I'm reading Matt Ridley's book The Red Queen. The title comes from the chess piece in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass that runs but stays in the same place, and that's the basis for the most intriguing idea so far (I'm halfway through it): that evolution isn't really progress, but a continual "effort" to stay in one place or survive in relation to parasites, bacteria, viruses, and to a lesser extent other species on our own size scale.
This is one of those world-view-influencing notions that, like Robert Wright's The Moral Animal will stay with me and shed a different (not necessarily exclusive) light on many of my own and other's motivations.
While The Red Queen seems to focus (so far) on competition and selection, a necessary inclusion in these lines of ideas are that fact that all life is interrelated and cooperating, e.g. we wouldn't do well without the zillions of bacteria that inhabit our digestive system (a point that Ridley makes in passing).
The section I'm currently reading deals with the evolution of sex and specifically the reason there are two sexes in humans. This kind of "evolution of evolution" reasoning fascinates me. I'm also interested in whether he'll discuss my idee fixee, the evolution of ever-more complex organisms, or "how did we get here"?
January 02, 2004 07:20 AM