ON REFLECTION
A beginner’s guide to sex
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to Dr John Launer, London Department of Postgraduate Medical Education, Stewart House, 32 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DN, UK; jlauner@londondeanery.ac.uk
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Most doctors know remarkably little about sex. They may have learned the facts of life at school, studied family planning and sexually transmitted diseases as medical students, and had some personal experience of sexual relationships. Yet they are unlikely to have had any serious teaching about evolution, and hence to understand very much about the biological role of sex. This is a pity. Sex is a fascinating subject, not just in the most obvious sense, but because discoveries in biology in recent decades have given us a far greater understanding of males and females, and the interactions between them. In this article, I want to offer a brief review of what we now know about the evolutionary biology of sex, and the consensus that is emerging around sexual psychology.
Sexual reproduction began around a billion years ago. For around two and a half billion years before then, it was unknown:
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