The Red Queen

A coda to "Amor Fati"

This is a coda to my last essay about the sex binary taboo. That piece was primarily about the culture war engulfing “trans issues,” but the sex binary can also seem tragic to people with no desire to change their sex. This piece is about the existential distress anyone might feel when they consider how the sex binary shapes our destiny.

If you’d also like to read “Amor Fati,” click on the preview below:

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It is uncomfortably true that, on average, there are innate differences between the minds of men and women. Our interests and talents are influenced by biological fate. This seems to impugn our individuality and free will.

Politics is obviously messier when our differences are innate. Races may intermarry, and the poor may find their fortune, but humanity will always be comprised of two discrete categories: male and female. Given that our sex differences are not merely “skin deep,” it is natural to wonder: if we are intrinsically separate, then can we become equal?

The most comforting answer to such anxiety is found in Matt Ridley’s seminal 1993 book The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. But relief does not come from downplaying the primacy of the sex binary, which Ridley argues is key to understanding human nature. Rather, we find solace by grasping the truth more firmly.

Ridley writes that “it is impossible to understand human nature without understanding how it evolved, and it is impossible to understand how it evolved without understanding how human sexuality evolved. For the central theme of our evolution has been sexual”:

This seems an astonishingly hubristic claim. It seems to deny free will, ignore those who choose chastity, and portray human beings as programmed robots bent only on procreation. It seems to imply that Mozart and Shakespeare were motivated only by sex. Yet I know of no other way that human nature can have developed except by evolution, and there is now overwhelming evidence that there is no other way for evolution to work except by competitive reproduction. Those strains that reproduce persist; those that do not reproduce die out. The ability to reproduce is what makes living things different from rocks. Besides, there is nothing inconsistent with free will or even chastity in this view of life. Human beings, I believe, thrive according to their ability to take initiatives and exercise individual talent. But free will was not created for fun; there was a reason that evolution handed our ancestors the ability to take initiatives, and the reason was that free will and initiative are means to satisfy ambition, to compete with fellow human beings, to deal with life's emergencies, and so eventually to be in a better position to reproduce and rear children than human beings who do not reproduce. Therefore, free will itself is any good only to the extent that it contributes to eventual reproduction.

It can infuriate a conscious agent, bristling with willpower, to find herself circumscribed by her nature. We observe the rote behaviors of our animal cousins and then blanche to imagine ourselves acting out routines like biological machines. To the conscious agent, capable of contemplating the cosmos, the suggestion that her very mind is shaped by her sex seems an affront to individuality. We want to be more unique than representative specimens. When we listen to David Attenborough describe the bird of paradise performing his flamboyant mating dance, we fancy ourselves the intellects observing nature, not the animal instincts under study.

Ridley gives us the Attenborough treatment in The Red Queen. But in studying humanity as just another animal, he reveals that the sex binary may not be the existential threat that it at first seems. To the contrary, Ridley contends that human sexuality likely caused us to develop individuality and free will. He asks: Why did homo sapiens rapidly evolve outsized brains capable of generating higher order consciousness and intelligence — but not our ape cousins, with whom we share so much else in common? Or to re-phrase the question:

What was the secret that the serpent told Eve? That she could eat a certain fruit? Pah. That was a euphemism. The fruit was carnal knowledge, and everybody from Thomas Aquinas to Milton knew it. How did they know it? Nowhere in Genesis is there even the merest hint of the equation: Forbidden fruit equals sin equals sex. We know it to be true because there can only be one thing so central to mankind. Sex.

