Death & Sex by Tyler Volk

Author:Tyler Volk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

PART ONE

Humans and

Other Chimps

1

Forbidden Fruit

When I was newly married, driving in Florida after a sparsely attended shotgun wedding (just the two of us and a justice of the peace), a preacher came on the radio. I listened because he was criticizing efforts to understand the evolution of sexuality while I was engaged, as a junior science writer, in writing a book on it (with, of all people, my mother, an evolutionary biologist). Scientists these days are taking it down to ridiculous levels, beyond the level of the flea, he said with scorn in his voice. By God, they were even trying to look to bacteria for answers! Listen, he continued. You don’t need to look at the birds and bees, let alone microorganisms, to understand sex. Everything you need to know about the subject is already there, written for you in black and white, in the Bible.

As a northerner in the Bible Belt I was perturbed. The Origins of Sex: Four Billion Years of Genetic Recombination had yet to come out. Highly technical, due to be published by Yale University Press, this book, just as the Christian broadcaster warned, took it down to the level of cells. Who was I, a twenty-six-year-old, to have such hubris?

Although I’d never read the Good Book cover-to-cover (I hear there are some bawdy parts), and had been brought up by scientists (astronomer father, chemist stepfather, and biologist mother), I could not help but feel accused by this stranger’s sermon. In Genesis, as I understood it, Adam is made by God in his image, Eve is taken from Adam’s rib, and they live happily ever after—at least until the Fall. As Jimmy Buffett sings (which you can also hear driving through Florida), some say a woman is to blame: The fall is Eve’s fault, as it is she who let the trickster snake whisper sweet somethings in her ear and yielded to the temptation to munch of the sumptuous fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil upon whose branches he hung. She took her fateful bite, and the rest is history.

Now, in English texts such as the King James translation of the Bible, the fruit she bit is an apple, but some say apricots, pomegranates, figs, or grapes were more likely the fruit of the one tree God prohibited the first couple from eating in Genesis 2:9. According to ethnobotanist R. Gordon Wasson, the “apple” may even have been a white-spotted red mushroom, Amanita muscaria, of the sort that the hookah-smoking snail sits upon in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Forming a symbiotic partnership with the roots of trees, this fungus is a kind of “fruit.” It also qualifies as a candidate for the first bite on the grounds of being psychoactive and poisonous, although for sheer salacious lubriciousness in cross section it’s hard to top the apple.

Who could blame Eve, surrounded by all those arrogant males, for taking a bite of the forbidden fruit? Even if the main thing learned from that luscious bit of nutriment was the revelation that they were naked.

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