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Evolution’s Rainbow

Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, with a New Preface

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Evolution’s Rainbow

Written by: Joan Roughgarden
Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
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About this listen

In this innovative celebration of diversity and affirmation of individuality in animals and humans, Joan Roughgarden challenges accepted wisdom about gender identity and sexual orientation. A distinguished evolutionary biologist, Roughgarden takes on the medical establishment, the Bible, social science--and even Darwin himself. She leads the reader through a fascinating discussion of diversity in gender and sexuality among fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals, including primates. Evolution's Rainbow explains how this diversity develops from the action of genes and hormones and how people come to differ from each other in all aspects of body and behavior. Roughgarden reconstructs primary science in light of feminist, gay, and transgender criticism and redefines our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality. A new preface shows how this witty, playful, and daring book has revolutionized our understanding of sexuality.

©2004 Joan Roughgarden (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Anthropology Biological Sciences Gender Studies Witty
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It's logical, blatantly clear and a great read.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone speaking about the gospel of Darwin. With all the discoveries, developments, failures and lessons from said failures you would figure that maybe we have evolved enough to critically think about the many new shades of gray we have discovered, only if we could accept they exist. This book is like that, but uses well constructed examples to show you that living in the past, reading yesterday's news and outdated research to form viable opinions may not always work out. Life does evolves and so must we. I think it's time we start understanding ourselves through more research rather than reasoning our behaviour by drawing from observations in lobster populations and darwaninan examples. Whether you believe in any of this or not, at least you will most likely agree that there's a lot more we don't know about each other than we ever thought.

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Starts with science then becomes christian opinion

I'm stopping the book in the middle. The first line was a weird whistle blower for christians who think scientism is a religion, but I have it a pass. The information and reflections were good enough past that, then from end of chapter 16 onwards (especially in chapter 17), her christian partiality starts to leak heavily into the science, making it... Well not science, for sure. It becomes just an opinion piece, and a ridiculous one at that. She starts heavily declaring things without proof, assumes scientists' intentions from her own biases, and her analysis starts to sound like preaching. So... Not for me after all! 🤷🏿

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