Sexual selection only impacts species who are picky about sexual partners. Unlike the brute indifference of natural selection, choice and discretion drive sexual selection as individuals reject low quality mates. Pressure from conscious agents accelerates evolution so that changes caused by sexual selection accumulate faster than those from natural selection. Therefore when we discover examples of rapid evolution, as when humanity developed large brains in short order, we should suspect that sexual selection is at play. Our ape cousins appear to possess the right ingredients for higher order thinking — they are inquisitive, dexterous, and social — but alas, they are also sluts:

Indeed, among apes, people are unique in that both sexes are extremely choosy. A gorilla female is happy to be mated with whoever “owns" her harem. A gorilla male will mate with any estral female he can find. A chimp female is keen to mate with many different males in the troop. A chimp male will mate with any female in season. But women are highly selective abut the men with whom they mate. So indeed are men. True, they are easily persuaded to go to bed with beautiful young women — but that is exactly the point. Most women are neither young nor beautiful, nor are they trying to seduce strange men. It is hard to overemphasize how unusual humans are in this respect… Although he may prefer variety more than females do, man is a highly sexually selective male as males go.

Selectivity by one or the other sex is the prerequisite of sexual selection. And… it is more than that. It is the almost invariant predictor of sexual selection.

Once it is underway, sexual selection is subject to the Red Queen. Ridley named his book for this biological theory, which in turn took its name from a character in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass:

One of the peculiar features of history is that time always erodes advantage. Every invention sooner or later leads to a counterinvention. Every success contains the seeds of its own overthrow. Every hegemony comes to an end. Evolutionary history is no different. Progress and success are always relative. When the land was unoccupied by animals, the first amphibian to emerge from the sea could get away with being slow, lumbering, and fishlike, for it had no enemies and no competition. But if a fish were to take to the land today, it would be gobbled up by a passing fox as surely as a Mongol horde would be wiped out by machine guns. In history and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago. Computers have no effect on productivity because people learn to complicate and repeat tasks that have been made easier.

This concept, that all progress is relative, has come to be known in biology by the name of the Red Queen, after a chess piece that Alice meets in Through the Looking-Glass, who perpetually runs without getting very far because the landscape moves with her. It is an increasingly influential idea in evolutionary theory… The faster you run, the more the world moves with you and the less you make progress. Life is a chess tournament in which if you win a game, you start the next game with the handicap of a missing pawn.

The Red Queen is not present at all evolutionary events. Take the example of a polar bear, which is equipped with a thick coat of white fur. The coat is thick because ancestral polar bears better survived to breed if they did not feel the cold. There was a relatively simple evolutionary progression: thicker and thicker fur, warmer and warmer bears. The cold did not get worse just because the bear's insulation got thicker. But the polar bear's fur is white for a different reason: camouflage. White bears can creep up on seals much more easily than brown bears can. Presumably, once upon a time, it was easy to creep up on Arctic seals because they feared no enemies on the ice, just as present-day Antarctic seals are entirely fearless on the ice. In those days, proto-polar bears had an easy time catching seals. But soon nervous, timid seals tended to live longer than trusting ones, so gradually seals grew more and more wary. Life grew harder for bears. They had to creep up on the seals stealthily, but the seals could easily see them coming — until one day (it may not have been so sudden, but the principle is the same) by chance mutation a bear had cubs that were white instead of brown. They thrived and multiplied because the seals did not see them coming. The seal's evolutionary effort was for nothing; they were back where they started. The Red Queen was at work.

In the world of the Red Queen, any evolutionary progress will be relative as long as your foe is animate and depends heavily on you or suffers heavily if you thrive, like the seals and the bears. Thus the Red Queen will be especially hard at work among predators and their prey, parasites and their hosts, and males and females of the same species. Every creature on earth is in a Red Queen chess tournament with its parasites (or hosts), its predators (or prey), and, above all, with its mate.

The Red Queen explains our evolutionary history and sexual behavior better than any other theory that interprets why homo sapiens — but no other ape — rapidly evolved big brains:

There is no such thing as being clever enough just as there is no such thing as being good enough at chess. Either you win or you do not. If winning pits you against a better opponent, as it does in the evolutionary tournament generation after generation, then the pressure to get better and better never lets up. The way the brains of human beings have gotten bigger at an accelerating pace implies that some such with-in-species arms race is at work.

