Olivia Judson - Dr Tatianas Sex Advice to All Creation

Ever wondered why sine women bite off your head, or why some guy always gets all the girls? Ever pondered why some men bring you balloons while others leave you their genitals? Dr Tatianas Sex Advice to All Creation is the book for you.

Quiry, entertaining and brilliant, Dr Tatiana, the racy new agony aunt, explains all this and much more. She discloses the best time to hae sex change, how to have a virgin birth, when to seduce your sisters or eat you lover. She also discusses more mundane matterssuch as male pregnancy, homosexual rape and the joys of a detachable penis. For Dr Tatiana, the first agony aunt learned in natural history and evolutionary biology, receives letters from creatures great and small who are worried about their sex lives. She cajoles, reproves and reassures hear anxious correspondentswhether they are lions or bedbugs, spiders or sea lugs, hyaenas or manateesand reveals why they have the problems they do. In giving her solutions, she explains the evolutionary biology of sex, from Darwins theory of sexual selection to why sexual reproduction exits at all.

This book is a fusion of science and natural history, a blend of wit and rigour that will fascinate and inform.

Olivia Judson

The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex

ePub r1.0

Titivillus 17.12.17

Olivia Judson, 2002

Editor digital: Titivillus

ePub base r1.2

For Horace, who taught me to write

OLIVIA P. JUDSON (London, 1970) is an evolutionary biologist and award-winning science journalist and writer. She received her doctorate in biological sciences from Oxford University before joining the staff of The Economist, where she wrote about biology and medicine and won the prestigious Glaxo Wellcome/Association of British Science Writers Award. After leaving The Economist, she has written for a wide variety of other publications, including The New York Times, Nature, The Guardian, The Financial Times, and The Daily Telegraph.

She has also given a lectures and seminars at places including Harvard, Stanford, the University of Lausanne, and the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

She is presently a research fellow at Imperial College London.

Dr Tatianas Sex Advice to All Creation is her first book-and her first TV show.

Dr. Tatiana was born in Oliver Mortons kitchen, with Oliver himself, Jonathan Rauch, Anthony Gottlieb, Brian Barry, and Peter David attending as midwives. Without their help, she would never have come into being. She made her debut in The Economist. Many thanks to Bill Emmott for permission to draw on that first column for this book.

An enormous number of people have contributed to this book, whether by answering queries, helping hunt down obscure scientific papers, catching errors, commenting on parts of the manuscript, or simply letting me talk their ears off as I wrestled with ideas and arguments. For help with particular subjects or organisms, I would like to thank Phil Agnew, Matz Berggren, Philippe Bouchet, Stuart Butchart, Bill Cade, Tracey Chapman, Adam Chippindale, Andrew Cockburn, Bryan Danforth, Anne-Katrin Eggert, David Funk, David Gems, Darryl Gwynne, Peter Henderson, Ren Hessling, Rolf Hoekstra, Laurence Hurst, David Mark Welch, Nico Michiels, Christine Nalepa, Steve Palumbi, Charlie Paxton, Scott Pitnick, Heather Proctor, Bill Rice, Scott Sakaluk, Janet Shellman, Steve Shuster, Leigh Simmons, Mike Siva-Jothy, Donald Steinkraus, Willie Swanson, David Tarpy, Scott Taylor, Ethan Temeles, Barbara Thorne, Fritz Vollrath, Dave Walter, Stuart West, Martin Wikelski, Kenneth Yeargan, and Larry Young. The staff of several libraries were extremely helpful; but special thanks to the staff in the entomology library of Londons Natural History Museum, who were tireless in helping me dig out information on obscure insects. Thanks, too, to Imperial College for the free run of their facilities. I am grateful to Ursula Mittwoch, who, in a letter responding to my column in The Economist, drew my attention to problems with Batemans principle and prompted me to inspect the subject more closely. Thomas Bataillon, Austin Burt, Isabelle Chuine, Elodie Gazave, Philippe Jarne, Nicholas Judson, Thomas Lenormand, Armand Leroi, Yannis Michalakis, Ben Normark, Michel Raymond, Franois Rousset, and Denis Roze were regular and stimulating sounding boards; their suggestions and good humor were indispensable.

Peter Barnes, Thomas Bataillon, Bruce Greig, Greg Hurst, Ben Normark, Andrew Pomiankowski, Michel Raymond, Mark Suzman, and Stuart West kindly agreed to be guinea pigs for an early draft of part one; Austin Burt, Barbara Mable, and David Mark Welch read a draft of the final chapter; Caroline Daniel, Thomas Lenormand, Franois Rousset, Anthony Shewell, and Mark Suzman read the entire manuscript. Many thanks to all of them for helpful comments and vigorous criticisms. Bill Hamilton was the first to alert me to the problem of the evolution of sex, and to the extraordinary variety of sexual practices out there in nature. This book grew out of the work that I did with him during my doctorate, and I am sorry that he did not live to meet Dr. Tatiana.

Many thanks to Georges Borchardt and DeAnna Heindel for helping make this project a reality. To Alison Samuel and Penny Hoare at Chatto, and to John Sterling and Sara Bershtel at Metropolitan, for whom waiting for Dr. Tatiana must have sometimes felt like waiting for Godot, I owe particular thanks for encouragement and patience throughout. Many thanks, too, to Penny Hoare, Roslyn Schloss, Shara Kay, and above all to Sara Bershtel and her colleague Riva Hocherman, for comments and suggestions that greatly improved the manuscript.

Dr. Tatiana was blessed with an array of agony uncles: I am forever indebted to Dan Haydon, Horace Judson, Gideon Lichfield, and Jonathan Swire, all of whom read and reread draft after draft of chapter after chapter, gave suggestions that showed me paths through difficult thickets, and helped me break through bouts of writers block, all the while providing boundless encouragement at all hours of the day and night.

Ive been lucky to have had inspirational surroundings. I made most of the conceptual breakthroughs while staying at the Hotel de lOrange, in Sommires, France. Philippe de Frmont and his family welcomed a stranger, and provided a tranquil and beautiful sanctuary (and incidentally, improved my French). Jonathan Swire generously lent me Mosewell, an idyllic setting for writing. Sir John and Lady Swire, and Barnaby and Camilla Swire pampered the hermit whod landed in their midst and gave me enormous encouragement and enthusiasm (not to mention, offering fabulous distractions that tempted me away from Dr. Tatiana for a few hours here and there). To Philippe and to the Swires, I cannot adequately express my gratitude.

Finally, I must thank Horace, for always being encouraging; Nicholas, for always laughing, and for plundering distant libraries for obscure papers on my behalf; my late mother, who taught me to play practical jokes (though she wouldve pretended to find Dr. Tatiana shocking); Mark, who rashly suggested I write a book about sex in the first place and had the misfortune to bear the brunt of the consequences; and Jonathan, for everything.