#1213 Nathan Lents - The Sexual Evolution: Sex, Gender, and Mating

Hello everyone, welcome to a new episode of The Decenter. I'm your host as always, Ricardo Lopes, and today I'm here with a repeat guest, Dr. Nathan Lentz. Last time we talked about his book Human Errors, and today we're talking about his latest book, The Sexual Evolution, How 500 million years of sex, gender, and mating shape modern relationships. So Dr.

Lentz, welcome back to the show. It's always a pleasure to have you one. Thanks very much, and it's a pleasure to be back. Okay, so I mean you go through lots of different things in the book. Let I will try to focus just on a handful of them because we only have an hour today.

So uh let's let me start just with a general question. What can we learn by looking at the natural history of sex? Well, uh, we can learn a lot, and I think that um only recently have we really begun to appreciate uh the full diversity of sex uh in the animal world. And so we know that um, you know, sex evolved uh in microscopic organisms first, uh, simply as a way to combine two genomes.

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