Red Queen: The Evolution of Sex and Humanity

Author: (English) Ridley, translated by Fan Yufeng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-12-01
Features: When I used to work on animal research, my friends often asked me how I could spend three years studying just one type of bird. How can such an ordinary grouse have so much to study? My answer was often perceived as arrogant and harsh: Although the study of human nature has a history of two thousand years, what we know is still very limited. Humans are only slightly special, at most just one kind of mammal. Unless we can understand the evolutionary process of human nature, we cannot fully understand ourselves. In light of this, the first third of this book is dedicated to evolution. Additionally, the discussion on human nature is confined to these pages. The foundation of evolution is quite important, but for those who are not interested in the operation of genes, the topic of evolution can indeed be challenging. But please don’t be discouraged. The household rule I grew up with was that you had to finish your main meal before enjoying a chocolate cake. Even now, when I enjoy a chocolate cake, I still often feel (but deliberately ignore) a sense of guilt. If readers find the latter part of this book easier to understand and skip the earlier sections to directly "eat the chocolate cake," I can understand that as well. This book is filled with unique insights, but very few of them are my own discoveries. Scientists are busy with their research and have little time to publish their new findings, while science writers often need to explore the depths of their minds to bring these discoveries to the public, which makes them often feel like intellectual plagiarists. If judged by individual chapters, there are many who write more brilliantly than I do, but I take pride in the fact that few can reach this level of quality throughout the entire book. My role is to synthesize the findings of various researchers and present them to the readers.