The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [8]
It is no harder to explain than a game of cards. There are aces and kings and twos and threes in any deck of cards. A lucky player is dealt a high-scoring hand, but none of his cards is unique. Elsewhere in the room are others with the same kinds of cards in their hands. But even with just thirteen kinds of cards, every hand is different and some are spectacularly better than others. Sex is merely the dealer, generating unique hands from the same monotonous deck of genetic cards shared by the whole species.
But the uniqueness of the individual is only the first of the implications of sex for human nature. Another is that there are in fact two human natures: male and female. The basic asymmetry of gender leads inevitably to different natures for the two genders, natures that suit the particular role of each gender. For example, males usually compete for access to females, rather than vice versa. There are good evolutionary reasons for this and there are clear evolutionary consequences, too; for instance men are more aggressive than women.
A third implication of sex for human natures is that every other human being alive today is a potential source of genes for your children. And we are descended from only those people who sought the best genes, a habit we inherited from them. Therefore, if you spot somebody with good genes it is your inherited habit to seek to buy some of those genes; or, put more prosaically, people are attracted to people of high reproductive and genetic potential – the healthy, the fit and the powerful. The consequences of this fact, which goes under the name of sexual selection, are bizarre in the extreme, as shall become clear in later chapters.
Ours to Reason Why?
To speak of the purpose of sex, or of the function of a particular human behaviour, is shorthand. I do not imply some teleological goal-seeking or the existence of a great designer with an aim in mind. Still less will I be implying foresight or consciousness on the part of sex itself or of mankind. I merely refer to the astonishing power of adaptation, so well appreciated by Charles Darwin and so little understood by his modern critics. For I must confess at once that I am an ‘adaptationist’, which is a rude word for somebody who believes that animals and plants, their body parts and their behaviours, consist largely of designs to solve particular problems.8
Let me explain. The human eye is ‘designed’ for forming an image of the visual world on its retina; the human stomach is ‘designed’ to digest food; it is perverse to deny such facts. The only question is how they came to be ‘designed’ for their jobs. And the only answer that has stood the test of time and scrutiny is that there was no designer. Modern people are descended mainly from those people whose eyes and stomachs were better at those jobs than other people’s. Small, random improvements in the ability of stomachs to digest and of eyes to see were thus inherited, and small diminishments in ability were not inherited because the owners, equipped with poor digestion or poor vision, did not live so long or breed so well.
We human beings find the notion of engineering design quite easy to grasp, and have little difficulty seeing the analogy with the design of an eye. But we seem to find it harder to grasp the idea of ‘designed’ behaviour, mainly because we assume that purposeful behaviour is evidence of conscious choice. An example might help to clarify what I mean. There is a little wasp that injects its eggs into whitefly aphids, where they grow into new wasps by eating the whitefly from the inside out. Distressing, but true. If one of these wasps, upon poking