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The Score: How the Quest for Sex has Shaped the Modern Man
A Philadelphia Inquirer sex columnist traces evolutionary history to offer insight into the male side of heterosexual relationships, discussing such topics as the battle of the sexes as revealed by sperm differences, the challenges faced by men who are courting women, and the complicated line between promiscuity and monogamy. 20,000 first printing.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published June 12, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
October 18, 2008
Top Ten Fun Facts I Learned from Fancy Faye Flam:
1. Certain bees explode after leaving their penis inside their mate.
2. What do seals, walruses, polar bears, and bats all have in common? A penis bone.
3. Mushrooms don't just limit themselves to male vs. female, they have over 30,000 sexes.
4. The giant squid pierces the female's tentacle with his penis, which is often bitten off by the female's beak.
5. Penguins=no weiner.
6. Flatworms have caustic semen that burns holes in its lover. I want that.
7. Sea slugs have a built-in date-rape drug. Sexy.
8. Female chimps can take on 30 dicks a day.
9. Fly sperm cells are 100 times longer than humans.
10. Back in the day, to combat masturbation, young boys were wrapped in wet blankets, had electro-shocks on the testicles, and even got their manhood caged into some device that triggered an alarm if they got an erection!? True story. So ladies, don't come complaining to me about your female circumcision and your missing clit and all that boo-hooing.
Bonus! In DaVinci's time, the common belief was that sperm was produced in the brain, then traveled down the spine and out the penis.
This book almost made me believe in evolution because the entire premise of the book assumes that every organism in the world is a result of it, but I still don't know.
1. Certain bees explode after leaving their penis inside their mate.
2. What do seals, walruses, polar bears, and bats all have in common? A penis bone.
3. Mushrooms don't just limit themselves to male vs. female, they have over 30,000 sexes.
4. The giant squid pierces the female's tentacle with his penis, which is often bitten off by the female's beak.
5. Penguins=no weiner.
6. Flatworms have caustic semen that burns holes in its lover. I want that.
7. Sea slugs have a built-in date-rape drug. Sexy.
8. Female chimps can take on 30 dicks a day.
9. Fly sperm cells are 100 times longer than humans.
10. Back in the day, to combat masturbation, young boys were wrapped in wet blankets, had electro-shocks on the testicles, and even got their manhood caged into some device that triggered an alarm if they got an erection!? True story. So ladies, don't come complaining to me about your female circumcision and your missing clit and all that boo-hooing.
Bonus! In DaVinci's time, the common belief was that sperm was produced in the brain, then traveled down the spine and out the penis.
This book almost made me believe in evolution because the entire premise of the book assumes that every organism in the world is a result of it, but I still don't know.
March 5, 2009
I had high hopes for the book, and Faye Flam really came through. This was a really interesting look at sex and how it is a part of our culture. It also involves a lot of biology, but is really accessible and written for non-science types.
For example, where did sex come from? How long ago did sexes evolve? How was the first penis formed? It turns out there are more than two sexes, and more than two sex chromosomes in the plant and animal kingdoms.
Do other animals have sex for pleasure? Are other animals gay? I was surprised to learn that some of the more kinky relationship arrangements that humans make, such as triads and open marriages, are also out there in the animal kingdom as well.
When I was trying to decide whether or not to buy it, I flipped through and came to the start of a chapter that made reference to Maureen Dowd's "Are Men Necessary?" I've always had a hard time with Maureen Dowd; the first article of hers that I ever read I thought was a parody partly because I thought her name was meant to be a pun (More Endowed?). Well, I hadn't thought there was anything insightful to be said about her work, and Faye Flam did a good job of it. She kept it brief and relevant to the topic at hand, too!
Definitely an interesting read and well worth the time.
For example, where did sex come from? How long ago did sexes evolve? How was the first penis formed? It turns out there are more than two sexes, and more than two sex chromosomes in the plant and animal kingdoms.
Do other animals have sex for pleasure? Are other animals gay? I was surprised to learn that some of the more kinky relationship arrangements that humans make, such as triads and open marriages, are also out there in the animal kingdom as well.
When I was trying to decide whether or not to buy it, I flipped through and came to the start of a chapter that made reference to Maureen Dowd's "Are Men Necessary?" I've always had a hard time with Maureen Dowd; the first article of hers that I ever read I thought was a parody partly because I thought her name was meant to be a pun (More Endowed?). Well, I hadn't thought there was anything insightful to be said about her work, and Faye Flam did a good job of it. She kept it brief and relevant to the topic at hand, too!
