Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes naturally to our species. But this narrative is collapsing. Here, renegade thinkers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, while debunking almost everything we "know" about sex, offer a bold alternative explanation. Ryan and Jethá's central contention is that human beings evolved in egalitarian groups that shared food, child care, and, often, sexual partners. Weaving together convergent,...

"Survival of the Beautiful is a revolutionary new examination of the role that art and culture play in nature and the evolutionary process. Taking his inspiration from Charles Darwin's observation that birds have a natural aesthetic sense, Rothenberg dives into the mysteries of why we create art, and why animals, humans included, have innate appreciation for beauty.Sexual selection may explain why animals desire, but it says very little about what...

"People who are not content to remain the gender they were assigned at birth have existed throughout human history and in all recorded cultures (Herdt, 1996). Naturally the experiences of people in the contemporary high-income cultures which are the focus of this book will be informed by the understandings and technology available now, but fundamentally gender diversity is not a new phenomenon. It is therefore curious that, until recently, it was...

We live in a world that has suffered the abuses of an unbalanced masculine rule for thousands of years--but the feminine is rising. "Seeds of feminine wisdom that have been quietly germinating underground are now breaking through the surface," writes Mirabai Starr. "Women everywhere are rising to the collective call to step up and repair our broken Earth. And we are activating a paradigm shift such as the world has never seen." With Wild Mercy, Mirabai...

Over the last 30 years, the health needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Americans have become increasingly recognized, in particular for the ways in which they are distinct from those typically assessed and addressed in society. Universities and researchers are paying greater attention to LGBTQ public health issues and how they might adapt existing methods to research marginalized communities, but until now there has been no authoritative...

'Down Girl' is a broad, original and far ranging analysis of what misogyny really is, how it works, its purpose, and how to fight it. The philosopher Kate Manne argues that modern society's failure to recognize women's full humanity and autonomy is not actually the problem. She argues instead that it is women's manifestations of human capacities - autonomy, agency, political engagement - is what engenders misogynist hostility. "Down Girl is an exploration...

"This third edition of Ira M. Lapidus's classic A History of Islamic Societies has been substantially revised to incorporate the insights of new scholarship and updated to include historical developments in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Lapidus's history explores the beginnings and transformations of Islamic civilizations in the Middle East and details Islam's worldwide diffusion to Africa, Spain, Turkey and the Balkans, Central, South...