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Pardon me, but are you a sex machine?

When the singer James Brown declared himself a sex machine, he didn't get much argument, especially from hard-core Darwinian biologists. From their perspective, yes, we've all been engineered to breed.

The godfather of soul achieved immortality with a primal screech and a thrust of his loins, but for most of us that's just the beginning. In our bid to live forever, we're driven to mate, then spend our best years raising kids we hope will be crazy enough to repeat the process. Weirdly enough, they usually do.

Though the wild thing has its pleasures, our fondness for it is not fully understood. Nor is nature's. Scientists call this the "paradox" of sex, noting that there are other, far less messy ways for life to reproduce. Given its huge cost in terms of energy and risk to the individual organism, why do we bother, when all we may be passing on is the cleft in our chins? Our excuses come and go. Every era spins its flimsy rationales, then calls on the power of myth, religion, and the law to etch them in stone. They never last.

The current trend is to blame our obsession with sex on those imperious packets of living data known as genes. All creatures are programmed to reproduce according to the rules of natural and sexual selection -- life's version of the killer app. Modern biology and, increasingly, psychology are influenced by evolutionary theory. On one extreme, the so-called neo-Darwinians would say that everything we do is an expression of the genetic algorithm embedded in our cells.

But as suggested below, our carnal knowledge is being shaped by other influences, including evolutionary models that aren't so coldly mechanistic. If nothing else, these ideas and theories are a telling reflection of the times. In groping for the universal truth of sex, it's a well-known fact that every age ends up making love to itself.

1. Are humans monogamous?

No, monogamy is human. It's one of many sexual strategies we practice, and seem destined to continue practicing, until we get it right. Surveys say that as many as half of all American men report having had extramarital sex at least once. The rate among women is said to be one in three, though they're also apparently more prone to fib about it.

We're not the only animals with a taste for sexual novelty. Thanks to "genetic fingerprinting" techniques that can determine parentage, researchers have found more cheating in the wild kingdom than on country-western radio. Even among species that once were thought to practice fidelity, it turns out scientists were often seeing what they wanted to see. "The pattern is painfully clear," write zoologist David P. Barash and psychiatrist Judith Eve Lipton in The Myth of Monogamy. "In the animal world generally, and the avian world in particular, there is a whole lot more screwing around than we had thought."

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