So argues Geoffrey Miller. After laying bare the inadequacies of the conventional theories about intelligence, he takes a surprising turn.

“I suggest that the neocortex is not primarily or exclusively a device for toolmaking, bipedal walking, fire-using, warfare, hunting, gathering, or avoiding savanna predators. None of these postulated functions alone can explain its explosive development in our lineage and not in other closely related species. . . . The neocortex is largely a courtship device to attract and retain sexual mates: Its specific evolutionary function is to stimulate and entertain other people, and to assess the stimulation attempts of others.”

The only way, he suggests, that sufficient evolutionary pressure could suddenly and capriciously be sustained in one species to enlarge an organ far beyond its normal size is sexual selection. “Just as the peahen is satisfied with nothing less than a visually brilliant display of peacock plumage, I postulate that hominid males and females became satisfied with nothing less than psychologically brilliant, fascinating, articulate, entertaining companions.” Miller's use of the peacock is deliberate. Wherever else in the animal kingdom we find greatly exaggerated and enlarged ornaments, we have been able to explain them by the runaway [effects of sexual selection.] 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. Female choice causes peacocks' tails to grow longer until they become a burden — then demands that they grow longer still. Miller used the wrong word: Peahens are never satisfied. And so, having found a force that produces exponential change in ornaments, it seems perverse not to consider it when trying to explain the exponential expansion of the brain.

At the end of The Red Queen, Ridley concludes:

It is a disquieting thought that our heads contain a neurological version of a peacock’s tail — an ornament designed for sexual display whose virtuosity at everything from calculus to sculpture is perhaps just a side effect of the ability to charm… the choosiness of human beings in picking their mates has driven the human mind into a history of frenzied expansion for no reason except that wit, virtuosity, inventiveness, and individuality turn other people on.

I had disquieting thoughts the first time I read about sex differences in Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: On the Modern Denial of Human Nature. For over 300 pages I happily nodded along with Pinker's takedown of the belief that we are born tabula rasa, until he made this gentle claim:

With some other traits the differences are small on average but can be large at the extremes. That happens for two reasons. When two bell curves partly overlap, the farther out along the tail you go, the larger the discrepancies between the groups. For example, men on average are taller than women, and the discrepancy is greater for more extreme values. At a height of five foot ten, men outnumber women by a ratio of thirty to one; at a height of six feet, men outnumber women by a ratio of two thousand to one. Also, confirming an expectation from evolutionary psychology, for many traits the bell curve for males is flatter and wider than the curve for females. That is, there are proportionally more males at the extremes. Along the left tail of the curve, one finds that boys are far more likely to be dyslexic, learning disabled, attention deficient, emotionally disturbed, and mentally retarded (at least for some types of retardation). At the right tail, one finds that in a sample of talented students who score above 700 (out of 800) on the mathematics section of the Scholastic Assessment Test, boys outnumber girls by thirteen to one, even though the scores of boys and girls are similar within the bulk of the curve.

I was unconcerned at the suggestion that more men are idiots, but quite unhappy with the corollary that more men are also geniuses. My heroes include brainiacs like Richard Feynman, and I want to believe that had I chosen to study physics instead of art, then with enough effort, I could have understood the universe as well as him. That being female makes it less likely that I could have reached Feynman's impressive mental heights feels disturbing.

And was my choice to become an artist just another downstream effect of my femininity? Pinker notes that “Vocational tests also show that boys are more interested in ‘realistic,’ ‘theoretical,’ and ‘investigative' pursuits, and girls more interested in ‘artistic' and ‘social' pursuits.” I can hear an Attenborough voiceover narrating my typically female career choice.

Of course, few men can match Feynman's I.Q., and there are abundant male artists. That's the thing about averages — when we quantify population-wide generalities, we learn little about individuals. Nevertheless, upon noticing where our life choices correlate with such generalities, we may struggle to shake off the perturbing suspicion that our sex nudged our decision-making along.

