interlibraryprone finished reading Evolution's rainbow by Joan Roughgarden
Took me a long time but I'm glad I finished it. I'm gonna have to gather my thoughts about this book into a longer post. Loved the takedown of Darwinian sexual selection & the cisheterosexism in a lot of biology research.
Did not love how poor a job the book did with regard to intersex stuff - Roughgarden just generally fumbled all of the intersex stuff. For example, in Part 1 she seems to conflate intersex with biological hermaphroditism; in Part 2 she misrepresents intersex as "baby born with ambiguous genitals" only to then contradict herself by describing some common intersex variations that don't fit this description. Her conceptualization of intersex is inconsistent, bioessentialist, out of line with what the intersex community, and gramatically weird to boot (she talks about intersexes a lot).
This is an ambitious book and I learnt things. It could sorely use an update for fixing the intersex content, improving the history section, and an update to the genetic engineering chapter now that CRISPR is a thing.