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The Red Queen

Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

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The Red Queen

Written by: Matt Ridley
Narrated by: Simon Prebble
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About this listen

“A terrific book, witty and lucid, and brimming with provocative conjectures.” (Wall Street Journal) from the author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller Genome

Brilliantly written, The Red Queen compels us to rethink everything from the persistence of sexism to the endurance of romantic love.

Referring to Lewis Carroll's Red Queen from Through the Looking-Glass, a character who has to keep running to stay in the same place, Matt Ridley demonstrates why sex is humanity's best strategy for outwitting its constantly mutating internal predators. The Red Queen answers dozens of other riddles of human nature and culture—including why men propose marriage, the method behind our maddening notions of beauty, and the disquieting fact that a woman is more likely to conceive a child by an adulterous lover than by her husband. The Red Queen offers an extraordinary new way of interpreting the human condition and how it has evolved.

 Biological Sciences Science World
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This book is very dated. It was written at a time well before modern science and the uncovering of the true complexities of the human brain and its adaptability. It is an interesting listen to see just how naive we were when first trying to uncover genetics and its role in human development. Now we understand just how much we don't know, and how most of us are on a spectrum, less driven by genes and more on combinations and environments. In ways it fails to explain where we come from as we have far out developed our fellow species, and the Red Queen seems too simplistic an answer.

Very Dated but interesting to see simplistic ideas

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