Sex at Dawn

Sex at Dawn
First Harper Perennial paperback edition cover
Author(s)	Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jethá
Country	USA
Language	English
Subject(s)	Human sexuality, Anthropology
Publisher	Harper
Publication date	June 29, 2010
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages	384
ISBN	978-0-06-170780-3
LC Classification	HQ12 .R93 2010

Relationships
Types Family Kinship Siblings Cousin Marriage Husband Wife Friendship (romantic) Significant other Boyfriend Girlfriend Casual Cohabitation Same-sex relationship Sexual partner Monogamy Non-monogamy Open marriage Polyamory Polyfidelity Polygamy Cicisbeo Concubinage Courtesan Mistress
Activities Bonding Courtship Dating Mating Meet market Romance Singles event Wedding
Endings Breakup Separation Divorce Widowhood
Emotions Affinity Attachment Compersion Intimacy Jealousy Limerence Love Passion Platonic love Unconditional love
Practices Bride price dower dowry Hypergamy Infidelity Sexual activity Transgression Repression
Abuse Child Dating Domestic Elderly

Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality is a book co-authored by Christopher Ryan, Ph.D and Cacilda Jethá, MD (Portuguese pronunciation: [kɐˈsiɫðɐ ʒɨˈta]), first published in 2010 by the Harper imprint of HarperCollins. For the paperback, published July 5, 2011, the book's subtitle was changed to "How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships." As of 2012, Sex at Dawn has also been published in Korea, Finland, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Spain, China, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Romania, and Albania. An anonymous group of students in Iran guerilla-translated the book into Persian, an effort supported by the authors, who've made the pdf available for free download at the book's web site.

The book touches on issues related to evolution of monogamy in humans, divorce, human mating systems and more. The book has received generally positive reviews in the popular press and has received several awards. Reliable academic commentary has been limited to three negative reviews that warn that humans have a history that involves more monogamy than Sex at Dawn acknowledges, that the book misrepresents the current state of research to the general public, and does so deliberately in aid of an "ideological" agenda.

Summary

The authors argue that human beings evolved in egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands in which sexual interaction was a shared resource, much like food, child care, and group defense. In this, they agree to a degree with the work of Lewis H. Morgan who proposed in the 19th century that pre-agricultural humans lived in "primal hordes" in which property and paternity was communal.

They think that much of evolutionary psychology has been conducted with a bias regarding human sexuality. The authors believe that the public and many researchers are guilty of the "Flintstonization" of hunter-gatherer society; that is to say projecting modern assumptions and beliefs onto earlier societies. Thus they think that there has been a bias to assuming that our species is primarily monogamous despite what they believe to be evidence to the contrary. They argue for example, that our sexual dimorphism, testicle size, female copulatory vocalization, appetite for sexual novelty, various cultural practices, and hidden female ovulation, among other factors strongly suggest a non-monogamous, non-polygynous history. The authors argue that mate selection was not the subject of much intragroup competition among pre-agricultural humans, as sex was neither scarce nor commodified; rather sperm competition was a more important paternity factor than sexual selection. This behaviour survives among certain existent hunter-forager groups that believe in partible paternity.

The authors argue as a result that conventional wisdom regarding human nature, as well as what they call the standard narrative of evolutionary psychology is wrong. This "standard narrative" goes like this: Males and females assess one another’s mate value from perspectives based upon their differing reproductive agendas/capacities: "He looks for signs of youth, fertility, health, absence of previous sexual experience, and likelihood of future sexual fidelity. In other words, his assessment is skewed toward finding a fertile, healthy young mate with many childbearing years ahead and no current children to drain his resources. b) She looks for signs of wealth (or at least prospects of future wealth), social status, physical health, and likelihood that he will stick around to protect and provide for their children. Her guy must be willing and able to provide materially for her (especially during pregnancy and breastfeeding) and their children (known as male parental investment)." Assuming they meet each others' criteria, they mate and form a monogamous pair bond. Following this, "she will be sensitive to indications that he is considering leaving (vigilant toward signs of infidelity involving intimacy with other women that would threaten her access to his resources and protection)—while keeping an eye out (around ovulation, especially) for a quick fling with a man genetically superior to her husband. He will be sensitive to signs of her sexual infidelities (which would reduce his all-important paternity certainty)—while taking advantage of short-term sexual opportunities with other women (as his sperm are easily produced and plentiful)." They clarify: "we don’t see [the elements of the narrative] as elements of human nature so much as adaptations to social conditions—many of which were introduced with the advent of agriculture no more than ten thousand years ago."

