Book Review – Sex on Earth, by Jules Howard

Book Review, Sex on Earth by Jules Howard

Sex on Earth is a fun romp through the animal kingdom that is hard to put down. Accurate but not academic, Howard surveys animals for what is weird, wild, and, ultimately for that particular animal, normal. Of course, these adjectives are only used by human watchers: whale sex is weird to me only because I’m not a whale. You’ll come away with a sense that whatever your sex life looks like, it’s pretty boring.

He includes most of the standbys. Things like shovel-shaped appendages that male dragonflies use to scrape females clean of sperm deposited from previous matings. Or rape-like duck coitus with females reshaping their vagina to fertilize eggs with sperm only from the male with the brightest beak. But there’s lots to learn here, even for an old biologist: I didn’t know that some reptiles perform a kind of pre-coital masturbation to speed things up. Seems that they don’t like taking their time on the sidewalk doing it while hungry hawks scan the ground from overhead. Speed is the game here.

I like that he explores the entire animal kingdom – hence the book’s title – form sex crazed protozoa (that might be a stretch) to whale penis bones (the blue whale’s penis is about ten feet long and twelve inches in diameter – try holding that thing up without a support!) I like, too, that aside from simple voyeurism to sell a book, Howard dives deeper into reproduction to search out evolutionary explanations for all manner of acts and behaviors.

It’s a light-hearted book that is easy to read and entertaining. Readers who enjoyed Forsyth’s A Natural History of Sex will notice similarities but still learn new things.

Go here on Amazon for Wild Sex.
See it here at Barnes and Noble.
Author Jules Howard’s website.
For more interesting stuff, go here to listen to Carin Bondars’ TED Talk: The birds and the bees.

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