THE BABY MAKERS

In The Baby Makers, Holly Dunsworth asks a very simple question with astonishing implications: when did ancient man figure out that intercourse led to procreation, or in other words, that man + woman = baby?

It seems obvious now, but as she endeavors to prove, we are the only species on earth with reproductive knowledge. Our primitive ancestors wouldn’t have instinctively linked a tumble in the hay to a round belly five months later. The impact of this discovery has been massive. As soon as we figured out that sex had consequences, we began inventing means of securing and manipulating paternity, creating complex laws and customs around dating, marriage, virginity, birth control, nudity, succession, and inheritance, among others. Given the ever present political debates over birth control and abstinence only education, the ramifications are still reverberating today. The book will also make the bold claim that thanks to our babymaking knowledge, we are directly influencing our own evolution. Though other pop- science books combine sex and biology, such as Bonk, Sex at Dawn, and Why Is Sex Fun?, none of these address the idea of reproductive consciousness. It’s a fresh hypothesis that’ll make waves in both the mainstream and the scientific community. Holly Dunsworth, is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rhode Island; she has written for Slate, Scientific American online, and NPR’s Weekend Edition, and her research has been featured on NPR, Yahoo, FoxNews, MSNBC, iO9, HuffPo, Jezebel, and Smithsonian, among others. She’s been interviewed by both PBS and the BBC, and spoken at Harvard, Stony Brook, Yale, and Rutgers.