Ever Since Adam and Eve: The Evolution of Human Sexuality

Few would argue that sex is a great preoccupation of humankind. In our private lives, sex can contribute to rewarding companionship, or conversely, the lack of it, to utter loneliness. With so much at stake, it is no wonder that sexuality is the most feared and repressed of our characteristics. In this fascinating book, eminent scientists Malcolm Potts and Roger Short attempt to make sense of our increasingly complicated sexual situation. For each of life's milestones--sexual intercourse, conception, pregnancy, birth, puberty, love, marriage, parenting, menopause, and death--they describe the biology behind our actions and consider how pressures imposed by various historical and contemporary cultures have further influenced our behavior. By looking at the past, they attempt to make sense of the present, to see how and why these cultural modifications arose, how they have contributed to the richness of human sexual behavior, and what our biological and cultural inheritance can teach us about safeguarding the continuation of our species. The authors examine how sex relates to diverse topics such as love, power, and mortality. The result is a lively and thought-provoking discussion of one of the most complex elements of the human condition. Malcolm Potts is the Bixby Professor at the Population and Family Planning School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Textbook of Contraceptive Practice (Cambridge 1983) and Abortion (Cambridge 1977). Roger Short is the Wexler Professorial Fellow in the Department of Perinatal Medicine at the University of Melbourne's Royal Women's Hospital. He is an editor of Reproduction of Mammals (Cambridge 1985).