The authors take a broad position that goes beyond sexual behavior, believing that humans are generally more egalitarian and selfless than is often believed. In an interview Ryan said, "we’re not saying that sharing was so widespread because everyone was loving and sitting around the fire singing “Kumbaya” every night. The reason that sharing was so widespread—and continues to be in the remaining hunter-gatherer societies in existence—is because it’s simply the most efficient way of distributing risk among a group of people." However, with the advent of agriculture people's lifestyle changed completely, leading to the advent of private property and the accumulation of power. This fundamentally changed the way people behave and has left the modern human being in a situation where their instincts are at odds with the society they live in.

The authors do not take an explicit position in the book regarding the morality or desirability of monogamy or alternative sexual behavior in modern society, but argue that people should be made aware of our behavioral history so that they can make more informed choices.

Reception

One month after publication, Sex at Dawn entered The New York Times best-seller list. The book received enthusiastic praise from syndicated sex-advice columnist Dan Savage, who wrote: "Sex At Dawn is the single most important book about human sexuality since Alfred Kinsey unleashed Sexual Behavior in the Human Male on the American public in 1948." Newsweek's Kate Daily wrote, "This book takes a swing at pretty much every big idea on human nature: that poverty is an inevitable consequence of life on earth, that mankind is by nature brutish, and, most important, that humans evolved to be monogamous. ... [Sex at Dawn] sets out to destroy almost each and every notion of the discipline, turning the field on its head and taking down a few big names in science in the process. ... Funny, witty, and light ... the book is a scandal in the best sense, one that will have you reading the best parts aloud and reassessing your ideas about humanity's basic urges well after the book is done... Ryan and Jethá do an admirable job of poking holes in the prevailing evo-psych theories and are more apt to turn to biological, rather than psychological, evidence. That doesn’t mean their thesis is bulletproof. But it does mean there’s a lot of value in reconsidering basic assumptions about our beginnings that we widely accept today as gospel." Eric Michael Johnson, writing in Seed Magazine, said "by looking at modern indigenous societies and comparing the findings of anthropologists with the latest results in behavioral psychology and biology, Ryan and Jethá piece together a remarkably coherent pattern from an otherwise fractured understanding of human sexuality." He further commented that the findings were not as novel as sometimes presented, noting that Sarah Hrdy "advocated a promiscuous mating system for humans in The Woman That Never Evolved" in 1999 and psychologist David Barash and psychiatrist Judith Lipton had detailed their own arguments in a similar vein in 2001. However, this book updated the ideas with material not available a decade earlier and did so using a "relaxed writing style and numerous examples from modern popular culture, their discussion of these topics remains readily accessible even to those who may be encountering such ideas for the first time."

The book was chosen as NPR host, Peter Sagal's favorite book of 2010, won the 2011 SSTAR Consumer Book Award (Society for Sex Therapy and Research), and was chosen as one of the best science and technology books of 2010 by Audible.com. The book received the 2011 Ira and Harriet Reiss Theory Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. Sex at Dawn was again a New York Times bestseller when it was released in paperback, in July, 2011.

