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I had been asking sex questions on a human evolution group, and was told more than once to read Sperm Wars. "It explains everything." The book focuses heavily on infidelity and explains the biological basis of sexual behavior. I was a little worried about "knowing too much"; that this knowledge would depress me and ruin my sex life. I bought a copy and lost it before reading it.

Recently, it came up in conversation again, and, feeling more along the lines of "not knowing enough" about the biology of sex this time, I bought another copy and pushed myself to read it.

After reading it? The biology is interesting, and some of the descriptions of subsequent human behavior are enlightening and make perfect sense to me, but some of the other conclusions are less than convincing. (And some have been disproven. See the comments on this review.) It wasn't exactly life-changing, and certainly hasn't hurt any aspect of my sex life.

Although his research found that only 4 percent of conceptions take place as a result of sperm wars, and 9 out of 10 children are born from routine monogamous intercourse, the premise of the book is that this is the "major force in the shaping of human sexuality", and all of our sexual behaviors are explained in relation to it. "Well, people that study sperm competition are a fairly conceited lot actually. They think it explains everything to do with sexual behaviour."

He says to read through his scholarly papers if you doubt his conclusions. Instead of just saying "trust me", I'd feel a lot better if he included a brief summary of the supporting data nearby.

Most importantly, many of the connections he makes between evolutionary biology and conscious behavior seem a bit too speculative, based on a narrow-minded interpretation of human ethology.

The most obvious example to me is the section where he states that men are averse to using condoms, and then goes about explaining why. For instance, men try to have sex without condoms because they "spoil the man's subconscious rationale for having routine sex". A man would only have sex with a condom so that he can trick the woman into having sex without one later. "Subconsciously, his body realizes the futility of casual sex with no chance of conception."

Of course, this is silly. Men don't like sex with condoms because it doesn't feel as good. Simple as that. Why doesn't it feel as good? Well, that's where biology comes in. But it's pretty simple: Evolution made men adept at determining whether they are in a real vagina or not, and varies the amount of pleasure they will feel accordingly. Their conscious decision of whether to use one or not is made partially on the basis of the amount of pleasure they will feel. That's it. It has nothing to do with a "subconscious" urge to impregnate women or anything.

I didn't understand why the book was so "controversial" until the last third, where he basically says that women's bodies secretly want to be raped, homosexuals are just "practicing" for heterosexuality, and women pursue prostitution as a reproductive strategy.

It's easy to use a simple model of individual natural selection to explain a desire to have sex with multiple partners, but how do you explain the fact that I and many of my friends don't want to procreate at all? The fact that some priests/monks have trouble living completely celibate lives is explained quite easily by such a model, but the fact that these men would pursue such a life in the first place, and in the majority of cases succeed, is not. Organisms certainly evolve on this level, but also on many others. He doesn't take into account the possibility of evolved behaviors that are altruistic rather than selfish, and completely ignores the cultural evolution/memetic side of things.

Describing human biology is straightforward; it either does things or it doesn't. Connecting this low-level functionality to high-level behavior is not so simple.