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: Fascinating, but Lacking
Review: Baker certainly opened my eyes to many of the instinctive and difficult-to-understand reasons about why we have sex and with whom. There are some fascinating revelations here. But, as other readers have noted, not much is backed up by data. In fact, a lot of it seems like pure speculation, though Baker presents his theories as "conclusions." He basically holds that our conscious minds have nothing to do with our sexual behavior. Our bodies make all the decisions for us. Baker would have us believe that women are biologically programmed to be conniving sluts and men their unwitting, but horny victims. He notes that up to ten percent of babies are not the children of the husband or long-term partner of the mother, and then he dwells on all the cheating men and women. What about the vast majority of both women and men who remain monogamous during marriage? They really don't get mentioned in the book. In fact, almost all the examples of sexual behavior in the book focus on MINORITY behavior.

The book is not a waste; I would highly recommend it, but readers should be critical. There is no doubt a lot of truth here, but I felt like Baker did not provide enough evidence to back up his theories.

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.

Rating:
Summary: Speculative Non-Fiction
Review: I had high hopes for this book. Being familiar with Baker's preliminary research, I wanted to see some real substantive results. What I got was erotica backed up by pure conjecture and speculation. Where are the numbers, Robin? Where's the data? Other books on this subject that have been written for the casual science reader still contain research results and summations. The book doesn't even have a bibliography! What is interesting is that Baker admits the free-wheeling sexual antics he describes are rare in the population. Yet every one of his "vignettes" encompasses some seedy act of infidelity, deception, betrayal, or other form of biological "oppurtunism". The women are all faithless icons of raw self-interest, they make babies with cads who are "manly" and "aggressive", and then go back to their "partners" who are all dorky nice guys that end up caring for other men's children. This is Robin Baker's rule for male-female relationships. Years of solid research does not bear this out as the standard arrangement. The only example he gives of successful male-female monogamy takes place in a primitive hunter-gatherer society. Hmm...

Rating:
Summary: An amazing book about human sexuality.
Review: I've first heard about the research behind this book in a local newspaper that covered a TV show that discussed it. The claim that 10% of children were not the offsprings of their presumed fathers stuck in my mind.

I bought this book in order to get the details from the "horse's mouth".

Some reviewers have written that this book brings unbased theories. They probably got this impression because this is a "popular science" book - it brings the research's results in a way readable & accessable, rather than the research details and analysis (which are available in a seperate volume, which is prohibitively expensive - well over $100. I think it's price should be significantly reduced to make it a reasonable buy for the average person).

The book presents the material in a very clear way - 37 short scenes describing various sexual behaviours are told, followed by explanations of the whys and mechanisms behind the scenes. The scenes build one on top of the other - the first scenes are used to explain the basic & simple principles, while later scenes are used to explain the finer cases.

The explanations might be shocking to some people, but are actually logical. Every person wants to have as many descendents (children, as well as grandchildren, great grandchildren, etc.) as possible (the less descendents one has, the less influence one has on the human population / gene pool at any future time).

So a woman, who have to invest a lot of time, effort, money, etc to raise each child (at least for the time of pregnancy) naturally want an "ideal man" by their side to help her raise each child - a man who has a long life expectency (= healthy), has a lot of resources (= wealthy), loyal (= wouldnt disappear and leave her with her childs), stable (= doesnt take risks), has good genes (= his genes would help her have more descendents), etc.

A man would like to find the same characterstics in a woman (healthy, wealthy, loyal, has good genes, etc), but has the option to 'launch & forget' - impregnate a woman and leave her during pregnancy, letting her raise a child in which she has an interest while going on to the next woman.

The crucial point is that women have to make compromises on their partners, while men want to excercise their special option.

This leads to infidelity - a woman may choose to live / marry a man who is wealthy, stable, and loyal (= so that he wouldnt spend his resources on children he has by other women) but get the genes from another man (who is judged by health, beuty, etc).

A man would like to help his kids, and would therefore want his woman/women to be loyal and prevent them from getting impregnated by other men, but still use the Cuckoo's trick of having other men raise his children by other women.

And those two paragraphs summarize the motives behind loyalty & monogamy vs. infidelity, as explained by the book.

This book has explicit sex descriptions, which makes it somewhat pornographical and inappropriate for kids without being too explicit for the average adult.

Rating:
Summary: Worst publishing I have ever seen
Review: Regardless of the quality of the content in the book, the copy I received when I purchased from Amazon is THE WORST QUALITY PRINTED BOOK I HAVE EVER SEEN. It looks like a cheap forgery from Hong Kong, seriously. Pages aren't square, typing is faded, binding is cheap and full of errors, the ISBN page is missing, and the inside page claims that it is a Harper Collins published book.