The book was criticized for "biased reporting of data, theoretical and evidentiary shortcomings, and problematic assumptions" in a book review by Ryan Ellsworth, graduate student at the University of Missouri, in the peer reviewed journal Evolutionary Psychology. Ellsworth concludes the review by saying, "To be sure, I doubt that any serious evolutionary scientist, even the most ardent supporter of the 'standard narrative,' would argue that humans evolved in a milieu of perfectly monogamous pairbonds." He then summarizes his objections as a matter of degree: "if promiscuity even slightly approaching bonobo levels were characteristic of (post-Homo erectus) ancestral sexuality, there would be much more evidence for it than Sex at Dawn manages to drum up." He accuses his fellow scientists of failing to give the Sex at Dawn the attention it deserves because of its popularity and potential to mislead the public, stating that the book presents "a distorted portrayal of current theory and evidence on evolved human sexuality" to the general public.

Christopher Ryan responded to the Ellsworth review on his podcast. He argued that Ellsworth had made some valid points, but that overall he misrepresented the argument of Sex at Dawn. Ryan did not believe that they had argued that human sexuality necessarily was the same as bonobo sexuality, just that coitus was more frequent than is generally acknowledged, and that a typical human being would have had multiple partners within relatively short periods of time. He argues that the main thrust of the book is to discredit "the standard narrative," which he believes it does. He believes that reviewers have read too much into the book's argument, which he thinks does not argue specifically in favor of a particular, universal model of human sexuality, except to say that there is rather less monogamy than traditionally believed. Much of Ellsworth's review was thus not arguing against his real thesis. Ryan also alleged that the academic review process "shuts down alternative views" and that some of the negative reaction from academics was due to the fact that many felt threatened by new ideas which could threaten reputations or positions and that a certain amount was emotional or ego driven.

Academic reviews say that Sex at Dawn is pseudoscience, that it downplays ways that monogamy can be evolutionarily adaptive, and that the book exaggerates human promiscuity and similarity to bonobos. Ryan contends that bonobos are a good parallel for the study of human sexuality, but that he does not intend to equate the two.

David Barash, author of The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People wrote that Ryan and Jethá "ignore and/or misrepresent reams of anthropology and biology in their eagerness to make a brief for some sort of Rousseau-ian sexual idyll that exists—and/or existed—only in their overheated libidinous imaginations" in an approving review of Sex at Dusk, a rebuttal to Sex at Dawn. Barash writes that he finds it annoying that the book "has been taken as scientifically valid by large numbers of naïve readers … whereas it is an intellectually myopic, ideologically driven, pseudo-scientific fraud." In short, "just as multiple sexual partners can increase the fitness of a philanderer, the same behavior on the part of one’s partner can reduce the other’s fitness. Hence, sexual jealousy is a very widespread and fitness-enhancing trait, as is a roving eye."

Ellsworth later reviewed Sex at Dusk in Evolutionary Psychology. Ellsworth recounts a number of Saxon's scientific criticisms, such as, what she regards as the book's superficial discussion of bonobo and chimpanzee sexuality, an over-emphasis on the importance of sperm competition, ignoring the role of philopatry and emigration, complicated human inter-group relationships, and major omissions from the paleoanthropological record among others. Ellsworth agrees with Saxon that the omissions must be intentional, in service of an ulterior "ideological" agenda since the information they point to is available in the sources cited by the book. As Ellsoworth quotes from Saxon: "Their argument is one for the equalization of male access to women and the removal of conscious female mate choices, therefore ending the sexual rejection experienced by most males. In complete contrast, women at no point are argued as all being equally attractive to men, and the authors‘ discussion of women‘s bodies and sexual signals strongly suggests that they do recognize that men have quite strong mate preferences for young, fertile, and attractive women. The Sex at Dawn argument is about men of all ages and ranges of attractiveness getting access to the most desirable female bodies, i.e., that the sexes are equal but one sex is more equal than the other." Ellsworth finishes by writing that the popularity of the book is due to "the widespread tendency of people to see the world as they wish it to be, rather than how it really is."

External links

• Sex at Dawn's official site