Much of what we take for granted about human sexuality - sort of monogamous, co-parenting, menopause, non-procreative sex - is downright weird by the standards of the rest of the animal kingdom. This book tries to look at why and how these practices evolved.

It's an interesting how others might see us account. The book dates from 1997 and it particularly shows when talking about sex that cannot result in procreation such as during pregnancy etc., without any mention of homosexuality in our and other species. ( )

FINALLY! THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION EVERYONE'S BEEN ASKING!

And the answer is... we don't know. That's also the answer to a lot of related sexual questions from menopause to penis size. Humans are outliers and we don't really have any definitive answers. What we do get however is a hell of a lot of speculation. Now some of this is based solidly in research science, such as the glamorous collecting of monkey piss to try and analyze which monkey is in estrus and when. The remainder is unfortunately a lot of "just so" storytelling, using evolutionary theories and sexual selection and a dash of social science findings to create plausible scienc-y sounding narratives for why humans are an outlier. Diamond's books often stumble as they try to answer the big questions on this very same step. One illustration of the problem with this is exemplified in the book as he describes two competing theories for why human females have "hidden" fertile periods and not a gigantic glowing ass. One theory says this is to create defensive monogamous relationships, the other says it's creating a society where everyone's sleeping around which protects women and children as any male could possibly have fathered the kids. Diamond tries to synthesize the view by saying it's a bit of one and a bit of the other. The only real hard science here is a comparative view of other primates and their evolutionary strategies.

It's not so much the evolution of human sexuality as it is "some plausible sounding evolutionary explanatory models that might explain" human sexuality. How satisfying that ends up being depends a bit on what you went into the book wanting and how much you like asking "how do you actually know that". ( )

No hay una autoridad más preparada y competente que Jared Diamond, reconocido experto en el campo de la fisiología, para responder a estas y otras inquietantes preguntas. Con su amena y fascinante experiencia científica, Diamond analiza la desconcertante evolución que ha configurado la sexualidad de los seres humanos, tan diferente al resto de especies animales.

it is clearly not written by an accurate evolutionary biologist point of view.
rather pop ( )

Interesting; some enlightening things to learn about the evolutionary-biology aspects of human sexuality in comparison with that of other animals. My only objections: (a) it felt at times like a short book padded out to a middle-size one by his repetitive phrasing style, and (b) the title is misleading: a question that the book doesn't really answer. ( )