Sperm Wars: Infidelity, Sexual Conflict, and Other Bedroom Battles PDF

Rating: (36 reviews) Author: Visit Amazon's Robin Baker Page ISBN : 9781560258483 New from $13.17 Format: PDF

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About the Author

Robin Baker is a bestselling author in the field of sexual biology whose books include SPERM WARS (Basic, 1996), BABY WARS (Ecco, 1999), and SEX IN THE FUTURE (Arcade, 2000). From 1980-96 he was Reader in Zoology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Manchester, and he has over a hundred scientific papers and magazine articles to his name. His work and ideas on the evolution of human behavior have been featured in many television and radio programs around the world.

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• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; Revised edition (January 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560258489
• ISBN-13: 978-1560258483
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 7.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Sperm Wars: Infidelity, Sexual Conflict, and Other Bedroom Battles PDF

Among animals, humans seem unusually obsessed with sex and thus a bit separated from the rest of the animal biology, which seems to feature a preponderance of 10-second sex acts. Robin Baker uses a lifetime of university study to try to explain human behavior objectively through case studies and discussions at at rate of one per chapter. It is a mixture of illumination, rationalization and sadly some repetition as the explanations seem to cycle through in the ~33 chapters. Most of the time, he hits his points, but sometimes he seems to miss obvious ones; for instance in the "rough sex" chapter, the woman's reproductive advantage in marrying a mate is discussed but the male perspective in such mate exploration is not. Mate selection by physical endowment is essentially entirely neglected, yet in human societies it is the norm that most people have multiple partners over a lifetime. In fact, in this book sperm wars really alludes to instances in which multiple matings occur in a short enough time span that sperm of different mates are selected in the woman's reproductive tract--a topic of a number of chapters. Practically every sexual combination is presented and explained, even when it is a bit stretched, as for instance the explanation as to why homo- or bisexuality, lesbian or gay behavior may contribute to reproductive success. In his role, the author is largely amoral--an observing biologist trying to explain a role for behavior in reproductive success rather than judging its societal context--though sometimes outcome of the occasional case study seem to bear moral shadings. For those who want to learn about the biology underlying human sexual behavior, this book has some interesting ideas.

'Sperm Wars' is the type of book to give sociobiology a bad name. Of course, to many social scientists, rightly or wrongly, sociobiology already has a bad name. This is why the term is now rarely used and euphemisms such as behavioural ecology and evolutionary psychology were invented.

(I use the term sociobiology rather than the more fashionable terms evolutionary psychology and human behavioural ecology advisedly, because many of Baker's claims actually deal with physiology rather than psychology or behaviour and therefore, strictly speaking, fall outside the remit of behavioural ecology and psychology.)

Among the most familiar of the many charges levelled against evolutionary psychology are the claims, firstly, that evolutionary psychologists spin speculative untested (or even inherently untestable) `just-so' stories, and, secondly, that evolutionary psychologists are so-called `ultra-Darwinians' or `Darwinian fundamentalists' who claim that every human trait is necessarily an adaptation. In general, these charges have little merit.

However, Sperm Wars, is the exception that proves the rule. For once, both these familiar charges have some merit. In respect of virtually all of Baker's claims, an alternative non-adaptive explanation in which the characteristic in question is viewed as a by-product of more general purpose adaptations rather than itself adaptive is available and in some cases at least as plausible as Baker's own account.