Ridley described three reasons why we should expect evolution to produce different mentalities in men and women:

The first is that men and women are mammals, and all mammals show sexual differences in behavior. As Charles Darwin put it, “No one disputes that the bull differs in disposition from the cow, the wild boar from the sow, the stallion from the mare.” The second is that men and women are apes, and in all apes there are great rewards for males that show aggression toward other males, for males that seek mating opportunities, and for females that pay close attention to their babies. The third is that men and women are human beings, and human beings are mammals with one highly unusual characteristic: a sexual division of labor. Whereas a male and a female chimp seek the same sources of food, a male and a female human being, in virtually every preagricultural society, set about gathering food in different ways. Men look for sources that are mobile, distant, and unpredictable (usually meat), while women, burdened with children, look for sources that are static, close, and predictable (usually plants).

In other words, far from being an ape with fewer than usual sexual differences, the human being may prove to be an ape with more than usual sex differences. Indeed, mankind may be the mammal with the greatest division of sexual labor and the greatest of mental differences between the sexes. …

Of the many mental features that are claimed to be different between the sexes, four stand out as repeatable, real, and persistent in all psychological tests. First, girls are better at verbal tasks. Second, boys are better at mathematical tasks. Third, boys are more aggressive. Fourth, boys are better at some visuo-spatial tasks and girls at others. Put crudely, men are better at reading a map and women are better judges of character and mood — on average. (And interestingly, gay men are more like women than heterosexual men in some of these respects.)

Atop these verifiable sex differences, humanity has piled on layers of sexism, misogyny, and misandry. Desiring to counter these vices motivates some of us to wish away innate difference between male and female minds. But biological fate does not condemn us to gender apartheid, as Pinker insists in The Blank Slate:

There is, in fact, no incompatibility between the principles of feminism and the possibility that men and women are not psychologically identical. To repeat: equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group. … If we recognize this principle, no one has to spin myths about the indistinguishability of the sexes to justify equality. Nor should anyone invoke sex differences to justify discriminatory policies or to hector women into doing what they don't want to do.

In any case, what we do know about the sexes does not call for any action that would penalize or constrain one sex or the other. Many psychological traits relevant to the public sphere, such as general intelligence, are the same on average for men and women, and virtually all psychological traits may be found in varying degrees among the members of each sex. No sex difference yet discovered applies to every last man compared with every last woman, so generalizations about a sex will always be untrue of many individuals. And notions like “proper role" and “natural place" are scientifically meaningless and give no grounds for restricting freedom.

Despite these principles, many feminists vehemently attack research on sexuality and sex differences. The politics of gender is a major reason that the application of evolution, genetics, and neuroscience to the human mind is bitterly resisted in modern intellectual life. But unlike other human divisions such as race and ethnicity, where any biological differences are minor at most and scientifically uninteresting, gender cannot possibly be ignored in the science of human beings. The sexes are as old as complex life and are a fundamental topic in evolutionary biology, genetics, and behavioral ecology. To disregard them in the case of our own species would be to make a hash of our understanding of our place in the cosmos. And of course differences between men and women affect every aspect of our lives. We all have a mother and a father, are attracted to members of the opposite sex (or notice our contrast with the people who are), and are never unaware of the sex of our siblings, children, and friends. To ignore gender would be to ignore a major part of the human condition.

When I feel stifled by the sex binary and its unwelcome implications about human nature, I remember Epictetus' admonition that it is “not things that upset us but our judgments about things.” His stoic advice urges us to become better narrators of our own stories. So I propose that we look at our predicament this way:

The sex binary probably caused us to evolve brains big enough to contemplate the cosmos. If we resent it, that is only because it bequeathed us the mental capacity to understand our plight in the first place. Therefore whatever its attendant indignities, we ought to be grateful for the sex binary.