As children approached 11, attitudes toward girls shifted Okay, but how exactly did sex come about Science journalist rachel feltman dives into the saucy science of doing it. The story of human sexuality is as old as humanity itself But how did our earliest ancestors discover sex, and how did this knowledge spread through the generations Join me on a journey back to the beginnings of our species to explore the fascinating ways in which sex was discovered and transmitted throughout history
The origins of sexual discovery imagine a world thousands of years ago. A profound new discovery by palaeontologist, flinders university professor john long, reveals how the intimate act of sexual intercourse first evolved in our deep distant ancestors. In the landmark 1986 book origins of sex, biologist lynn margulis and science writer dorion sagan trace the first appearance of sex back billions of years, to bacteria Here, they describe the complex evolutionary history that their book will seek to untangle The following is an excerpt from the introduction Everyone is interested in sex
One course at yale hopes to fill that gap Caleb knapp, a lecturer in the department of history at yale, teaches early histories of sexuality, a course that explores the historical, social, and cultural frameworks that informed people’s understandings of sex and relationships before the twentieth century. Sex, the argument went, produces genetic variation by combining the genes of two individuals Very well, then, variation must be advantageous to the species Thus sex evolved to produce variation as a sort of group benefit plan, allowing groups that reproduced sexually to keep up with changes in their environment.
OPEN