Definitely an interesting read and well worth the time.
March 9, 2017
3.5 stars. Some interesting info in this book (especially about how infants end up one sex or another and all the ways that process can go awry), but I didn't feel that it quite lived up to its subtitle. Far more time seemed to be devoted to the mating habits of every other creature under the sun than were devoted to how human males have been shaped by sex and the drive for it.
February 17, 2009
Misleading title -- the book covers the male animal in general and not just the human male animal. I've heard this writer on the radio. I think she is an excellent speaker, but I find her writing a bit on the dry side.
June 20, 2011
Really well done book. Every argument and theory appears well supported and makes sense. I know more about the sex organs of random species now, and who doesn't need that info rolling around in their head?
November 15, 2013
The author provides a fascinating account of how sex, and the competition for it, has helped shape the male species. The author, a science writer for a Philadelphia newspaper, makes biology fun to read. This book really does look at the birds and the bees!
November 27, 2012
As usual, a fine book but I've already read much of this kind of stuff.
Quotes:
"In us humans, sperm shed most of their mitochondria as they form...The few mitochondria that remain in the sperm get killed by the egg. If your mate is just going to kill your mitochondria anyway, you don't suffer any big disadvantage if you get rid of them yourself...It's not that the males-as-parasites idea is wrong, said Hurst. It's just that males evolved for other reasons as well." - p17
"But there are hazards to letting the weather determine the sex of our offspring [as crocodiles, alligators, some turtles, and some lizards do]. Your whole species can lose out in a drastic climate change. In the 1990s, turtle expert James Spotila and paleontologist Peter Dodson published a paper speculating that temperature had determined the sex of dinosaurs--to their peril. Sixty-five million years ago when, according to prevailing theory, a meteor struck and darkened the skies, global cooling could have led to many generations with no females." - p47
A Christian physicist theorizing on Immaculate Conception:
"His hypothesis: that Mary carried a genetic anomaly. She had bits of the Y chromosome stuck in her X chromosome, just as scientists have found in most XX males. As long as such people carry a fragment of the Y with the key male-determining gene--SRY--they turn out male. And that poses a small problem. If Mary had an SRY she would most likely be a man, and if she lacked an SRY, then Jesus should have been a woman. To deal with that, Tipler proposes that through another rare genetic anomaly, Mary's SRY was suppressed and then reactivated in her son." - p54
"Maleness goes much deeper into evolutionary history than the Y chromosome." - p60
"In some species, a male cant get as much as a look from a female unless he's already devotedly tending little fish larvae....It posts a big catch-22 if you have to be a father to become a father. How can a guy break in? In some species, such as sticklebacks, males will steal eggs from other males. In one type of minnow, said Sabaj, a male will oust a rival from his nest, treating most of hte other guy's eggs as caviar but leaving behind just enough to fool a female into thinking he's a nice single dad." - p153
"Females also acquired the ability to make sperm in one of our fellow vertebrates, a swamp dweller called a killifish. And yet male killifish keep cropping up her and there, though you'd think a hermaphroditic fish would need a male about as much as it needs, well, a bicycle." - p181
Quotes:
"In us humans, sperm shed most of their mitochondria as they form...The few mitochondria that remain in the sperm get killed by the egg. If your mate is just going to kill your mitochondria anyway, you don't suffer any big disadvantage if you get rid of them yourself...It's not that the males-as-parasites idea is wrong, said Hurst. It's just that males evolved for other reasons as well." - p17
"But there are hazards to letting the weather determine the sex of our offspring [as crocodiles, alligators, some turtles, and some lizards do]. Your whole species can lose out in a drastic climate change. In the 1990s, turtle expert James Spotila and paleontologist Peter Dodson published a paper speculating that temperature had determined the sex of dinosaurs--to their peril. Sixty-five million years ago when, according to prevailing theory, a meteor struck and darkened the skies, global cooling could have led to many generations with no females." - p47
A Christian physicist theorizing on Immaculate Conception:
"His hypothesis: that Mary carried a genetic anomaly. She had bits of the Y chromosome stuck in her X chromosome, just as scientists have found in most XX males. As long as such people carry a fragment of the Y with the key male-determining gene--SRY--they turn out male. And that poses a small problem. If Mary had an SRY she would most likely be a man, and if she lacked an SRY, then Jesus should have been a woman. To deal with that, Tipler proposes that through another rare genetic anomaly, Mary's SRY was suppressed and then reactivated in her son." - p54
