The Red Queen, Matt Ridley
The Red Queen, Matt Ridley
9 Rating(s)
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
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The Red Queen
Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

Author: Matt Ridley

Narrator: Simon Prebble

Unabridged: 12 hr 52 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 01/18/2011

Synopsis

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

About Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley's books—including The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, How Innovation Works, and most recently, Viral: the Search for the Origin of Covid-19 (with Alina Chan)—have sold over a million copies, been translated into 31 languages, and won several awards. He sat in the House of Lords from 2013 and 2021, and was founding chairman of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle. He created the “Mind and Matter” column in the Wall Street Journal in 2010, and was a columnist for the Times. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in Northumberland.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Courtney on October 07, 2007

Things I learned from this book: (human) women like tall men, (human) men like beautiful women, (barn swallow) women like men with long, symmetrical tails, gentlemen prefer blondes, sperm are small because they made a dastardly deal with nature, gender exists (and there are two of them) essentially......more

Goodreads review by Arleen on January 11, 2014

Coming out of pre-veterinary medicine and a slew of genetics classes, I can say that nothing in this book is particularly mind-blowing... except the hubris. The author has drawn up a laundry list of assumptions about all of humanity and left out a good deal of its subjects. As a scientist or, at the......more

Goodreads review by Katja on January 22, 2013

What could have shaped the human mind is an endlessly interesting subject, no question about that. Speculating about contributions of the genes, nature, nurture, culture is fun, as much as getting a new perspective on what has always seemed "obvious". Still, I did not like this book as much as I pro......more

Goodreads review by Jason on August 24, 2008

Well, I had hoped to write this review closer to having read the book, but I'll write this anyway, just without some of the examples I was hoping to remember. Roughly the first 1/2 to 2/3 of the books covers the different explanations for why sex arose and the mating habits of various non-human speci......more

Goodreads review by Ana on November 28, 2016

This is really well written, but I just can't really wrap my head around the themes of sexuality in this book, especially as it concerns the idea of gender. Also I don't really trust men of science who can write things like "boys are better in math than girls" or "girls are better at linguistic task......more

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