The Red Queen: Sex And The Evolution Of Human Nature Quotes
"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." – Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
"A vet or a butcher could teach the surgeon about a much greater variety of different stomachs: big, multichambered 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 nonhuman stomach."
"Like the stomach surgeon, a psychiatrist can make all sorts of basic assumptions when a patient lies down on the couch."
"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."
"Reproduction is the sole goal for which human beings are designed; everything else is a means to that end."
"Free will itself is any good only to the extent that it contributes to eventual reproduction."
"Every detail of animal courtship mattered unless it could be explained in terms of the selective competition of genes."
"The very core of our inquiry must be reproduction, for reproductive success is the examination that all human genes must pass if they are not to be squeezed out by natural selection."
"The fruit was carnal knowledge, and everybody from Thomas Aquinas to Milton knew it."
"Ordinary mutations that change one letter for another in the genetic code are fairly innocuous because they can be repaired, but insertions—whole chunks of DNA that jump into the middle of genes—cannot be reversed so easily."
"The evidence so far is that the deleterious mutation rate teeters on the edge: It is about one per individual per generation in most creatures."
"The chessboard is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature."
"A bdelloid rotifer can fill a medium-sized lake with its progeny in just two months."
"The existence of the bdelloid rotifers is, in the words of John Maynard Smith, 'an evolutionary scandal.'"
"Unless a genetic mistake happens, a baby bdelloid rotifer is identical to its mother. A human baby is not identical to its mother. That is the first consequence of sex."
"Sexual species can call on a sort of library of locks that is unavailable to asexual species."
"The things that kill animals or prevent them from reproducing are only rarely physical factors. Far more often other creatures are involved—parasites, predators, and competitors."
"The immune system consists of white blood cells that come in about 10 million different types. Each type has a protein lock on it called an 'antibody,' which corresponds to a key carried by a bacterium called an 'antigen.'"
"Genes, like people, have other things to do than kill each other."
"A male is defined as the gender that produces sperm or pollen: small, mobile, multitudinous gametes."
"A female produces few, large, immobile gametes called eggs."
"Human mitochondria, for example, have thirty-seven genes of their own."
"The answer lies in the exception to this rule: an alga called Chlamydomonas that has two genders called plus and minus rather than male and female."
"In those species with sex by fusion, there are almost invariably two genders."
"Male-killer genes have been found in more than 140 species of plant."
"If your host is going to die, you had better multiply as fast as possible."
"Gender is a bureaucratic solution to an antisocial habit."
"A male-killing gene in, say, a mouse, by killing the males in a brood, does not benefit those mice’s sisters at all."
"The only way to explain the fact that they have stopped halfway along the one-way street is to posit a continuing battle between the organelles’ male-killer genes and nuclear fertility restorer genes."
"Males do not submit their organelles to be slaughtered; they leave them behind at the border."
"The sex chromosomes themselves began to have an interest in the gender of their owners’ children."
"The female bird can simply release an egg of the desired gender and let any sperm fertilize it."
"The Chinese, deprived of the chance to have more than one child, killed more than 250,000 girls after birth between 1979 and 1984."
"There is a good deal of circumstantial evidence that high levels of the hormone gonadotrophin in the mother can increase the proportion of daughters and that testosterone in the father can increase the proportion of sons."
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"The female inspects the bower and mates with the male if she likes the workmanship and the decorations."
"If the main purpose of sex is to grant your descendants immunity from parasites, then it follows directly that it makes sense to seek a mate with parasite-resistance genes."
"The existence of female prostitutes reveals the male sexual appetite in its nakedness."
"Our brains grew so big not to make tools but to psychologize one another."
"A man does not experience lust because he learned it at his father's knee; a person does not feel hunger or anger because she was taught it."
"The man who can sufficiently arrange his business affairs to make time, opportunity, and money available for supporting two families is as rich as he is rare."
"By choosing the reddest male on offer, females are therefore getting superior survival genes as well as attractiveness genes."
"Given that male albatrosses have the same genetic incentives as male elephant seals, why do they behave so differently?"
"Human institutions cannot be understood without understanding their internal politics."
"Men are still obsessed with power-seeking and building or dominating male-male coalitions."
"A lucky hunter kills more than he can eat, so he loses little by sharing it with his companions but instead gains a lot because next time, if he is unlucky, the favor will be repaid by those with whom he shared now."
"For the first time having wealth was the best way to get wealth."
"Power is, roughly speaking, the ability to call upon allies to do your bidding, and that depended strictly on wealth."