"Maleness goes much deeper into evolutionary history than the Y chromosome." - p60
"In some species, a male cant get as much as a look from a female unless he's already devotedly tending little fish larvae....It posts a big catch-22 if you have to be a father to become a father. How can a guy break in? In some species, such as sticklebacks, males will steal eggs from other males. In one type of minnow, said Sabaj, a male will oust a rival from his nest, treating most of hte other guy's eggs as caviar but leaving behind just enough to fool a female into thinking he's a nice single dad." - p153
"Females also acquired the ability to make sperm in one of our fellow vertebrates, a swamp dweller called a killifish. And yet male killifish keep cropping up her and there, though you'd think a hermaphroditic fish would need a male about as much as it needs, well, a bicycle." - p181
June 9, 2008
"What makes a man?" Flam, a science writer who pens a sex column for The Philadelphia Inquirer Philadelphia Inquirer, seeks a scientific answer to this often-asked question. Her search takes her from a seduction boot camp for men to the labs of evolutionary biologists, sociologists and physiologists who study gender differences.
From mushrooms with 30,000 sexes to sea worms that compete to be the male, Flam surveys the natural world to explain why human males evolved the way they did, revealing a riotous diversity in the way life begets life. While human males have one X and one Y chromosome Y chromosome, for instance, the oddball male platypus platypus carries five of each kind. Male squid inject females with sperm packages that burst out of her skin to fertilize the egg, while male sea urchins broadcast sperm into the ocean, never knowing whose eggs they may reach.
Flam contends that the fundamental reproductive imbalance between males and females shapes the way men seek love, take risks and view the world--and drives evolutionary strategies.
The Score sometimes flirts with gender essentialism essentialism, and the link between other male animals and modern man can often be tenuous. Men may prefer younger women, for instance, but male chimpanzees go wild for older females. While the book may not definitively say what makes a man, it offers a few entertaining clues, capturing the weird and the wacky without being fluffy.--Tia Ghose
From mushrooms with 30,000 sexes to sea worms that compete to be the male, Flam surveys the natural world to explain why human males evolved the way they did, revealing a riotous diversity in the way life begets life. While human males have one X and one Y chromosome Y chromosome, for instance, the oddball male platypus platypus carries five of each kind. Male squid inject females with sperm packages that burst out of her skin to fertilize the egg, while male sea urchins broadcast sperm into the ocean, never knowing whose eggs they may reach.
Flam contends that the fundamental reproductive imbalance between males and females shapes the way men seek love, take risks and view the world--and drives evolutionary strategies.
The Score sometimes flirts with gender essentialism essentialism, and the link between other male animals and modern man can often be tenuous. Men may prefer younger women, for instance, but male chimpanzees go wild for older females. While the book may not definitively say what makes a man, it offers a few entertaining clues, capturing the weird and the wacky without being fluffy.--Tia Ghose
July 7, 2012
This book was chockful of info, most of which I didn't know. It's more a taste of all the different sorts of studying scientists are doing on the subject, but it's fascinating anyway, and it was a great, easy read.
It's also short, less than 200 pages, so it can be easily digested.
It's also short, less than 200 pages, so it can be easily digested.
November 6, 2012
This is probably the only scientifically based book that made me laugh. It is witty, and an easy read and you get to learn lots and lots of fun facts. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves thinking about sex, biology, behavior, and science.
June 28, 2008
interesting read. a biological and evolutionary perspective supported by research. learned more about fish, snakes, and birds than i anticipated from the book cover.
May 1, 2009
Adult nonfiction. It's like Mary Roach's "Bonk" but somehow better. Scientific and entertaining at the same time.
August 15, 2011
This is a very interesting and well written book about the evolution of gender and sexuality. Highly recommended.
June 30, 2012
3.5
Not worth 4 stars, but definitely better than a 3.
Not worth 4 stars, but definitely better than a 3.
Read
October 2, 2012Recommended on Skeptically Speaking show #90 on December 17, 2010. http://skepticallyspeaking.ca/episode...
July 26, 2016
a lot of information but sometimes loses track of the relevant point.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews