The Sexual Evolution
How 500 Million Years of Sex, Gender, and Mating Shape Modern Relationships
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- 21,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
“A bulletproof case that sexual diversity exists in the natural world…The Sexual Evolution is a thoughtfully and delightfully written book full of illuminating and entertaining information that will be new to most readers. At a time when ignorance and misinformation about sex, gender, reproduction, and intimacy abound, we could all benefit from reading this research-packed tour.” — Science
Evolutionary biologist Nathan H. Lents knows what makes humans unique—and it’s most definitely not our sexual diversity. A professor at John Jay College, Lents has spent his career studying what makes us, well, us, and contrary to what the culture warriors want people to believe—diverse sexual behavior is not a new development, or even a human one. It didn’t just emerge from a progressive culture; it’s the product of billions of years of evolutionary experimentation throughout the animal kingdom. It’s not a modern story, a Florida story, or even a human story. It’s a biological story.
In The Sexual Evolution, Lents takes readers on a journey through the animal world, from insects to apes, revealing what the incredible array of sexual diversity can teach us about our own diverse beauty. Nature, it turns out, has made a lot of space for diverse genders and sexual behaviors. And why? Because when it comes to evolution—diversity wins. This is not just a political or social message, instead it’s rooted in science and cultivated from understanding the full breadth of sexuality that exists throughout the world.
With shades of both Frans de Waal and Esther Perel, Lents’s storytelling is as fascinating as it is topical, offering eye-opening stories about the diversity of animal life, while relating it to our own sexual journey as a species. At once a forceful rebuttal to bigotry and a captivating dive into the secret sex lives of animals, The Sexual Evolution is the rare book of pop science that leans into the controversy. Sex, the reactionaries say, should only be for procreation between a man and a woman, anything else goes against nature. Well, nature would like a word with them.
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"When it comes to a more expansive, diverse, and flexible attitude toward gender and sexuality, we can learn a lot by looking beyond our own species," according to this enthralling survey. Lents (Human Errors), a biology professor at John Jay College, CUNY, explains that same-sex intercourse is extremely common in the animal kingdom, noting, for instance, that female bonobos have sex with each other more often than with males as a form of bonding and social climbing. Many species have more than two ways to express gender (loosely construed as "patterns of behavior that are either sexualized or tied to reproduction"), Lents contends, discussing how male bluegill sunfish come in two biologically distinct types, the smaller of which resembles a female and engages in three-way mating rituals with larger males and females. Elsewhere, Lents emphasizes how few animals practice sexual monogamy, explaining how couplings among birds were long assumed to equate with sexual exclusivity until genetic testing in the late 1980s revealed the high prevalence of hatchlings sired by a male other than their mother's partner. Lents gleefully tears down cis, hetero, and monogamous norms, outlining surprising case studies that give the lie to restrictive conceptions of gender and sex. The result is an indispensable glimpse into the queerness of animals.