"But like men, chimps do not rise entirely on brute strength. They use cunning, and above all they form alliances."
"But there is another way to ensure that altruism pays: reciprocity."
"Wealth, cunning, political skill, and experience lead to power among men."
"It could be a coincidence that evolutionary arguments predict what does happen."
"In the mid 1980s, Laura Betzig set out to test the notion that people are sexually adapted to exploit whatever situation they encounter."
"In other words, mating was a trade: male power and resources for female reproductive potential."
"The unrestricted sexual availability of slaves 'is treated as a commonplace in Greco-Roman literature from Homer on; only modern writers have managed largely to ignore it.'"
"It recognized sexual competition to be one of the principal causes of murder and mayhem."
"No man was allowed more than one wife, so no man had an incentive to kill a fellow tribesman to take his wife."
"If war is something we inherited directly from the hostility between groups of male apes over female apes, with territory as merely a means to the end—sex—then it follows that tribal people must be going to war over women rather than territory."
"Apart from rare and occasional adultery, the Pitcairners were and remain monogamous."
"Nature, Mr Allnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above."
"Once monogamous men had a chance to vote against polygamists (and who does not want to tear down a competitor, however much he might also like to emulate him?), their fate was sealed."
"It is one thing to find that powerful emperors were polygamous but quite another to discover that they each adopted similar measures to enhance their reproductive success within the harem."
"The major source of conflict in the great majority of spouse killings is the husband’s knowledge or suspicion that his wife is either unfaithful or intending to leave him."
"In the words of Edward Wilson: 'In diverse cultures men pursue and acquire, while women are protected and bartered. Sons sow wild oats and daughters risk being ruined. When sex is sold, men are usually the buyers.'"
"To say that Western women do not enter politics in the same numbers as men because they have been conditioned to think of it as a man’s career is to patronize women."
"The male preference for young mates implies lifelong mateships."
"The genes for height are really only genes for responding to diet by growing."
"But where does the mothers get the interest? From their mothers? Even if you suggest that the original Eve took an arbitrary step in deciding to be more interested in character than Adam, you cannot escape genetic change."
"The practice of primogeniture was a good way to keep wealth—and its polygamy potential—intact through the generations."
"Wealth concentration works better for land, whose value depends on its scarcity, than for business fortunes, which are made and lost in many families in parallel."
"The overwhelming fascination of men with female youth argues that pair bonds have lasted lifetimes."
"The first dose produces a baby that is mentally different from a girl baby from its first day on the planet."
"There is ample evidence from sculpture and painting that Victorian beauties were not especially thin."
"Thinness was once all too common and was a sign of relative poverty."
"A young man growing up today is bombarded with correlations between thinness and wealth."
"The physical attractiveness of a woman was a far better predictor of the occupational status of the man she married than her own socioeconomic status."
"As long as the preference is cultural and the preferred trait is genetic, Fisher’s insight that fashion is despotic still stands."
"A man cannot tell the age of a woman directly."
"Blond adult hair may be a sexually selected honest handicap."
"We are, in other words, descended from men who chose young women as mates."
"Tall men are universally considered more attractive by women than short men."
"Status and economic achievement are highly relevant barometers of male attractiveness."
"Behavior itself is rarely what has evolved; it is the underlying psychological attitude that evolves."
"Men think women like a heavier build than they do; women think men like women thinner than they do."
"The object of oratory alone is not truth but persuasion."
"Our intuitive commonsense psychology far surpasses any scientific psychology in scope and accuracy."
"April Fallon and Paul Rozin of the University of Pennsylvania showed four simple line drawings of male or female figures in swimsuits to nearly five hundred undergraduates."
"Repeated rejection causes us to lower our sights; an unbroken string of successful seductions encourages us to aim a little higher."
"The human mind may not be much suited to logic at all, but is well suited to judging the fairness of social bargains and the sincerity of social offers."
"To deceive others well, an animal must deceive itself."
"Deception is therefore the reason for the invention of the subconscious."
"All apes and monkeys show complex behavior replete with communication, manipulation, deception, and long-term relationships."
"Interacting with an organism of approximately equal mental abilities whose motives are at times outright malevolent makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition."
"The neocortex is largely a courtship device to attract and retain sexual mates."
"The neocortex is...to stimulate and entertain other people, and to assess the stimulation attempts of others."
"Human society is more complex than ape society because it needs a 'polytechnic school' in which young people can learn the practical skills of their species."
"There is no such thing as being clever enough just as there is no such thing as being good enough at chess."