The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [2]
Several people helped even further by reading drafts of chapters and commenting on them. Their advice was time-consuming to them but immensely valuable to me: Laura Betzig, Mark Boyce, Helena Cronin, Richard Dawkins, Laurence Hurst, Geoffrey Miller, 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.
My agents, Felicity Bryan and Peter Ginsberg, were unfailingly encouraging and constructive at all stages. My editors at Penguin and Macmillan, Ravi Mirchandani, Judith Flanders, Bill Rosen and especially Carrie Chase, were efficient, kind and inspired.
My wife, Anya Hurlbert, read all the book and her advice and support throughout has been invaluable.
Lastly, thanks to the red squirrel that sometimes used to scratch at my window while I wrote. I still don’t know which sex it was.
The publishers would like to thank the following for permission to quote material from their books:
Allison & Busby for On Human Finery, 1976, by Quentin Bell;
Oxford University Press, Inc., New York for The Evolution of Human Sexuality, 1979, by Donald Symons.
Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers would be pleased to hear from any copyright holders not here acknowledged.
CHAPTER ONE
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: however 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 to the similarities. A vet or a butcher could teach the surgeon about a much greater variety of different stomachs: big, multi-chambered 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. Just like the stomach surgeon, a psychiatrist can make all sorts of basic assumptions when a patient lies down upon 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 a hundred thousand years of separation since they last shared a common 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’ eyeball soup, a shake of the head that means yes, western privacy, circumcision rituals, afternoon siestas, religions,