, Mari- an Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Andrew Dobson, Emma Duncan, Peter Garson, Anthony Gottlieb, John Hartung, Peter Hudson, Anya Hurlbert, Mark Flinn, Archie Fraser, Steven Gaulin, Charles Godfray, Joel Heinen, Nigella Hillgarth, Michael Kinsley, Richard Ladle, Richard Machalek, Seth Masters, Patrick McKim, Graeme Mitchison, Oliver Morton, Randolph Nesse, Paul Neuburg, Paul Newton, Linda Partridge, Marion Petrie, Steve Pinker, Mike Polioudakis, Jeanne Regalski, Peter Richerson, Mark Ridley (being mistaken for whom has been a great benefit to me), Alan Rogers, Vincent Sarich, Terry Sejnowski, Miranda Seymour, Rachel Smolk- er, Beverly Strassmann, Jeremy Taylor, Nancy Thornhill, David Wil- son, Edward Wilson, Adrian Wooldridge, and Bob Wright. Several people helped even further by reading drafts of chapters and commenting on them: Their advice was time-consum- ing to them but immensely valuable to me: Laura Betzig, Mark Boyce, Helena Cronin, Richard Dawkins, Laurence Hurst, Geoffrey Miller, and Andrew Pomiankowski. I owe a special debt to Bill Hamilton, to whom I returned again and again for inspiration at the early stages of this project: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ::: IX ::: My agents, Felicity Bryan and Peter Ginsberg, were unfail- ingly encouraging and constructive at all stages: My editors at Pen- guin and Macmillan, Ravi Mirchandani, Judith Flanders, Bill Rosen, and especially Carrie Chase, were efficient, kind, and inspired. My wife, Anya Hurlbert, read the entire book, and her advice and support throughout have been invaluable. Lastly, thanks to the red squirrel that sometimes scratched at my window while I wrote: I still don ' t know which sex it was. Chapter 1 HUMAN NATURE The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: howev- er fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything: "I wonder if all the things move along with us?" thought poor puzzled Alice: And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried, "Faster! Don't try to talk!" —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass When a surgeon cuts into a body, he knows what he will find inside. If he is seeking the patient ' s stomach, for example, he does not expect to find it in a different place in every patient. All people have stomachs, all human stomachs are roughly the same shape, and all are found in the same place. There are differences, no doubt. Some people have unhealthy stomachs; some have small stomachs; some have slightly misshapen stomachs. But the differences are tiny compared with the similarities. A vet or a butcher could teach the surgeon about a much greater variety of different stomachs: big, multichambered cow stomachs; tiny mouse stomachs; somewhat human looking pig stomachs. There is, it is safe to say, such a thing as the typical human stomach, and it is different from a non- human stomach. It is the assumption of this book that there is also, in the same way, a typical human nature. It is the aim of this book to seek it: Like the stomach surgeon, a psychiatrist can make all sorts of basic assumptions when a patient lies down on the couch. He can assume that the patient knows what it means to love, to envy, to trust, to think, to speak, to fear, to smile, to bargain, to covet, to dream, to remember, to sing, to quarrel, to lie. Even if the person were from a newly discovered continent, all sorts of assumptions about his or her mind and nature would still be valid. When, in the 1930s , contact was made with New Guinea tribes hitherto cut off from the outside world and ignorant of its existence, they were found to smile and frown as unambiguously as any Westerner, despite 100,000 years of separation since they last shared a com- ::: 4 ::: The Red Queen mon ancestor: The " smile " of a baboon is a threat; the smile of a man is a sign of pleasure: It is human nature the world over: That is not to deny the fact of culture shock. Sheeps ' eye- ball soup, a shake of the head that means yes, Western privacy, circumcision rituals, afternoon siestas, religions, languages, the dif- ference in smiling frequency between a Russian and an American waiter in a restaurant—there are myriad human particulars as well as human universals: Indeed, there is a whole discipline, cultural anthropology, that devotes itself to the study of human cultural differences. But it is easy to take for granted the bedrock of simi- larity that underlies the human race—the shared peculiarities of being human. This book is an inquiry into the nature of that human nature: Its theme is that it is impossible to understand human nature without understanding how it evolved, and it is impossible to understand how it evolved without understanding how human sexuality evolved.