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77 reviews for:
Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation
Manuel Leite, Martin Seethaler, Olivia Judson
4.01 AVERAGE
77 reviews for:
Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation
Manuel Leite, Martin Seethaler, Olivia Judson
4.01 AVERAGE
Very cool look at evolution, engagingly written as a sex advice column. Factual and speculative. Great little tidbits for wowing people at parties ;)
When you learn to skip some of the text, you find the interesting parts. What I learned is that insects and bugs are really weird...
It was a fun and original way to go about sci-comm and maybe get people a little more interested to or relating with the subject of sexual biology. However, the author's style of "like totally I am chill and totally fun and like awesome" style got a bit distracting and annoying to me after awhile. Perhaps this would be better if it was half the size or in a different medium.
I first read this over a decade ago and it holds up better than anything else I liked in high school. Did you know that armadillos are born only as identical quadruplets?
This book is fantastic readable evolutionary biology, although I remember having the urge to hide the cover as I read it on the bus. An organism's fitness is ultimately determined by how many surviving offspring it can produce, and Olivia Judson has a great way to describe all the amazing adaptations that animals have to get to this goal. I've always wanted to use it with a class, but haven't had kids old enough - certain selections would be great for high school bio. (I had to come home and consult my copy yesterday, after learning how to extract Drosophila testes. Why do fruit flies have sperm roughly their own body length? Just ask Dr. Tatiana...)
Enjoyable but not a easy Sunday, lazy read.
Featured in my March Wrap Up video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU9784CW4Nk
Featured in my March Wrap Up video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU9784CW4Nk
My family read this book together to pass the time on our weekly trip to my parent's house. The short chapters and anecdotal style were particularly well suited to the venue.
Dr. Judson (aka Dr. Tatiana) uses a fictional advice column to introduce a species with differentiated sexual characteristics in each section, then compares and contrasts other species. The variety of material is excellent, the descriptions are clear and compelling, and the analysis is at good level for a non-biologist to enjoy.
Many popular biology books draw parallels to human behavior and try to use the text to carry a subtext about human nature. With the advice column's anthropomorphized letters from mollusks and bacteria, I feared the same heavy-handed treatment from this book, but was pleasantly surprised. The first chapter or two takes on Bateman's Hypothesis (roughly that men are biologically prone to the promiscuous and women are biologically prone to monogamy) and tears it to shreds. A whole book on that theme would have been monotonous, but thankfully the remainder of the book moves on from the simplistic treatment commonly given to humans to explore less familiar species and provide a tidy thesis "Life isn't simple" from which any number of theories like Bateman's can be discarded.
Dr. Judson (aka Dr. Tatiana) uses a fictional advice column to introduce a species with differentiated sexual characteristics in each section, then compares and contrasts other species. The variety of material is excellent, the descriptions are clear and compelling, and the analysis is at good level for a non-biologist to enjoy.
Many popular biology books draw parallels to human behavior and try to use the text to carry a subtext about human nature. With the advice column's anthropomorphized letters from mollusks and bacteria, I feared the same heavy-handed treatment from this book, but was pleasantly surprised. The first chapter or two takes on Bateman's Hypothesis (roughly that men are biologically prone to the promiscuous and women are biologically prone to monogamy) and tears it to shreds. A whole book on that theme would have been monotonous, but thankfully the remainder of the book moves on from the simplistic treatment commonly given to humans to explore less familiar species and provide a tidy thesis "Life isn't simple" from which any number of theories like Bateman's can be discarded.
I loved the biological insights of this book. Creatures and beings and breeding and not breeding is Wild. The embrace of the queerness of nature then the return to gender tropes - while obviously comedic felt forced or rather 'of its time' . Maybe it's my personal preference for sex positive agony aunts but otherwise I deeply recommend it as a journey into the tantalising wilderness of global reproduction.