Why is Sex Fun?: The Evolution of Human Sexuality
Jared Diamond
Jun 2018 · RB Media · Narrated by L.J. Ganser
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5 hr 17 min
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To us humans the sex lives of many animals seem weird. In fact, by comparison with all the other animals, we are the ones with the weird sex lives. How did that come to be?Just count our bizarre ways. We are the only social species to insist on carrying out sex privately. Stranger yet, we have sex at any time, even when the female can't be fertilized (for example, because she is already pregnant, post-menopausal, or between fertile cycles). A human female doesn't know her precise time of fertility and certainly doesn't advertise it to human males by the striking color changes, smells, and sounds used by other female mammals.Why do we differ so radically in these and other important aspects of our sexuality from our closest ancestor, the apes? Why does the human female, virtually alone among mammals go through menopause? Why does the human male stand out as one of the few mammals to stay (often or usually) with the female he impregnates, to help raise the children that he sired? Why is the human penis so unnecessarily large?There is no one better qualified than Jared Diamond-renowned expert in the fields of physiology and evolutionary biology and award-winning author-to explain the evolutionary forces that operated on our ancestors to make us sexually different. With wit and a wealth of fascinating examples, he explains how our sexuality has been as crucial as our large brains and upright posture in our rise to human status.
To us humans the sex lives of many animals seem weird. In fact, by comparison with all the other animals, we are the ones with the weird sex lives. How did that come to be?Just count our bizarre ways. We are the only social species to insist on carrying out sex privately. Stranger yet, we have se...
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3 reviews
Thavamani Azhagan
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March 8, 2019
sex
About the author
JARED DIAMOND is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among his many awards are the US National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, the Wolf Prize for Agriculture, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Rockefeller University's Lewis Thomas Prize honoring the Scientist as Poet, and election to the US National Academy of Sciences. He has published over 200 articles in Discover, Natural History, Nature, and Geo magazines, plus 400 articles in technical scientific journals. Diamond is the author of the international bestselling books Guns, Germs, and Steel (which has sold over seven million copies), Collapse, The Third Chimpanzee, The World Until Yesterday, and Upheaval. The many prizes that these books have won include the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction, Britain's Science Book Prize (twice), Japan's Cosmos Prize, the California Book Award (twice), the Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Germany's Science Book of the Year, Japan's Asahi Shimbun Award for best book of the past decade, France's Lire Prize for best science book published in France, and book prizes of Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland.
JARED DIAMOND is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among his many awards are the US National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, the Wolf Prize for Agriculture, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Rockefeller University's Lewis ...
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