This book stands out like a sore thumb, it looks like a BAD forgery. I think that I got a $2 value book for $20.

Rating:
Summary: Mostly a rebuttal to the negative reviews
Review: There's a lot of silly stuff in some of the negative reviews below (quotations are paraphrased):

1) "Baker's soft porn examples only deal with seedy, sleazy minority behavior. What about the vast majority who are monogamous?" This is multidimensionally silly. Firstly, statistics show that there is no such vast majority; to the extent that there is, it's a vast majority of people who are socialized into paying lip service to one set of ideals while furtively doing something else as their subconscious constructs rationalizations and excuses for why their bodies didn't follow the socialization to do X and went and did Y instead. Secondly, even if a set of circumstances is somewhat atypical, it can still exert decisive evolutionary pressure on a population, given millions of years to operate. If only 1% of people die in car wrecks, over time this will select against people who are bad drivers for genetic reasons (slow reactions, bad eyesight, weak attention span, etc.), though it may take many generations. Thirdly, if a minority trait or a tendency to a particular reproductive choice exists in a population to any significant degree (e.g., bisexuality, or women conceiving ~10% of children through cuckoldry), there *must* be an evolutionary reason for that trait or tendency to have not been eradicated by natural selection pressure. Baker's "soft porn" examples merely work through some of the concrete reasons and situations for why these traits and tendencies might be preserved. Agree or disagree with them if you will, or suggest your own reasons, but merely dismissing them as minority cases is a cop-out.

2) Several reviewers complained about "no hard data or bibliography." As another reviewer stated, the book written for academics by the same authors (Human Sperm Competition) has tons of hard data and a reference/bibliography section that goes on for twenty pages. "Sperm Wars" is written for the general public, so they (wisely) kept all the academic clutter out of this popularization.

3) "It's partly speculation and/or partly-unproven theories." Yes, the authors included some of their more daring ideas in the book (and it's usually obvious where they do, sometimes because they say so); the authors speculate on the reason bisexuality exists, for example, and every educated reader should know without explicit disclaimers by the authors that there is no unanimity within science as to why it exists. Ditto on the authors' ideas about why semen contains many different sperm types. However, I don't agree with those who think that the layman should be excluded from reading about science that remains unfinished or getting the opinions of the various protagonists. The most interesting parts of science are often those where there is vigorous debate; covering the public's ears while the scientists thrash it out is like sequestering the jury just when the lawyers are getting to the juicy stuff. And in this case, the issues being discussed affect everyone's personal life and aren't merely academic debates about missing dark matter in the cosmos or why dinosaurs became extinct.

4) Finally, something that's just incorrect rather than silly. One reviewer remarked that the math didn't work out right on the authors' theory about bisexuality (namely that bisexuality is not eradicated by natural selection because while bisexuals have fewer children, they have them earlier in life). However, the math does work out. Suppose one has two populations N and N*, and that the individuals of each population have on average M and M* children, respectively. After n generations, population N will grow to be N(n) = N(0)xM^n, where N(0) is the size of the initial population and N(n) is the size after n generations, with M^n denoting "M raised to the power n." Similarly, N*(k) = N*(0) x M*^k for the N* population after k generations (having k not equal to n is crucial; I suspect this was the other reviewer's mistake). Dividing the two equations, one gets N*(k)/N(n) = {N*(0)/N(0)} x {M*^k/M^n} (call this equation I). If the ratio of the two populations remains stationary over time (e.g., bisexuals vs. heterosexuals), then N*(k)/N(n) = N*(0)/N(0) (call this equation II), PROVIDED that generation k of the N* population is alive at the same time that generation n of the N population is alive. If it takes the N population T years to reproduce and the N* population T* years to reproduce, then if t is the total elapsed number of years, n = t/T and k = t/T* (call these equations III & IV). If we apply equations II, III, and IV to equation I, we get that (M*)^(t/T*) = (M)^(t/T). Taking the logarithm of both sides and using the fact that log(a^b) = b x log(a), we get (t/T*) x log(M*) = (t/T) x log(M), and cancelling the t from both sides and rearranging yields the result T*/T = log(M*)/log(M). That's the condition that must be satisfied if the ratio of the two populations is to stay the same over time. So if heterosexuals on average have 4 children and bisexuals on average have 3 children, then log(3)/log(4) = 0.79, so bisexuals must reproduce the next generation on average in a time T* equal to 79% of T if their percentage of the population is to stay the same over time.