[Hac-announce] February 2015 Book Discussion: "Sex at Dawn"

[Kevin Gough or Paula Jones]

February's book will be Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by psychologists Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. This thought-provoking book weaves together evidence from anthropology, archaeology, primatology, anatomy, and psychosexuality to show almost everything we “know” about sex is suspect.


Per the jacket flap: "In the tradition of the best historical and scientific writing, Sex at Dawn unapologetically upends unwarranted assumptions and unfounded conclusions while offering a revolutionary understanding of why we live and love as we do."

"The essential corrective to the evolutionary psychology literature, Sex at Dawn irrefutably shows that the urgent sexuality apparent everywhere in human society and that requires layers of religious, social, and psychological suppression was a constant on the African savanna. The more dubious its evidentiary basis and connection with current reality, the more ardently the scientific inevitability of monogamy is maintained - even as it collapses around us. Darwin and science have been corralled into fomenting useless, irrational guilt." - Dr. Stanton Peele

This book will perhaps shed some light on the depictions and discussions of sexuality in recent book group selections The End of Men: And the Rise of Women and Ecotopia. 


A podcast discussing the book with author Chris Ryan can be found here: http://www.extraenvironmentalist.com/2012/12/10/episode-54-love-marriage/.

Copies of the book are readily available in area libraries.

 
The discussion will take place on Saturday, February 21, 2015 at 2 pm in the library of the Unitarian Society of New Haven at 700 Hartford Turnpike, New Haven. (Snow date will be the following Saturday, February 28.) Refreshments will be served.
 













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