Strange Bedfellows: The Surprising Connection Between Sex, Evolution and Monogamy

by David P. Barash, Judith Eve Lipton

Overview

In The Myth of Monogamy, husband and wife David P. Barash (an evolutionary biologist) and Judith Eve Lipton (a psychiatrist), stunned the public by showing how rare monogamy is in nature. Now, in Strange Bedfellows, they look at the other side of the coin: how biology actually promotes monogamy in some species and how these lessons apply to human beings.

An accessible work of science that is relevant to our intimate daily life, Strange Bedfellows will reassure some people, surprise others, and engage everyone.

David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton have co-authored six books, including The Myth of Monogamy and Making Sense of Sex.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781934137208
Publisher:	Bellevue Literary Press
Publication date:	10/01/2009
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	995,649
Product dimensions:	6.42(w) x 9.26(h) x 0.66(d)

About the Author

David Barash, professor of psychology at the Universityof Washington, is the author of over 20 books (among them Natural Selections, The Myth of Monogamy and Madame Bovary's Ovaries) and over 200 articles. One of the earliest proponents of "sociobiology" in the 1970s, now know as "evolutionary psychology" or "evolutionary biology," he remains among its most articulate popularizers. Judith E Lipton earned her MD from the Universityof North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She met David Barash in 1975, in Seattle, Washington, and they were married in 1977. Her collaboration with Dr. Barash led to a shift in focus, to evolutionary psychiatry. Together they have published 6 books including "The Myth of Monogamy" and "Gender Gap."

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From the Publisher

A decade after they published The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People, husband-and-wife evolutionary scientists Barash and Lipton make a strong case for the benefits and joys of monogamy even for people, like themselves, "who take biology seriously." Until quite recently, they report, "three-quarters of all human societies were polygamous," and the advent of DNA testing shows that birds have a similarly wandering eye: "sometimes 30 or 40 percent of nestlings ... are not genetically related." While promiscuity seems built into our genes, there is a longer legacy of serial monogamy ("the likelihood... is that only a few well-positioned males succeeded in polygamy") and genetic payoff for two-parent households (feeding, warming, and protecting the young) than numbers might suggest. Humans especially benefit from reciprocity and "monogamy is the ultimate friendship," with the biggest payoff, not just in reproduction but "physically, intellectually, emotionally economically, socially ... in a word, biologically." Everything from infant-mother attachment to neuroplasticity to "mirror neurons" to hormones form the biological framework for adult love. With wit and intelligence, Barash and Lipton provide a rational, scientific look at the seemingly irrational business of falling and staying in love.
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