The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

by Matt Ridley

Evolution is something that happens to organisms. It is a directionless process that sometimes makes an animal’s descendants more complicated, sometimes simpler, and sometimes changes them not at all. We are so steeped in notions of progress and self-improvement that we find it strangely hard to accept this. But nobody has told the coelacanth, a fish that lives off Madagascar and looks exactly like its ancestors of 300 million years ago, that it has broken some law by not “evolving.” The notion that evolution simply cannot go fast enough, and its corollary that a coelacanth is a failure because it did not become a human being, is easily refuted. As Darwin noticed, mankind has intervened dramatically to speed up evolution, producing hundreds of breeds of dogs, from chihuahuas to St. Bernards, in an evolutionary eye blink. That alone is evidence that evolution was not going as fast as it could. Indeed, the coelacanth, far from being a flop, is rather a success. It has stayed the same—a design that persists without innovation, like a Volkswagen beetle. Evolving is not a goal but a means to solving a problem.