Why don ’ t you write about something more interesting , Lisa ? Review of Elisabeth A .

The late Stephen Jay Gould, at one point in his wide ranging studies, decided to look into the early publications of Alfred Kinsey to see if he could find insights into Kinsey’s later work in sexology. Kinsey began his career as a taxonomist of gall wasps. Gould located and dusted off the (Harvard) Widener Library copy of a Kinsey monograph on wasps from the 1930s, and found graffiti on the title page: ‘‘Why don’t you write about something more interesting, Al?’’ (Gould 1985, p.157). Elisabeth Lloyd captured public attention with her 2005 publication of The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution. Orgasms are interesting. The New York Times reviewed the book in its Tuesday Science section (a section that Gould had read religiously). Lloyd was immediately invited to chat about her book with Barbara Walters and colleagues in NBC’s morning program The View. Saturday Night Live joked that the book was a ‘‘real departure for the Hardy Boys.’’ (The Hardy Boys was a series of mystery novels for adolescents with titles like ‘‘The Case of the Cosmic Kidnapping.’’) The comparison of Lloyd’s book to a mystery novel is more insightful than the stances taken by some of her reviewers. (My tardiness in completing this review led me to examine Lloyd’s early reviewers.) They take the topic of the book to be the female orgasm itself, rather than its ‘‘case.’’ The case of the female orgasm is the history of the theorizing and argumentation about the evolutionary origin and maintenance of the trait. Once we recognize the inconsistency of the facts about female orgasm with the early adaptationist theories about its origin, the first mystery is how those theories could have been accepted in the first place. The facts are that female orgasms are developmentally related to male orgasms, with common embryological primordia for penis and clitoris and apparently homological reflexes during orgasm: contractions in the muscular floor of the pelvis with a 0.8 s frequency. But these similarities in the internal, homological relations between the male and female origins contrast with the environmental causes of the reflex in each sex. Male orgasms are stimulated by sexual intercourse, and by masturbatory friction on the phallus (the penis in males) that imitates intercourse. Female orgasms are similarly stimulated by friction on the phallus (the clitoris in females), but human anatomy rarely