Why is sex fun?

The author-Jared Diamond-is an interesting individual.  In the age of specialisation, we train to know deep but narrow.  Diamond is a rare breed.  He trained in Physiology, but branched out to Ecology and Environmental history.  He made substantial scientific contributions in all three areas.  He’s also fascinated by birds and turned bird-watching hobby into major scientific contributions.  He went to New Guinea to study birds, but ended up learning about tribe people there so Anthropology became his field too. It’s very rare for one individual to have multiple areas of expertise.  Diamond also has ability to make difficult concepts easily understandable.

To me major take home from this book is not so much the contents, but the fascinating questions posed e.g. why is sex fun? why don’t men breast-feed? why do women have menopause? why do we age? It shows how curious mind work. When we question even the most mundane physiological phenomena, the questions take us through intellectual adventures of some sort while the author tries to answer the questions. 

The answers to those questions could be based on physiology, but the answers would have been short, uninteresting and unimaginative.  Most importantly, the journey to the answers would have been dull and dry.  The author, on the other hand, used evolutionary biology as a basis to form answers to all these questions.  The premise is that all living things’ purpose is to transmit their gene through generations. Through environmental pressure, behaviours, anatomical structures and functions are changed, shifted and moulded to comply with the concept of ‘survival of the fittest’.  Although it is an interesting premise I have some reservation about temporality i.e. chicken and egg dilemma. What is the cause and what is the effect?