Sperm Wars: The Science of Sex

Rating:
Summary: It's a jungle in there
Review: A somewhat amazing book on how women can collection sperm from different partners and how the collections of sperm will duke it out within her body in the chase to fertilize the egg, among many other amazing things, including the fact that some sperm serve not to swim after the egg, but to block another man's sperm from the chase. Written from an evolutionary point of view, Robin Baker's text is very readable and certain to make many people uncomfortable. It has had a remarkable effect on me. I suddenly realized how insignificant our consciousness is even in something like reproduction. So much goes on beneath our consciousness, and many things within our consciousness are done for reasons we don't understand or are mistaken about. For example, according to Robin Baker, masturbation serves a reproductive purpose! I won't try to explain here, but he convinced me. Also group sex may actually help a husband to get his wife to bear his child! Read it. I kid you not.

Women come off pretty much as unconscious instruments of the process, men to a slightly lesser degree. All this is as I have always thought, but I had no idea about the details, and I mistakenly thought people, as conscious beings, had a greater effect on reproduction than we actually do. Incidentally at least ten percent of our children are not fathered by the husband, and close to twenty percent of conceptions are from sperm other than that of the husband (revelations not unique to this book). "Nowhere is there a woman true and fair," spake the poet. The duplicity of sex is required according to Baker because the woman needs to simultaneously mate with the champion (which is what she is always trying to do) while at the same time keep a man around to help take care of the offspring. Implicit in the book is the idea that people naturally cheat on their spouses as a strategy, a strategy that has consequences, both positive and negative. Sexually speaking, as in everything else, we are instruments of the process more than we think.

This is an excellent, if somewhat creepy, book with the tales of sex and infidelity and scheming by both sexes ringing entirely true. But strange to say I feel like a Victorian, wanting to have a nice cup of tea and talk about something else.

Rating:
Summary: Good book-some issues with the scholarship
Review: I found Sperm Wars to be quite interesting. It is one of the few books that addresses the issue of which men reproduce and why(i.e. Bakers claim that wealthier, more outgoing and better educated men tend to reproduce more effectively through cuckoldry and divorce and remarriage than the general population of men). The big reason I can't give the book a higher rating is some of the scholarship seems a little slipshod. For example, Baker claims that bi-sexual men can reproduce as effectively as heterosexual men because bi-sexual men 1) tend to have fewer children over their lifetime 2) tend to to have what children they do at an earlier age.

The mathematics of Bakers claim here just don't work out. Still, this book does cover and important and neglected topic-read it, but read it critically.

Rating:
Summary: Sex and science.
Review: I fully agree with reader kjharrin.
If some readers believe that Dr. Baker is too speculative or wrong, they have to prove it scientifically. As a matter of fact, this book is a popular version of Dr. Baker's scientific work.
Indeed, the facts are harsh. We are all more or less children of sperm wars and we have all genes of rapists and killers in our body, otherwise we wouldn't be here.
The sex scenes are explicit. But how could the treatment of a theme like this not be explicit? OK, this work could have been written in Latin for the happy few, like doctors did a century and more ago.
I must congratulate Dr. Baker for his original and pioneering scientific research on for a long time taboo items.
I recommend this book to everybody interested in human, also biological, physical and mental sexual behaviour.