After years of dull, uninspired, and humorless textbooks, I am greatly enjoying all of my college textbooks. They manage to throw in voice and jokes without being biased or uninformative. For instance, my statistics textbook is hilarious. It frequently makes fun of itself in the footnotes, and gives occasionally ludicrous examples.
I also have a textbook for my evolution class which is a little drier, but I couldn't help but love the chapter on sexual selection when it gave me gems like these:
"Most sperm, on the other hand, are little more than DNA with a propeller" (Freeman and Herron 404).
"...at any point in time there are more males than females in the pond looking for love" (407).
"Pryke and Andersson suspected from the beginning that the reason [for the male's appearance] was that the female red-collared widowbirds think that long tails are sexy" (417).
"One impediment to quick fatherhood, however, is the presence of still-nursing cubs fathered by males of the previous coalition. That is because females do not return to breeding condition until after their cubs are weaned. How can the male [lions] overcome this problem? They frequently employ the obvious, if grisly, solution: They kill any cubs in the pride that have not been weaned" (415).
(And suddenly The Lion King takes on a whole new, darker meaning.)
"Figure 11.28. Spotted cucumber beetles in love. The male is on the left" (425).
Yes, it is a picture of copulating spotted cucumber beetles.
Also, it turns out that prairie dogs are polyandrous. So much for the theory that monogamy in females is evolutionarily selected for! Take that! Females can be promiscuous if they darn well want.
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