Poking around the library three weeks ago I stumbled on this one, by Jared Diamond, 
professor, popularist, and Pulitzerist for Guns, Germs, and Steel, a great book in which he used anthropology, ecology, and evolutionary biology to explain cultural dominance.
In Why Is Sex Fun? –which isn’t a new book, but who the heck cares—he uses the same tools to answer that question, and others, about human sexuality. And the topic is also durable, Maggie Gyllenhaal narrates these fascinating neuroscience episodes from Discovery’s Curiosity series. Getting off in an MRI machine for the sake of science..who knew?
Why are we the only species to eat in public and mate in private? Why does menopause exist? It doesn’t in other animals. And what about all of the sex people have… most of the sex people have!…that serves no reproductive function? And why do women, unlike other females, not give off signs when they are fertile?
The answers are interesting if not always simple….as you might expect from an author assembling answers from so many different ‘-ologies’. Menopause, for example, makes a lot of sense when you think about it from a scientific perspective, which Jared Diamond definitely does.
As any parent can attest, human children take a LONG time to rear. The mother should be around until the child is fledged, nearly twenty years. AND she can best promote furthering of her genes in latter years by focusing on her children and grandchildren. Again, we parents know, kids not only take a long time to raise, they are a huge investment in time, money, food, energy, heartache, you name it. And with menopause, those kids get 
grandmothers to help out.
Don’t you just feel like a better person for knowing stuff like this?
I do not feel like a better person collecting 25 cent a day library fines for this book. Gotta dash.
