Lousy Sex: Creating Self in an Infectious World
In Lousy Sex , Gerald N. Callahan explores the science of self, illustrating the immune system’s role in forming individual identity. Blending the scientific essay with deeply personal narratives, these poignant and enlightening stories use microbiology and immunology to explore a new way to answer the question, who am I?
"Self" has many definitions. Science has demonstrated that ninety percent of the cells in our bodies are bacteria—we are in many respects more non-self than self. Lousy Sex considers this microbio-neuro perspective on human identity together with the soulful, social perception of self, drawing on both art and science to fully illuminate this relationship. Through stores about the lives of wood lice, the biological advantage of eating dirt, the question of immortality, the relationship between syphilis and the musical genius of Beethoven, and more, the book creates another way, a chimeric way of seeing ourselves.
For a raft of animals, sunlight and sex are inseparable. Whether many creatures on this Earth become males or females is purely a matter of where the mercury falls along the length of its glass tube. In the laboratory, the sexes of some frogs will even reverse when the temperature is raised or lowered. Whether that happens in the wild isn’t clear, but it seems likely. Soil temperature, pond and ocean and river and rock and swamp temperatures—driven by the light of a star almost 100 million miles away—make turtle and crocodile sex, push lizards onto lifelong paths, flip fish from male to female, and make alligators fat with hormones.
