Isn’t Dr Tatiana’s Sex Guide to All Creation Wonderful?

I think in many ways the evolution / creationist debate (if you can call one side’s habit of sticking their fingers in their collective ears and yelling “I can’t hear you!” a debate) is symbolic of life. Sometimes you don’t want to choose the least worst option. You want a reason to be excited about something. Creationism will never be viable because it offers no explanations for existence. Personally for me it’s not enough that Creationism is awful. The reason why I do get excited about, rather than merely tolerate, the theory of evolution through natural selection is that it’s a beautiful concept. I recently finished re-reading Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice To All Creation and it remains awe-inspiring. The book is an agony aunt column for creatures suffering from relationship problems. Agony and suffering being appropriate words because reproduction isn’t so much a matter of life or death for some creatures but more a matter of life and death. Dr Tatania answers the pleas of stick insect who has been copulating for six weeks, a spider whose mate refuses to eat him and why those ducks you feed in the pond are vicious creatures. It explodes myths like the existence female chastity or the absence of homosexuality in evolution. Above all it shows a baffling variety of practices and facts which you simply couldn’t make up, like the fly whose sperm is longer that its body.

The book is nominally divided into chapters, but the problems themselves, on the whole plucked from The Economist magazine, make the book digestible in bite-sized chunks. Given the tendency for extreme sex and violence in the animal kingdom I’d say that’s a good thing.

The book shifts gear for the final chapter which is a report of a Jerry Springer style talk show. The star guest is a rotifer which claims not to have had sex for 85 million years. This should derail any claims of evolutionary development. Sex, like death, was thought to be a necessary evolutionary constant. This is where the splendour of evolution shines. This chapter tackles the problem of why sex exists in the first place. What is so important it that drives a male mantis to have his head bitten off? Judson explains why sex, as a defence against disease or degradation of genes through mutation developed. By explaining the problem she shows that sex is a highly successful, but possibly not the only, solution to the problem. Rather than sex being necessary for an evolutionary biology, a solution to disease and mutation is necessary and she shows that while sex might not be universally constant, the problems it solves are.

Serious biologists could criticise the overly anthropomorphic nature of the book. I think that would be an unfair criticism. It is anthropomorphic, but the situation of literate creatures writing to an agony aunt does maintain a sense of unreality about it, which reminds the reader that it’s the concept that matters. Evolution is a beautiful concept and this book is a beautiful explanation of it. —–