Everything You Always Wanted to Know. . .

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Faced with evidence that females are just as randy as males, some evolutionary biologists say "sperm competition" may be the reason. Imagine a cross between water polo and The Bachelorette. If sperm are seen as fighting it out among themselves for the right to fertilize an egg, it figures that females benefit (via better offspring) from having multiple partners, too.

Humans have a long history of not looking too closely at paternity, but the new genetic lie detectors may change that. As Barash and Lipton note, the "monogamous family is very definitely under siege, and not by government, not by a declining moral fiber, and certainly not by some vast homosexual agenda . . . but by the dictates of biology itself."

2. Does size matter?

Yes, and so does shape, if you believe the evolutionary biologists who say the human penis evolved both to implant sperm and to extract someone else's. Comparisons to pistons and plungers are slung with a certain suspicious zest among this crowd, as is the fact that, among primates, men are the most amply endowed. On this score, Barash and Lipton are not entirely convinced: "If sperm competition has been so important in producing men's anatomy, especially the seemingly oversized penis, why do men have proportionately smaller testicles than chimps?" Well, exactly.

Among evolutionary psychologists, Darwinian competition is called upon to illuminate every aspect of human behavior, including the supposedly age-old male anxiety about penis size, if not the invention of clothes. As long as we're comparing, let's cast a furtive glance at those who were quite comfortable wearing nothing at all. In Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art 100 B.C.-A.D. 250, author John R. Clarke notes that the ancient Romans and Greeks viewed small penises as the aesthetic ideal. Clarke, an art historian, stresses that the classical world had "a sexual culture that operated under rules completely different from our own." We may be mystified by how a bathhouse fresco of a well-hung guy could have the average Roman in stitches. Then again, imagine their puzzlement over a cartoon of an evolutionary psychologist caught in bed with a student saying, "I can explain everything!"

3. Why are some people always attracted to the wrong lovers?

It's better to see the glass as half full and be grateful that we're so often attracted, at least, to the right species.

4. What do women want?

Iron. Human evolution has been driven by the female need for the dietary iron they largely got from meat.

Or so argues the surgeon and writer Leonard Shlain in the new book Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution (Viking). Drawing on medicine and other fields, Shlain creates an intriguing scenario for how modern humans suddenly appeared in East Africa 150,000 years ago, then fanned out to dominate the earth. In his view, the human female was the first to push the species into a sudden evolutionary spurt beyond our immediate ancestor, a somewhat duller biped known as Homo erectus. What's more, Shlain suggests that males have never quite forgiven the other sex for wrecking the party.

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