Red Queen, Conflict and Co-operation and the Illusion of progress

The faster you run, the more the world moves with you and the less you make progress. Life is a chess tournament in which you win a game, you start the next game with the handicap of a missing pawn. This is an increasingly influential idea in evolution, one that recurs across this book Red Queen : Sex and the evolution of Human Nature

One of the peculiar features of history, is that time always erodes advantage.

Every invention sooner or later leads to a counter-invention. Every success contains the seeds of its own overthrow.

Every hegemony comes to an end. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse drawn carriages did a century ago. We do not move cross Silk board in Bangalore any faster in a car than by foot.

Progress and Success are always relative. When the land was unoccupied by animals, the first amphibian who emerged from the sea could get away with being slow and lumbering for it had no competitors. But if a fish were to take to the land today, it will be gobbled up by a passing fox, the author states.

Matt Ridley's book, presents multiple chapters discussing human nature across themes. The most salient being that there is a common nature shared by all people and that sex is the driving force even while each human remains unique. Ridley begins by providing the example of commonality found in every culture :smiling. He argues that a baboon's smile threatens, whereas the human smile means pleasure in every culture of the world. He adds that the desire to reproduce proves the existence of the common human nature because it is an activity that passes on one;s characteristics to ones offspring.

"Evolving is not a goal but a means of solving a problem"

Humans therefore will survive not because they are intelligent, but because their intelligence attracts a mater through whom they can successfully reproduce,

The concept that all progress is relative, has come to be known in biology by the name '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 isnt much different from the Sisphyean Struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting even better at things. Most folks would agree that in spite of the technological developments of time-saving devices we seem to constantly have less and less free time.

In 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. This introduces us to the theme of intermingled conflict and co-operation. The relationship between a mother and a child is pretty stratightforward - both are seeking roughly the same goal - the welfare of themselves as well as each other. The relationship between a man and a rival for a promotion is also fairly straightforward - both want the worst for the other.

This, Matt Ridley states, is one of the great recurring themes of human history, the balance between cooperation and conflict.

It is the key to economics. It is one of the oldest themes in the history of life, for it is repeated right down to the level of the gene itself.

Increasingly, this seems to complete a circle - one that reminds us to pause and being mindful of the present. Of 'just being'.

Maybe getting to the goal isn't the necessarily the purpose of life - maybe the journey is.