By Jules Howard Bloomsbury USA, November 2014 For about a billion years, Earth has been a pretty sexy place. Since the first lowly eukaryotes gave it a whirl, sexual reproduction has spread to become a hallmark of kingdom Animalia. Zoologist and nature writer Jules Howard’s latest book is a paean to the kaleidoscopic forms, functions, and behaviors that have ushered the procreative act on its evolutionary journey to ubiquity. “For every burly elephant seal guarding a harem, there is a hermaphroditic slug swarming over a dog turd, or a nearly extinct spider being encouraged to have sex in someone’s kitchen,” he writes. “A panda sniffs a piece of wood; a toad safely crosses a road to find its ancestral breeding ground; a dolphin gently gooses ...
