Thanks to Matt Ridley, I can see that the political fight brewing between the USA and Mexico looks like it relates to The Red Queen Principle.
“Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race.”
And how!
It took scientific journalist Matt Ridley 174 pages to reach this stunning sentence in his “The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature,” published in 1993 and named after The Red Queen Principle. And it looks like he is just warming up. An earlier part of the paragraph runs:
“To summarize the argument so far, evolution is more about reproduction of the fittest than survival of the the fittest; every creature on earth is the product of a a series of historical battles between parasites and host, between genes and other genes, between members of the same species, between members of on gender in competition of members of the other genders. Those battles include psychological ones, to manipulates and exploits 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. . .”
To all of that I say: Wonderfully, deliciously, intriguingly eye-opening.
To all of that I say: What the fuck is he talking about?
Here in lies my own Sisyphean-Red Queen race experience while reading “The Red Queen.” I am mesmerized by Ridley’s provocative, brilliant, witty writing. I am grateful for endless gobs of insightful conjectures on topics dear to my heart (namely the nature of evolution and the evolution of human nature), but at the same time I really can’t say I have clear understanding of what Ridley is on about.
For example, I don’t have a good base in biology, so I’m not even sure what the whole DNA thing is about (Double Helix HUH?) and I really don’t understand what Ridley means when he says sex is about “mixing genes” and not rolling around in the sack. And I’m certainly can’t follow all of his witty examples based on gobs of to try to answer the question relating to the dilemma of why species have sex at all. (Apparently, it makes a lot less sense than I had assumed. Many creatures have only females and they do just fine.)
While utterly confused, I do find Ridley highly engaging — highly — and so I reread every two pages, reading about three pages a day, which means I’m advancing at about the rate of one page a day, which is why it has taken me 173 days to get this far. But I’m going to keep on going. Why?
Because I believe that Ridley’s fundamental outlook — which he admits to culling and combining from scores of the brightest scientific minds — is dead on. He believes that humans are more alike than different (by a long shot) and he wants to understand these similarities (e.g. human nature), and he thinks this has everything to do with sex.
Halfway through this provocative, dumbfounding book I think I’m starting to hit pay dirt. On page 175 of “The Red Queen” Ridley writes that, “There is no nature that exists devoid of nurture; there is no nurture that develops without nature.” However, he goes on to note that:
“The study of human beings remained resolutely unreformed by these idea until a few years ago. Even now, most anthropologists and social scientists are firmly committed to the view that evolution has nothing to tell them. Human bodies are products of natural selection; but human minds and human behavior are produces of ‘culture,’ and human culture does not reflect human nature, but the reverse. This restricts social scientists to investigating only differences between cultures and between individuals — and to exaggerating them. Yet what is most interesting to me about human beings is the things that are the same, not what is different — things like grammatical language, hierarchy, romantic love, sexual jealousy, long-term bongs between the genders (‘marriage,’ in a sense). These are trainable instincts peculiar to our species and are just as surely the products of evolution as eyes and thumbs.”
See what I mean? If you are intrigued by the theories of evolution and ideas regarding human nature, surely you will think: “Wow! That is wonderfully, deliciously eye-opening!” And also, if you are as dense as me: “What the fuck is Ridley talking about?”
I’ll can’t wait to see what comes next. I know I won’t understand it, but it promises to be intriguing. The following subhead reads: “The Point of Marriage.”