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Articles

The Origins of Don Giovanni

If our genes are selfish, does that mean that we are too? Mary Midgley explains the facts of life.

Let us start by quoting from a letter –

“Methinks I see a young couple in courtship, having each a design upon the other…she holds ready a net under her apron, he another under his coat; each intending to throw it over the other’s neck; she over his, when her pride is gratified, and she thinks she can be sure of him; he over hers, when the watched-for yielding moment has carried consent too far.”

So wrote Richard Lovelace, the unscrupulous rake in Samuel Richardson’s eighteenth-century novel Clarissa. He is echoed closely today by Matt Ridley, learned and discreet exponent of sociobiology, who writes thus in The Red Queen:

The Point of Marriage
For a man, women are vehicles that can carry his genes into the next generation. For a woman, men are sources of a vital substance (sperm) that can turn their eggs into embryos. For each gender, the other is a soughtafter resource to be exploited.

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