The Evolution of Human Sexuality
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Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Donald Symons |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Human sexuality |
| Published | 1979 (Oxford University Press) |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 358 (first edition) |
| ISBN | |
The Evolution of Human Sexuality is a 1979 book about human sexuality by anthropologist Donald Symons, in which Symons discussed topics such as human sexual anatomy, ovulation, orgasm, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, and rape, attempting to show how evolutionary concepts can be applied to humans. Symons argued that the female orgasm is not an adaptive trait and that woman have the capacity for it only because orgasm is adaptive for men, that rape can be explained in evolutionary terms and feminist claims that it is not sexually motivated are incorrect, and that differences between the sexual behavior of male and female homosexuals help to show underlying differences between male and female sexuality. In his view, homosexual men tend to be sexually promiscuous because of the tendency of men in general to desire sex with a large number of partners, a tendency that in heterosexual men is usually restrained by women's typical lack of interest in promiscuous sex.
The book received several positive reviews, as well as some criticism: it was described as the most important work on human sociobiology to date, but also dismissed as an impoverished work. It has been seen as a classic work on human sexual evolution and used as a textbook, though critics have questioned Symons' explanation of the female orgasm and his suggestion that eliminating rape "might well entail a cure worse than the disease". Symons' arguments about homosexuality have received both criticism and support from commentators, and he has been both accused of supporting genetic determinism and defended against the charge.
According to Symons, the ideas that he developed in The Evolution of Human Sexuality were partly inspired by a conversation he had with ethologist Richard Dawkins in 1968. Symons, who had concluded that "men tend to want a variety of sexual partners and women tend not to because this desire always was adaptive for ancestral males and never was adaptive for ancestral females", found that Dawkins had independently reached the same conclusion. Symons presented an early draft of his book during a 1974 seminar on primate and human sexuality he co-taught with anthropologist Donald Brown. Symons argued in the draft that there are universal human sex differences.
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