Ever since Adam and Eve: The Evolution of Human Sexuality [Paperback]

'Fascinating and often brilliant … Aimed at a popular readership and lavishly illustrated, it comes up with much of its best material in little boxed off sections.' Humphrey Carpenter, The Sunday Times

'… a comprehensive and fascinating study … he is to be congratulated for so elegantly opening up this world.' Expository Times

'… a tour de force.' Helen Fisher, The Quarterly Review of Biology

'This is the kind of book that has already generated great discussions among my friends and associates. It will make a wonderful gift, even for those with no more than a passing interest in biology or science. The authors are to be congratulated for having put together a book that that is at once thought-provoking, entertaining, and sumptuously attractive.' Abraham Morgentaler, The Lancet

Eminent scientists Malcolm Potts and Roger Short view the broad panorama of human sexual and reproductive behaviour to reveal an inextricable mixture of nature and nurture - a combination of innate actions which have evolved over the millennia to adapt us to a nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle, overlain by more recent cultural constraints imposed by civilization. For each of life's milestones - sexual intercourse, conception, pregnancy, birth, puberty, love, marriage, parenting, menopause and death - they describe the biology behind our actions and consider how pressures imposed by various historical and contemporary cultures have further influenced our behaviour. By looking back at the past they attempt to make sense of the present, to see how and why these cultural modifications arose, how they have contributed to the richness of human sexual behaviour, and what our biological and cultural inheritance can teach us about safeguarding the continuation of our species.

A lively and entertaining account of the broad panorama of human sexual behaviour which reveals our actions to be an inextricable mixture of nature and nurture - a combination of innate actions evolved over the millenia, overlain by more recent cultural constraints imposed by civilization.