This injects a timely splash of colour into a field increasingly given to dreary black-and-white thinking. Essential reading that proves Nature has always been the ultimate advocate for diversity, and has been having a perfectly marvellous time at it.
If you've ever wondered where all this delightful diversity around gender and sexuality is coming from, Nathan H. Lents has some excellent news: it's not chaos at all, and it certainly didn't start with us. Nature has been having a marvellous time being queer for the past 500 million years, and we're rather late to the party.
Professor Lents, of John Jay College in New York has made a career of understanding human peculiarities and brings wit and scholarly precision to this book. His attention to detail and wonderfully withering side-eye makes for entertaining reading. The man is funny, which is remarkable when discussing evolutionary biology, and his research is exhaustive and mercifully accessible. His blog is also great fun.
This gambol through nature's mating strategies is pure intellectual pleasure. Male seahorses getting pregnant? Naturally. Sequential hermaphrodite clownfish switching sex when the social situation demands? Obviously. Dolphins engaging in rather enthusiastic same-sex encounters? But of course. The utterly devoted male penguin couples raising chicks together deserve particular mention, as do Hawaii's lesbian Laysan albatrosses – both species are rather brilliantly redefining family values. You'll come away with so many new facts, learning that Humpback whales are super shy, and sing for hours before getting it on!
This book has impeccable timing. We're witnessing extraordinary social transformation as people cheerfully demolish every tired assumption about sex and gender. Biological sex, long considered a neat binary, is being recognised as refreshingly complex. Gender is being decoupled from sex entirely, expanding into a stunning spectrum of possibility. Traditional categories of attraction are being replaced by far more creative terminology. But where's this coming from? Plot twist: not from "progressive culture" at all.
Lents takes particular pleasure in dismantling cisgender, heterosexual and monogamous assumptions, presenting case study after case study that expose the utter absurdity of restrictive thinking about gender and sexuality. This biological diversity isn't some modern invention – it's the product of billions of years of evolutionary experimentation. All that glorious variety is genuinely fascinating.
The author demonstrates with admirable clarity that diverse genders and sexualities serve evolutionary purposes far beyond mere procreation. This is intellectual ammunition of the finest sort – The Sexual Evolution injects much-needed nuance into debates that have become tediously polarised.
The younger generation's wholesale rejection of traditional dating, marriage, and family structures – embracing everything from nonbinary identities to relationship anarchy – isn't youthful rebellion. Lents provides the scientific foundation for what many have long suspected: it's simply biology asserting itself.
This isn't a contemporary story or political statement – it's a biological narrative stretching back half a billion years. Despite what pearl-clutching culture warriors desperately wish people to believe, this spectacular array of sexual and gender expression has always been nature's modus operandi.
For LGBTQ+ readers and anyone engaged in these crucial conversations, The Sexual Evolution is both deeply informative and rather wonderfully validating. ( his front page dedication is utterly sweet.) Lents has produced an indispensable examination of natures queerness that demolishes prejudices held by even the supposedly enlightened among us. This perspective-shifting book advocates for understanding whilst remaining thoroughly entertaining.
The Sexual Evolution injects a timely splash of colour into a field increasingly given to dreary black-and-white thinking. It's the book we rather desperately needed: essential reading that proves Mother Nature has always been the ultimate advocate for diversity, and she's been having a perfectly marvellous time at it.
Available now from the publishers websites and all good bookshops.
