Sex, wild-style

An aroused male Bonobo holding sugar cane sex bribes greets visitors to linkurl:__The Sex Lives of Animals__,;http://www.museumofsex.com/exhibit/sex-lives-of-animals the newest exhibition at New York City's Museum of Sex. Don't be fooled, though, by his inviting grin. Behind his spiky-erect penis lies an attempt to topple a long-held theory that forms one of the pillars of linkurl:Charles Darwin's;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/13444/ theory of evolution. Darwin and his predecessor, linkurl:Carl Linnaeus,;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/13589/ do make an appearance in the exhibit, but only as two brief biographies tacked onto a side wall near the entrance to the show.

__Artist: Rune Olsen__

There's good reason to dispense with these architects of biology and get to the juicy stuff early on in the __Sex Lives__ experience. The main thrust of the exhibit is that linkurl:sexual selection;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/25282/ - a key component of Darwin's theory of evolution - is flat out wrong and needs to be re-thought in light of the curious sexual proclivities held by a number of our fellow animals.That idea comes courtesy of the exhibit's main scientific advisor, linkurl:Joan Roughgarden,;http://www.stanford.edu/group/roughlab/rough.html the controversial Stanford University ecologist who for years has linkurl:called for replacing;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/23358/ the theory of sexual selection, and the male-male conflict and female mate choice it entails, with one that more accurately depicts what she sees as a gentler, more inclusive animal sexuality. "We have to rethink sex and sexuality," she told me at the exhibit's opening. "I've tried to redirect the focus of thinking about sexual selection to offspring rearing, not mating."Roughgarden said that the abundance of behaviors such as linkurl:homosexuality,;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/16377/ linkurl:hermaphroditism,;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/20335/ and self-stimulation seen in the animal kingdom necessitate a shift from the simplified view of the promiscuous male and the choosy female upon which Darwin's well-trodden theory is based. "It's not sexual selection, it's social selection," she said, adding that even the classic Darwinian example of the peacock's tail as an indicator of genetic fitness for the peahen's perusal is wrong. Instead, Roughgarden views the peacock tails as "admission tickets to male power-holding cliques," which relate to a bird's ability to maintain social bonds and thus function as a successful chick rearer in peafowl society.

__Artist: Rune Olsen__

Around the perimeter of the exhibit's creme-colored walls are examples - in text, video, and audio - of just how unexpected animal sexual behavior can get. A sampling of the titles of these multimedia vignettes include linkurl:"Panda;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/53115/ porn," "Sexual linkurl:cannibalism,";http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/22927/ "linkurl:Masculinized;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/18193/ females," and my personal favorite, "Homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck." There were videos of linkurl:primates;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/53392/ masturbating, kangaroos performing autofelatio, and sound recordings of everything from hyenas and wolves to llamas and mosquitoes answering nature's call."I feel like a little kid," the Museum of Sex's curator, Sarah Jacobs, told me amid the sights and sounds. "I'm so excited to learn about animals again. They do anything and everything that humans do and beyond. We don't appreciate the diversity."Roughgarden agreed that the kaleidoscopic nature of animal sex (and her own idea about overturning sexual selection) is underappreciated. "This needs to be brought to the general public," she said. Jacobs said that her initial inspiration for the exhibition came from reading Roughgarden's 2004 book, linkurl:__Evolution's Rainbow__,;http://www.amazon.com/Evolutions-Rainbow-Diversity-Gender-Sexuality/dp/0520240731 which contained many of the intriguing animal sexual behaviors that made their way into __Sex Lives__.While the exhibit's message centers on Roughgarden's scientific agenda, its aesthetic focus is on five sculptures similar to the amorous Bonobo - life-sized sculptures of various animal species captured mid-coitus. The sculptures might be the stuff seen in natural history museums, but for their masking tape and pencil-scribbled exteriors, their humanistic eyes, and of course their interesting postures.

__The artist__

Norweigian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Rune Olsen created all the sculptures in a mere ten weeks. Though the sculptures didn't feel intimately connected to the media papering the walls ringing the exhibit, the figures did at least have the common denominator of showing various animal species locked in intimate embrace. There was a deer threesome, a lesbian Bonobo tryst, a pretty standard panda coupling, and a pair of adventurous Amazon River dolphins engaged in what Olson succinctly described as "blowhole sex."One of the most interesting features of Rune's sculptures is that he placed glass eyes fashioned after human eyes in the otherwise realistic animals' orbits. "One of the things that scientists can't do is linkurl:anthropomorphize,";http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/52728/ he said. "As an artist, you're allowed to do that." His aim, Olsen said, was to establish a connection with the viewer. "I was really interested in trying to conjure up some kind of emotion," he said, "I'm still intrigued in art as a medium for dialogue."____The Sex Lives of Animals__ will be on view at the Museum of Sex through next spring. The museum is located at 233 Fifth Avenue in New York, New York.Roughgarden has laid out her alternative to sexual selection in __The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness__, her new book which will hit shelves sometime in early 2009.__