The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [11]
In the world of the Red Queen, any evolutionary progress will be relative, so long as your foe is animate and depends heavily on you or suffers heavily if you thrive, like the seals and the bears. Thus the Red Queen will be especially hard at work among predators and their prey, parasites and their hosts, and males and females of the same species. 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.
Just as parasites depend on their hosts yet make them suffer, and just as animals exploit their mates yet need them, so the Red Queen never appears without another theme being sounded: the theme of intermingled co-operation and conflict. The relationship between a mother and her child is fairly straightforward: both are seeking roughly the same goal – the welfare of themselves and each other. The relationship between a man and his wife’s lover, or between a woman and her rival for a promotion, is also fairly straightforward: both want the worst for each other. The former two relationships are all about co-operation and the latter two about conflict and competition. But what is the relationship between a woman and her husband? It is co-operation, in the sense that both want the best for the other. But why? In order to exploit each other. A man uses his wife to produce children for him. A woman uses her husband to make and help rear her children. Marriage teeters on the line between a co-operative venture and a form of mutual exploitation – ask any divorce lawyer. Successful marriages so submerge the costs under mutual benefits that the co-operation can predominate; unsuccessful ones do not.
This is one of the great recurring themes of human history, the balance between co-operation and conflict. It is the obsession of governments and families, of lovers and rivals. It is the key to economics. It is, as we shall see, one of the oldest themes in the history of life, for it is repeated right down to the level of the gene itself. And the principal cause of it is sex. Sex, like marriage, is a co-operative venture between two rival sets of genes. Your body is the scene of this uneasy coexistence.
To Choose
One of Charles Darwin’s more obscure ideas was that animals’ mates can act like horse breeders, consistently selecting certain types and so changing the race. This theory, known as sexual selection, was ignored for many years after Darwin’s death and has only recently come back into vogue. Its principal insight is that the goal of an animal is not just to survive, but to breed. Indeed, where breeding and survival come into conflict, it is breeding that takes precedence. Salmon, for example, starve to death while breeding. And breeding, in sexual species, consists of finding an appropriate partner and persuading it to part with a package of genes. This goal is so central to life that it has influenced the design not only of the body, but also of the psyche. Simply put, anything that increases reproductive success will spread at the expense of anything that does not – even if it threatens survival.
Sexual selection produces the appearance of purposeful ‘design’ as surely as natural selection does. Just as a stag is designed by sexual selection for battle with sexual rivals and a peacock is designed for seduction, so a man’s psychology is designed to do things that put his survival at risk but increase his chances of acquiring or retaining one or more high quality mates. Testosterone itself, the very elixir of masculinity, increases susceptibility to infectious