Dr. Elisabeth A. Lloyd, among others, has described female orgasm as the female equivalent to male nipples, anatomy that one sex needed, while the other sex "just sort of lucked out with some lingering leftovers."

Ryan rejects this view. "When a woman has an orgasm," he explains, "the pH of her reproductive tract shifts in a way that favors sperm that enter her at that point." Why is this so important? Sperm competition. In prehistoric times, according to Ryan, women had "multiple lovers at any given ovulatory cycle, even in any given sexual event."

Stephen Pinker argues that we are becoming less violent. Nonsense, says John Gray

Human beings expend an enormous amount of energy doing things that don't seem to have any survival value: singing, dancing, painting caves, decorating spears and, above all, telling stories. (Think how much time you spend consuming fictional narratives--novels, movies, TV shows--in one form or another.) The nascent field of Darwinian aesthetics seeks to account for the art-making impulse in evolutionary psychological terms. If art is a product of the mind, and the mind is a product of evolution, then art is a product of evolution. Again, as an intellectual project, this is perfectly valid. But there are also strong selection pressures pushing in the direction of such an approach. Evolutionary thinking is, at present, an aggressively expansive species within the academic world, a kind of emergent Homo sapiens outcompeting the old-school Neanderthals across a wide swath of intellectual territory. Having colonized the social sciences--where it has begun to displace the view, predominant t