Nature's Nether Regions: What the Sex Lives of Bugs, Birds, by Menno Schilthuizen

By Menno Schilthuizen

A travel of evolution's such a lot inventive—and essential—creations: animal genitalia
Forget opposable thumbs and dogs tooth: the most important anatomical transformations among people and chimps are stumbled on under the belt. In Nature's Nether Regions, ecologist and evolutionary biologist Menno Schilthuizen invitations readers to find the wondrous range of animalian reproductive organs. Schilthuizen packs this pleasant learn with unbelievable clinical insights whereas protecting an soaking up narrative type equivalent to Mary Roach and Jerry Coyne. With illustrations all through and brilliant box anecdotes—among them laser surgical procedure on a fruit fly's privates and a snail orgy—Nature's Nether areas is a party of lifestyles in all sizes and shapes.

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Extra resources for Nature's Nether Regions: What the Sex Lives of Bugs, Birds, and Beasts Tell Us About Evolution, Biodiversity, and Ourselves

Sample text

We might like to re-mould it, but its existence we can scarcely doubt. Yet, while perceiving it as given, we should not mistake its genesis. This scheme was not the work of Nature, or of any other such hypostatised and personified abstraction. It is artificial, man-developed-a 'socio-fact' in the jargon of some. What this generation can hope to affect is not so much the present inherited structure of the given scheme of things, mancreated though it be: but, the manner in which the coming SOCIAL MAPS 9 generation comes to read, re-interpret, and, in re-interpreting, to re-mould, the scheme.

It is not an XYZ book, but an ABC. Who indeed, without an overplus of self-assurance, could license himself for the attempting of such a book? And who, without a shudder of selfdistrust, could then present his product to the shrugs or the inattention of the wise and the others who know? When the new-born duckling discards its shell, it is as with an adult awareness of what water will be like, and aptitudes adequate to its adventurings in the river. With the human infant it is conspicuously different.

In that sense at least it really does. And this after all is also really the case with much else that we have to reckon with in our social experience. What most commonly counts in the social universe is not simply whether something has existence in fact, but whether it has existence in effect. And in effect at THE NATION AND THE IMAGINATION 17 least the team is real, the tribe is real and the nation is real. Did the image of the team not exist, the position would be otherwise. But exist it does-the image of the team-as does the image of the tribe, and of the nation.

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