Reviews for The Sex life of the unmarried adult

The average rating for The Sex life of the unmarried adult based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-05-30 00:00:00 Chet Hurley This is a good review of Anthropology 101 together with some interesting hypotheses of why humans "bond" in serial monogamy. What bugs me about anthropologists in general, and Fisher in this text specifically, is their tendency to reconstruct the past through the lenses of how we think today. For example, use of the word "logical." I don't think we can assume that any hypothesis in necessarily "logical." It is logical in terms of how we see the world today, but I'm not convinced that using a 19th, 20th or 21st-century perspective is going to build a realistic picture of what was going on 20 million years ago when dryopithecus was hanging out. Another problem I have is the use of data collected on other primate groups (orangutans, gorillas or Goodall's chimpanzees) as some sort of indicator of the behavior of our "ancestors." If human behavior has evolved, then hasn't gorilla or chimpanzee behavior evolved? Even if they seem "primitive" compared to us, they are still affected by natural selection and changes in thought processes or behavioral areas as well. To ignore that fact is to disregard evolutionary theory. Knowing that they were not frozen in time while we moved forward, how can one use their behavior over the past 100 years as a model for what protohominids were like? Brain size is touted again and again as an argument as ancient craniums have been measured and the growth put forward as evidence of our becoming more intelligent, but we know that brain size isn't necessarily an indicator of advanced intelligence. This was an argument used in the 19th-century to "prove" that women were inferior to men: overall brain size is smaller and, disregarding the fact of proportionality, therefore women were considered less intelligent. From my admittedly very basic understanding of the human brain, there are also chemical and electrical factors to take into consideration. Size alone tells us very little, and, unfortunately, we cannot research actual brains from millions of years ago. I also could do without the little dramatizations that Fisher throws in. I understand that she writes for the general public as opposed to the niche of people who study anthropology, but I ended up skipping over those sections after a while because I felt they were useless stories that didn't add anything to the scientific content. Ultimately, I think I am waiting for some Derridian thinker to come along and approach the last million years from a totally unexpected point of view that will be anything but "logical," but entirely plausible anyway because thinking about the past that long ago requires escaping from the constraints of 21st-century thought. I hope this thinker comes before I die!

Review # 2 was written on 2019-12-01 00:00:00 Timothy Perez 14 million years ago, the climate changed. Africa was becoming cooler and drier. The trees were thinning, and the apes were forced to come down to the grasslands to find food. This was dangerous. They had to rely more on each other - strength in numbers. A bit of cooperation and coordination was needed for survival. As the climate change progressed, the woodlands disappeared altogether and it was savanna. 10 million years ago, the apes had to adapt. They couldn't just eat wherever they found food - or they would be eaten themselves. They had to carry off the food to safety, which meant bipedalism was an advantage (hands are more efficient in carrying). As selection pressure pushed them toward walking on two feet, anatomical changes made child birth too dangerous. Those females who tended to give birth prematurely had an advantage - they lived rather than die in child birth. And their offspring survived. But premature infants meant more work for the mother. She couldn't carry the baby on her back as in the four legged days. Carrying baby and food was tough. She needed help. The females who could offer sex for longer periods in each cycle got more help. Selection drove the monthly period of heat longer and longer until it pretty much disappeared. She could now copulate almost all month, during pregnancy and quite soon after birthing. She got the males' favors in return - he shared more meat, and helped around. One thing led to another, and soon they were becoming a bonded pair. This meant a whole lot of new brain functions - communication, planning, feelings like jealousy, kinship. Let this film run few million years. Bingo! We have modern humans. The female's ability to have sex pretty much all the time as pivotal to the evolution of homo sapiens, and this is what distinguishes us from all other creatures till today. And oh, we have technology, language, etc. too. But sex made it all happen.