The Red Queen

I just finished reading The Red Queen, and I have to give it a thumbs up. I was pleasantly surprised.

The reason I was surprised is that I generally find very shallow reasoning on the part of evolutionary biologists. For example, I feel a lot of Mystery's "Survival Value" and "Replication Value" stuff is crap. For most evolutionary biology stuff I hear, I am turned off by what I see as general tendency to do backward science, starting with the conclusion (e.g. men are bigger than women on average) and making unprovable conjectures (it must be because they fight more) as to the cause. In logic this is the fallacy of affirming the consequent: B is true, and A implies B, therefore A.

For the most part, The Red Queen avoids these types of questionable explanations. Many examples are taken from the animal kingdom, where strong patterns are irrefutably at work. The connection from that to human behavior is still an area of speculation and conjecture, but the reasoning is well thought-out and holds together pretty well.

There are a couple areas where the reasoning is still rather thin, but in those areas the author describes multiple competing theories for what forces are at work.

Unfortunately, the book does not have very specific relevance to pickup. It is certainly interesting and I got value out of reading it, but its value is not because it is practical.