The Red Queen

Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

By: Matt Ridley

Narrated by: Simon Prebble

Length: 12 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

Brilliantly written, The Red Queen offers an extraordinary new way of interpreting the human condition and how it has evolved.

©1993 Matt Ridley (P)2011 HarperCollins Publishers

Fascinating

Not quite enough information on pigeons so I kinda think he’s a bit racist but overall I would still recommend to any pigeon enthusiast

Amazing Book

This book was ahead of his time. Evolution psychology and gender dynamics owe a lot to this book.

great book flaws and all.

no book is perfect however this book is really good it touches on many things that are true and indisputable

good info except some blind western assumptions

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

I learned quite a bit of information from the Red Queen but some of the baseline assumptions are quite stereotypical of a western view point and lacks any discussion of the various types of relationships beyond traditional pair bonding (marriage) and polygamy (as defined by one man and several women).

Read this book and see the world in a new way!!

This book is brimming with fascinating information. Dont just listen to it, think about what it means, the consequences, and how the ideas are reflected in your own nature even if it's not easy to admit.

Best book I've ever listened to

Absolutely superb. The way the information is laid out is very logical and easy to follow. The narrator is also fantastic.

Excellent Book

It’s hard to establish significance in controversy but this does an excellent job! It’s a masterpiece!

A great view on human evolution

easy to understand will probably listen to it a few times to see if I missed anything

Not to the point

First half is interested but too slow. I had Problems following but the second half which is more human oriented was very interesting

Academic and well reasoned

Any additional comments?

Fascinating exploration of why sex for reproduction exists, incorporating scientific findings from genetics, sociology, evolutionary development, psychology, and broad biology. While Ridley makes most of the book accessible to the layperson, it clearly is aimed at the educated layperson. That is to say, this is not for the casual reader looking for easy tidbits of knowledge, as this feels further from the popular science side of the bell curve and closer to the academic writing end. As a result, while the book might be slow going and some section warrant reading more than once, the reader comes away with some fairly sophisticated concepts. The book is more than a decade old and it would be nice to see an updated version with newer scientific findings (including epigenetic findings). Nonetheless, much of the content is still relevant, invites deep thought, and disrupts some widely held beliefs (cultural rather than scientific) about sex, males and females, and humans as just another mammal.