Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation

danny writes "Having problems with your sex life? Read on for my review of Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation -- it may not get you laid, but you can have some fun learning about the evolutionary biology and natural history of sex." With that disclaimer in mind, read on for the rest.

Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation
author	Olivia Judson
pages	308
publisher	Vintage
rating	9
reviewer	Danny Yee
ISBN	0099283751
summary	the evolutionary biology of sex

Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation mimics a write-in advice column, in which anthropomorphised animals of all kinds ask for help with their sex lives. That is just the framework, however, for an entertaining tour of the natural history and evolutionary biology of sex. Pretty much every aspect of animal sex is at least touched on, though the "all creation" of the title is an exaggeration -- there's only the occasional reference to plants and bacteria, with nothing (for example) on the fascinating topic of pollination.

The columns are grouped thematically in thirteen chapters, divided into three parts. Part one covers the "expenses" involved in sex, female promiscuity, conflicts between males, and alternative strategies for those who are poor and small. Part two covers sex and cannibalism, sex and violence (male and female), love potions and homosexuality, and monogamy. And part three looks at incest, at hermaphroditism, facultative sex and other variants, and at asexuality and theories for the evolution and persistence of sex.

Each column typically runs to four or five pages, beginning with a question.

Dear Dr. Tatiana,

I'm an Australian redback spider, and I'm a failure. I said to my darling, "Take, eat, this is my body," and I vaulted into her jaws. But she spat me out and told me to get lost. Why did she spurn the ultimate sacrifice?

Dr. Tatiana never answers directly, but looks around first at other species with similar or related problems

"... most guys prefer not to be eaten at all. ... In the scorpion Paruroctonus mesaensis, the male whacks his partner several times before racing off; in the wolf spider Lycosa rabida, the male tosses his lover in the air, leaving her in a crumpled heap as he hurries away.

... In the bristle worm Nereis caudata, something similar goes on but for once it's the man who eats his wife.

... Do other males eat their mates? I have never heard of it. But note: this is not to say males don't eat females. They do. Just not during sex. Platonic cannibalism is a problem for creatures from apes to amoebae. It's depraved out there."

and sets the question in a broader context

"... It goes without saying that such a death wish can evolve only in special circumstances. That is, being eaten must mean you leave more offspring than if you are spared. So far, your species is the only one known to meet this criterion. A male redback who gets himself munched fertilizes more eggs than a male who survives. Why? ... it turns out that sex takes longer when she's chewing away on you, which gives you the chance to deliver more sperm and thus fertilize more eggs. So your challenge is to make yourself more appetizing."

before finishing with the answer, if there is one.

"The secret is picking your moment. Female redbacks aren't greedy; when they're not hungry, they don't eat. If you offer yourself right after she's feasted, forget it. You've got to wait until she gets that mean and hungry look in all eight of her beady little eyes. And then, for what you are about to receive, may your kiddies be truly thankful."

Links to many different areas of biology are explored.

"Lysin, the protein that determines whether an abalone sperm can enter an abalone egg, is evolving at record speed. Tantalizingly, abalone are also splitting into new species at a startling rate."

And for those who want to follow up specific topics in the technical literature, there are thirty pages of notes, giving annotated references for each column, with pointers into a forty page bibliography. (Though a short recommended reading list of non-technical popular works on evolution would have been a more useful inclusion for most readers.)

Sex Advice to All Creation assumes no background in biology, and there's the occasional wordy or repetitive explanation. But even scientists for whom the evolutionary biology is old hat are likely to find some new details in the natural history. The chatty tone and the framing conceit of an advice column -- extended in the last chapter to a mock television show -- remain entertaining and decorative, never pushed so far they become annoying or distort the science.

"If you are not a hermaphrodite, incest is best if you come from a species where males have only one set of genes. If you're not a member of such a species, I urge you to avoid sex with your nearest and dearest."

---

You can purchase Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Why didn't this get a 10?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing in the review that justifies the one point deduction!

What's with all the Furries lately?

[Anonymous Coward]

They were on CSI last night, now they have a friggin' fuzzy sutra. Creepy, creepy, creepy.

Re:Having problems with your sex life?

[segmond]

Anyone who is a serious geek and hacker and who wants to get laid and cannot get laid is not worthy to be called a geek or a hacker. I can understand that some geeks/hackers don't get laid because they devote much time to their projects that they see sex as a waste of resource in terms of time investment, emotional investment, etc... Human beings are computers, meat machines, they accept input using their senses (hearing, seeing, feeling) and they respond with output (feeling, speech, touch). The appropriate input gets you the right output just like any normal functioning computer does.

