THIS is one of the most amusing and informative popular science books I have come across, one that would sit comfortably alongside anything by Stephen Jay Gould.
Natalie Angier is an award winning American science journalist who writes beautifully and with high good humour about the natural and unnatural world. This collection of quirky subjects is culled from her articles for the New York Times, "but substantially revised and personalised
In the first chapter shades of Richard Dawkins and "the selfish gene she launches into the subject of lust as a genetic tool.
And why not? She explodes the myth of monogamous pairing among birds. Even among the most uxorious pairs, the males nip away from the conjugal nest for quickies in neighbouring territories, to spread their genes more widely females do the same to enlarge the gene pool among their offspring.
Both male and female are "craftily faithless" in order to maintain the pair bond, she says, which indicates some measure of calculation.
A shock for "Flipperophiles", and the demolition of another myth, is her account of the brutal kidnapping and physical abuse that constitutes the bottle nosed dolphin's "courtship".
But what of the human passion of romantic love? Some researchers have attributed it to chemical reaction like an amamine high, caused by phenylethylamine released by the brain. The neuro transmitters dopamine, neoepinephrine and serotonin have also been implicated in the ecstasy of romantic love.
Natalie Angier reports a new one the hormone oxytocin, long known as the stimulant for the contractions of childbirth and important in lactation, but with no known function in males. Now it is related, on the one hand, to the desire to cuddle, and on the other to sexual arousal it depends on the dose. At last a panacea for the bellicosity of the world
She mentions another hormone, vasopressin, which makes attentive and protective fathers of unreconstructed males. Feminists take note She also tells of a reprieve for testosterone as the main culprit in the genesis of aggression.
Of further interest to women is a new theory of menstruation that "gives an active and salutary spin to the dirty business of having a period".
Margie Profet, an evolutionary biologist of the University of Washington, suggests that menstruation is a mechanism for cleansing the uterus and fallopian tubes against harmful microbes delivered by incoming sperm.
This is "the male factor" mentioned elsewhere by Dr Elizabeth Duncan in the contest of reproductive tract infections in sexually active women.
After an informative section on DNA, Angier arrives at the beasties, some of humankind's pet hates scorpions, parasites, dung beetles, cockroaches and snakes.
She has something good to say about all of them scorpions have "a delicious bad name" parasites are one of the reasons for sexual reproduction dung beetles have aided the expansion of the human species, which otherwise would have drowned in ordure cockroaches for their antiquity, dating back anything from 280 to 400 million years snakes for their beauty and complexity.
Furthermore, she says, cockroaches have become for neurobiologists the insect equivalent of the experimental white rat because of the tactile and chemical sensitivity of their antennae, and the large size of the cells of their nervous system.
The short, readable chapters of this book, none longer than five pages, provide a wide variety of fascinating subjects, among them vegetarianism vs carnivory, human fat, joy and depression, genius and madness.
Natalie Angier also pays homage to three "exceptionally creative scientists" biologist Victoria Elizabeth Foe geneticist Mary Claire King and geologist and biologist Stephen Jay Gould.
Finally she deals with death through disease, suicide and old age, and the paradox of "the indispensability of death to the perpetuation of life". A profound thought on which to exit.
