63 quotes
He (Thomas Ray) had discovered that the notion of a host-parasite arms race is one of the most basic and unavoidable consequences of evolution.
The Red Queen (1993)
Evolving is not a goal but a means to solving a problem.
The Red Queen (1993)
Power seeking is characteristic of all social mammals.
The Red Queen (1993)
Simply put, anything that increases reproductive success will spread at the expense of anything that does not—even if it threatens survival.
The Red Queen (1993)
I am trying to describe the nature of humans, not prescribe their morality. That something is natural does not make it right.
The Red Queen (1993)
Computer viruses have since become a worldwide problem. It begins to look as if parasites are inevitable in any system of life.
The Red Queen (1993)
And in the matter of seduction itself, once more it is the male who is expected to make the first move. Women may flirt, but men pounce.
The Red Queen (1993)
The sex that invests the least has time to spare to seek other mates. Therefore, broadly speaking, males invest less and seek quantity of mates, while females invest more and seek quality of mates.
The Red Queen (1993)
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 Red Queen (1993)
Anthropology consists of studying the differences between peoples. But this has led anthropologists to exaggerate the motes of racial difference and to ignore the beams of similarity.
The Red Queen (1993)
Sex is recombination plus outcrossing; their mixing of genes is its principal feature….So sex equals genetic mixing.
The Red Queen (1993)
If reproduction has been the reward and goal of power and wealth, then it is little wonder that it has also been a frequent cause and rewarding of violence.
The Red Queen (1993)
Wherever you look in the historical record, the elites favored sons more than other classes….Lower down the social scale, daughters are preferred even today.
The Red Queen (1993)
It is hardly surprising to find that the males best at seduction tend to be the best at other things as well; it does not prove that females are seeking good genes for their offspring.
The Red Queen (1993)
Sexual selection, as we have seen, is very different from natural selection in its effects, for it does not solve survival problems, it makes them worse.
The Red Queen (1993)
Morality is never based upon nature.
The Red Queen (1993)
Humanity shares this profile of ardent, polygamist males and coy, faithful females with about 99 percent of all animal species, including our closest relatives, the apes.
The Red Queen (1993)
Females choose; their choosiness is inherited; they prefer exaggerated ornaments; exaggerated ornaments are a burden to males. That much is now uncontroversial. Thus far Darwin was right.
The Red Queen (1993)
These facts have been first disputed and then actively suppressed by the educational establishment, which continues to insist that there are no differences in learning ability between boys and girls.
The Red Queen (1993)
Reproducing sexually must improve an individual’s reproductive success or else sex would not persist. It is increasingly hard to understand how human beings came to be so clever without considering sexual competition.
The Red Queen (1993)