Partnerships in Birds: The Study of Monogamy Book

Marlene Zuk - a self-labeled feminist biologist - does a very good job in describing sexual behaviours in both humans and animals, and draws reasonable conclusions about similarities and differences. A great summary is written on the very last page:

"Men and women are not the same, from the standpoint of either physiology or evolution. Neither are male and female goldfish, or fruit flies, or weasels. But this does not mean that men and women do not deserve to be treated equally. At the same time, we can achieve equality without becoming sexual separatists."

Sexual Selections brings up a lot of interesting topics. One of my favorite quotes:

"...that some species of snakes form writhing balls of mating individuals must imply that - what? Orgies are natural? Sexually voracious females are to be applauded? There is not a moral to every story in animal behavior."

This is actually a reoccurring topic in the book - whether it's reasonable or not to claim that a behaviour is natural for us humans just because it exists in some animals. The writer thinks the answer most of the time is no. Or to be more precise, it is not accurate to draw moral conclusions for humanity based on observations of the animal kingdom. I personally find that to be very reasonable.

However, there's one part in the book in which the author makes an interesting claim when talking about the complexity of different sciences:

"We say, "It's not rocket science" to mean that something is not difficult, the assumption being that rocket science requires a lot of mathematical reasoning, which by definition means it must be hard. We don't say, "It's not sonnet writing," even though most people would have at least as hard a time writing a decent sonnet as sending a space shuttle into the sky."

This was quite the trigger for me, and I'm only saying it in a half-jokingly fashion. Writing beautiful poetry might not be something I'm an expert on, but actually, I'm not too good at sending rockets to space either - so hence I should come from a pretty unbiased point of view. So let's be frank. Rocket science is harder, it's way more complex to send an object into space than to scribble a few words on paper - no matter how beautiful they may be. There, I said it. The points being made in the chapter still stands, but I just couldn't let such a sacrilege go unmentioned.

Jokes aside, I really enjoyed this book and learned a lot reading it.