The Red Queen Quotes

“Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“Sex is not about reproduc-tion, gender is not about males and females, courtship is not aboutpersuasion, fashion is not about beauty, and love is not about affec-tion. Below the surface of every banality and cliche there lies irony,cynicism, and profundity.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“Half the ideas in this book are probably wrong.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“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. Why is that man a slave to his genes? He is not. He has free will. But you just said he’s in love because it is good for his genes. He’s free to ignore the dictates of his genes. Why do his genes want to get together with her genes anyway? Because that’s the only way they can get into the next generation; human beings have two sexes that must breed by mixing their genes. Why do human beings have two sexes? Because in mobile animals hermaphrodites are less good at doing two things at once than males and females are at each doing his or her own thing. Therefore, ancestral hermaphroditic animals were outcompeted by ancestral sexed animals.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“There is no nature that exists devoid of nurture; there is no nurture that develops without nature. To say otherwise is like saying that the area of a field is determined by its length but not its width. Every behavior is the product of an instinct trained by experience.

The study of human beings remained resolutely unreformed by these ideas 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 "culture," and human culture does not reflect human nature, but the reverse. This restricts social scientists to investigation 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 out species and are just as surely the products of evolution as eyes and thumbs.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“Genes are biochemical recipes written in a four-letter alphabet called DNA.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“time always erodes advantage.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“people are attracted to people of high reproductive and genetic potential—the healthy, the fit, and the powerful.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“A four-letter alphabet called DNA.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“Anaxagoras’ belief that lying on the right side during sex would produce a boy was so influential that centuries later some French aristocrats had their left testicles amputated.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“I don’t have to,” replies the philosopher. “I only have to outrun you.”)”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“Nature is the length of the rectangle, nurture the width. There can be no rectangle without both.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“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, lumbering, and fish-like, for it had no enemies and no competitors. But if a fish were to take to the land today, it would be gobbled up by a passing fox as surely as a Mongol horde would be wiped out by machine guns. 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.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“The struggle for existence never gets easier. However well a species may adapt to its environment, it can never relax, because its competitors and its enemies are also adapting to their niches. Survival is a zero-sum game.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“What was the secret that the serpent told Eve? That she could eat a certain fruit? Pah. That was a euphemism. The fruit was carnal knowledge and everybody from Thomas Aquinas to Milton knew it.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“What was the secret that the serpent told Eve? That she could eat a certain fruit? Pah. That was a euphemism. The fruit was carnal knowledge, and everybody from Thomas Aquinas to Milton knew it. How did they know it? Nowhere in Genesis is there even the merest hint of the equation: Forbidden fruit equals sin equals sex. We know it to be true because there can only be one thing so central to mankind. Sex.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“Humanity is, of course, morally free to make and remake itself infinitely, but we do not do so.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“Mankind is a self-domesticated animal; a mammal; an ape; a social ape; an ape in which the male takes the iniative in courtship and females usually leave the society of their birth; an ape in which men are predators, women herbivorous foragers; an ape in which males are relatively hierarchical, females relatively egalitarian; an ape in which males contribute unusually large amounts of investment in the upbringing of their offspring by provisioning their mates and their children with food, protection, and company; an ape in which monogamous pair bonds are the rule but many males have affairs and occasional males achieve polygamy; an ape in which females mated to low-ranking males often cuckold their husbands in order to gain access to the genes of higher-ranking males; an ape that has been subject to unusually intense mutual sexual selection so that many of the features of the female body (lips, breasts, waists) and the mind of both sexes (songs, competitive ambition, status seeking) are designed for use in competition for mates; an ape that has developed an extraordinary range of new instincts to learn by association, to communicate by speech, and to pass on traditions. But still an ape.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“When I watch Anthony and Cleopatra, I am seeing a four-hundred-year-old interpretation of a two-thousand-year-old history. Yet it never even occurs to me that love was any different then from what it is now. It is not necessary to explain to me why Anthony falls under the spell of a beautiful woman. Across time just as much as across space, the fundamentals of our nature are universally and idiosyncratically human.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“Because bodies do not replicate themselves but are grown, whereas genes do replicate themselves, it inevitably follows that the body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene, rather than vice versa.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“This concept, that all progress is relative, has come to be known in biology by the name of the Red Queen, after a chess piece that Alice meets in Through the Looking-Glass, who perpetually runs without getting very far because the landscape moves with her. It is an increasingly influential idea in evolutionary theory, and one that will recur throughout the book. The faster you run, the more the world moves with you and the less you make progress. Life is a chess tournament in which if you win a game, you start the next game with the handicap of a missing pawn.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“almost all biologists agreed that no creature could ever evolve the ability to help its species at the expense of itself. Only when the two interests coincided would it act selflessly.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“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. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago. Computers have no effect on productivity because people learn to complicate and repeat tasks that have been made easier.13 This concept, that all progress is relative, has come to be known in biology by the name of the Red Queen, after a chess piece that Alice meets in Through the Looking-Glass, who perpetually runs without getting very far because the landscape moves with her. It is an increasingly influential idea in evolutionary theory, and one that will recur throughout the book. The faster you run, the more the world moves with you and the less you make progress. Life is a chess tournament in which if you win a game, you start the next game with the handicap of a missing pawn.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“You are descended not from your mother but from her ovary. Nothing that happened to her body or her mind in her life could affect your nature”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“All Britons are descended from the same set of people a mere thirty generations ago.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“Far from being choosy, female primates seemed to be initiators of much promiscuity. Hrdy began to suggest that there was something wrong with the theory rather than the females.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“Shakespeare was a far better psychologist than Freud, and Jane Austen a far better sociologist than Durkheim”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

“story of a philosopher who runs when a bear charges him and his friend.”
― Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature