Sex at Dawn
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
"Sex at Dawn is the single most important book about human sexuality since Alfred Kinsey unleashed Sexual Behavior in the Human Male on the American public in 1948." --Dan Savage "This book takes a swing at pretty much every big idea on human nature: that poverty is an inevitable consequence of life on earth, that mankind is by nature brutish, and, most important, that humans evolved to be monogamous. ... [Sex at Dawn] sets out to destroy almost each and every notion of the discipline, turning the field on its head and taking down a few big names in science in the process. ... Funny, witty, and light ... the book is a scandal in the best sense, one that will have you reading the best parts aloud and reassessing your ideas about humanity's basic urges well after the book is done."--Kate Daily "Hobbes took the madness of his age, considered it “normal,” and projected it back into prehistoric epochs of which he knew next to nothing. What Hobbes called “human nature” was a projection of seventeenth-century Europe, where life for most was rough, to put it mildly. Though it has persisted for centuries, Hobbes’s dark fantasy of prehistoric human life is as valid as grand conclusions about Siberian wolves based on observations of stray dogs in Tijuana."--Sex at Dawn (2010) Christopher Ryan |
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (2010) is a book co-authored by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá.
The book argues that human beings evolved in egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands in which sexual interaction was a shared resource, much like food, child care, group defense, and so on. In this, they agree to a degree with the work of Lewis H. Morgan who proposed in the 19th century that pre-agricultural humans lived in "primal hordes" in which property and paternity was communal.
Though Darwin disagreed with Morgan's thesis, believing "pre-civilized" humans to have been polygynous (like gorillas), he respected Morgan's scholarship greatly.
They believe that much of evolutionary psychology has been conducted with a bias regarding human sexuality. They believe that the public and many researchers are guilty of the "Flintstonization" of hunter-gatherer society; that is to say projecting modern assumptions and beliefs onto earlier societies. Thus they believe there has been a bias to assuming that our species is primarily monogamous despite evidence to the contrary. They believe for example, that our sexual dimorphism, testicle size, appetite for sexual novelty, various cultural practices, and hidden female fertility, among other factors strongly suggest a non-monogamous, non-polygynous history.