Humans are not universal machines, they are more complex and the inputs varies based on culture, social class, environment and such, so to program them, one has to be aware of all that. This is nothing more but advanced psychology. How so called geeks and hackers can not pick up books and study this baffles me.

To give some examples, you can use presuppositions so that things you want the girl to do is pre-supposed. Instead of asking, "WILL you like to go out for coffee?" which fetches a yes or no, you ask, "WHERE will you like to go for coffee?" your presupposition is that she wants coffee, if she says, "I don't drink coffee", you go ahead, why they sell milk and juice for the cute little girls like you, lets go! just get them never to say no.

When people communicate you have to find out how they communicte, and use the same method to code back their message to them. some are visual, others auditory, kinesthetic. Example, "What do you think about the movie?" a) It looked beautiful! (b) It was loud! (c) It was moving. now you know where they fall in and use words that they can relate to better, etc, etc.

NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) teaches this, and whilst you learn alot from it, I am not going to say that this is the one key, you have to tailor it and adjust it for your environment. What do political leaders, politicians, lawyers, religious leaders have in common? The power of persuasion and to influence. Being a geek/hacker is not an excuse!

I am from Africa, I live in Detroit and have for a while! By the old school definition, I am a hacker, I grok digital eletronics, programming languages, natural languages, I know more assembly langauges than the average geek knows high level languages. I have been a Unix fool for 10yrs shit like that, oh yeah, and I think Python is the ichiban of programming languages. I love to tune 4 cylinder cars and turbocharge them. I am not trying to toot my own horn or whatever, I am just pointing out, that yes, I am a hax0r! w00w00!, anyway! point is that I get laid quite often by beautiful women! I once was a social inept fool, but I had to actually really sit down, read, study myself, others and environments and figure out how to manipulate it. So geeks do have sex lifes. I am still an introvert, but I can still hit the rowdy detroit clubs, dance to gangstar rap, spit the slang of the detroits and close up some fine women for future encounters. So enough of this crap about geeks not being able to get laid, I worry that the more yall say it, the more it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

Re:Having problems with your sex life?

[yali]

Sorry for the OT post, but I have to say it: As psychological theory, NLP is bunk. The reason it seems to work is that it gets guys to play the odds. Rejection stings, so most guys get rejected once and then go home and sulk. But when you've paid thousands of dollars for a "speed seduction" course to learn a supposedly deterministic system, you treat rejection as your failure to implement the system correctly and go into debugging mode, rather than taking it as an indictment of your inherent worthiness.

Every guy I've ever known who has lots of casual sex told me that he got rejected all the time. If 1 woman out of 10 is willing to have casual sex with you, you'll still get rejected an average of 9 times for every successful attempt. Most guys can't put up with that unless they're extremely self-confident or they have something like NLP to distance themselves from the hurt of rejection.

Re:Having problems with your sex life?

[Tackhead]

> Human beings are computers, meat machines, they accept input using their senses (hearing, seeing, feeling) and they respond with output (feeling, speech, touch). The appropriate input gets you the right output just like any normal functioning computer does.
>
> Humans are not universal machines, they are more complex and the inputs varies based on culture, social class, environment and such, so to program them, one has to be aware of all that.
>
>[snip big NLP plug]

On that note - on geeks and getting laid, or lack thereof:

"[...] for a group of healthy college-age males, there was remarkably little discussion of a topic which commonly obsesses groups of that composition. Females. Though some led somewhat active social lives, the key figures in TMRC-PDP hacking had locked themselves into what would be called 'bachelor mode.' It was easy to fall into -- for one thing -- as opposed to the hopelessly random problems in a human relationship -- which made hacking particularly attractive. But an even weightier factor was the hackers' impression that computing was much more /important/ than getting involved in a romantic relationship. It was a question of priorities. Hacking had replaced sex in their lives."

"[Hacking] was a mission. You would hack, and you would live by the Hacker Ethic, and you knew that that horribly inefficient and wasteful things like women burned too many cycles, occupied too much memory space. 'Women, even today, are considered grossly unpredictable,' one PDP-6 hacker noted, almost two decades later. 'How can a hacker tolerate such an imperfect being?'

- Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution, Steven Levy.

Whether NLP can get me laid or not doesn't matter to me. The more I interact with individual humans, the more I realize they aren't the kind of machines I'm interested in programming, especially for something as easily-obtainable as orgasm.