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3.47 AVERAGE
3.47 AVERAGE
"...we humans still carry the legacy of hundreds of millions of years of vertebrate evolution engraved deeply into our sexuality. Over that legacy, our art, language and culture have only recently added a veneer."
Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond
This is the first evolutionary biology book I have ever read and I am mostly new to the subject, so I don't have much to say whether it lacks scientific rigor or not, but it definitely caught my eye and lured me to read more about the subject( neglecting the evident reason that I am a male undergrad!).
His arguments sounds convincing to me as long as they matched my intuitions but I actually never looked for detailed scientific references of his claims.The writing is attractive enough for a reader to finish one chapter in one go.All in all, I would suggest this to anyone who is curious about the subject and is eager to hear a pretty delicate and interesting explanation!
His arguments sounds convincing to me as long as they matched my intuitions but I actually never looked for detailed scientific references of his claims.The writing is attractive enough for a reader to finish one chapter in one go.All in all, I would suggest this to anyone who is curious about the subject and is eager to hear a pretty delicate and interesting explanation!
The book would not be so bad, if it had another title. Jared Diamond did not answer the question (but it is a difficult one), so if you are looking forward to finally knowing the answer, you will definitely be disappointed. There are lots of holes in the presented theories. It seems weird to me to look for the origin of evolutionary pressures in the current Euro-American monogamous (but not always) pairing.
Cũng dễ đọc, không quá nhiều thông tin, không bị lan man.
informative
lighthearted
reflective
slow-paced
A good and short read on various idiosyncrasies of human sexual behaviour. Unfortunately does not go much deeper and some theories are admittedly speculative. Might serve better as an introduction to the subject and requires further readings elsewhere for better understanding of the true nature of our sexuality.
informative
medium-paced
I enjoyed this a lot. Jared Diamond is a rigorous scientist but has a very approachable writing style. One of the things that fascinated me about this was that the long-term, unconscious, evolutionary goals of humankind straight-up doesn't apply to me because I'm not going to be a mother. All of the behavior discussed in the book was about passing on genetic inheritance, and the benefits vs drawbacks to expending energy towards childcare, and I don't give a shit about that. It was pretty freeing. I don't feel any responsibility at all to perpetuate my species so I'm just like, Awesome, I'm gonna sit this one out and watch from the sidelines. Have fun hetero parents. He doesn't really make any arguments about gender, doesn't talk about queerness at all, just gives us the broad biological breakdown of why chromosomally typical male/female bodies have come to be the way they are, which I think has its place. He does acknowledge deviations from the norm, like intersex individuals, but he's not really involved in questions of psychology and consciousness and personhood and, thank god, morality. It's cool to think about this topic, to go from a macro view, an evolutionary to a physiological viewpoint and then beyond that into some more micro questions of gender, which is where I'm much better versed. I like to think that with such a wide knowledge base of all the variation among species and ethnologies in the world that Jared Diamond would be a pretty cool and accepting guy, very nonjudgemental, and that makes me like this book even more.
informative
medium-paced
Short read. The author argues that monogamy is evolutionary based on how we reproduce and our long life cycle.