Joan Roughgarden is an evolutionary biologist at Stanford University, and speaking from her personal experience as a transsexual, she analyzes the staggering variety we see in the animal kingdom. Sometimes too dense for the casual reader, it is nonetheless a fascinating and important book. She’s particularly insightful on the rainbow of gender variations both in animals and humans, proposing myriad new and provocative perspectives.

I love finding out how mind-bending the natural world is. God or Mother Nature or whoever is in charge certainly has a sense of humor and a profound devotion to diversity, and this book is an amazing job of trying to explain how it all works and why.

Just for fun, here is the brilliant Ricky Gervais mocking Biological Exuberance. Funny stuff, but his comment at the end about the book’s sketches is unfair, as there are plenty of photos too.