Everything Bill Perez says is true. This book is a classic in entomology. I couldn't put it down when I read the library copy so I ordered one for myself.
BEWARE! The older edition has some great photos. The new 2001 edition is very poorly printed. Many of the photos are inscrutable. The printing is clear but the graphics are quite poor. I was upset to find that, for a very expensive book, I wasn't getting what I had expected.

When you use your imagination and envision insect evolution as a single, huge and ancient phenomenon--a monstrous morphing blossom endlessly ramifying through an infinite-dimensional phenotype space--you begin to understand it as a fierce and indomitable force of nature. And while many of its freakish aspects are standard fare in biology textbooks and nature documentaries--never failing to cause our vertebrate mandibles to gape in horror--the mating schemes of insects are seldom dwelt upon in presentations to layfolk. While this fat volume is not specifically aimed at the casually interested layperson, it is well within the grasp of the interested non-biologist--and I recommend it highly to anyone interested in insects or evolution. First, it is a thorough review of the evolutionary issues of insect sex. Unlike many scientific "reviews" which are highly skewed towards the author's own work, this book displays the authors' almost omniscient acquaintance with everyone's contributions to the field. But this book is not a taxonomy--every example of insect mating strategy is presented within an evolutionary context, and used to illustrate or nuance some adaptive principle or tradeoff. And if you thought insect defense, feeding, and social habits were weird--be prepared for an extreme excursion through what insect evolution is capable of--from "traumatic insemination" (where the male, circumventing the female's sperm-sequestering genitalia, rips through her side to deposit directly in her abdomen[!]); to parasitic flies homing in on noisy crickets to spray them with a cloud of slowly lethal maggots (illustrating the costs shouldered by conspicuously advertising males); to grossly immature male fig wasps, emerging extra early to inseminate virgin females before they have even awakened from their brood chambers; to the whimsical surrealism of insect genital morphology. Of course, not everything is nightmarish--there are the beautiful aerial acrobatic contests of territorial male butterflies; the complex game-theoretic calculus of nuptial gifts, the guarding of females, and female mate choice; the almost comical orthopteran [grasshopper/cricket/katydid] Kama Sutra on p. 312 (I need this on a poster or T-shirt!). And to see all this (copiously illustrated, by the way), not as individual wonders held up to amaze, but as part of an illumination of basic evolutionary principles is pure scientific elegance. Awesome.

Thornhill and Palmer (TP) review tons of evidence on the nature of rape. The plusses of the book are (1) they show that rape is a sexual act directed at obtaining pleasure rather than being an expression of male power; (2) they show that as predicted by evolutionary theory, males are evolutionarily adapted to rape, whereas females are not. These are terribly important facts, and they go against the accepted wisdom in contemporary sociology and some brands of feminism; but the accepted wisdom has no empirical basis whatever, in the authors opinion and mine as well. The minuses of the book will appear trivial to those who believe in the accepted wisdom and are shattered by its demise. But they are important nonetheless. Most important, TP view males as touting up the costs of raping (pleasure, possible reproduction) against the costs (getting caught and punished). If the benefits exceed the costs, the male rapes. This ignores all forms of interpersonal interaction except the brute physical. For instance, the 'cost' of causing harm to an innocent victim, the 'cost' of seeing a victim helpless and miserable because of your actions, the 'cost' of having the self-image as a sexual predator, and the like, are simply not part of their model of human motivation. Yet there is overwhelming evidence that people are self-interested in the way depicted by TP. Males who use TP's cost/benefit analysis are better described as psychopaths or sociopaths rather than normal humans. This is because in the course of our evolution, humans have picked up fundamental prosocial traits. When these are absent in a person, the person is an abnormal, pathological case. In short, an alternative to TP's characterization of rape is that rapists are males who have abnormal personalities (including but not limited to psychopathy) the allow them to act out on urges that all males have but in most are countermanded by basic human sympathies. TP do a disservice to evolutionary theory, which they use to portray humans as a sorry lot of selfish brutes. The fact is that evolution produces morality and beauty, sensitivity and love, just as much as rape, murder, and indifference.

Nature, and natural selection, are not PC. We and all livingcreatures exist because of this process. It is impossible that ourenduring behaviors have not been shaped in some way by natural selection. This does not mean that all human behavior does not occur within an environment, which is crucial. Genetic determinism does not exist. That said, I don't think that Thornhill and Palmer have shown that humans male have an actual adaptation to rape(may instead be a by-product of male sexuality). I think that this book should not have been written at this point. The evidence is not there, which is not to say that it will never be there (to be fair, the evidence for social scientist's theories is even more flawed). More research is needed, which the authors concede, but it is somewhat damaging that this book was written before having this sort of proof. If the hypothesis has not yet been supported, why write a book about it that attempts to be comprehensive? This book does a good job of explaining the position of evolutionary psychology/sociobiology and of illustrating the ways that is has been misrepresented to support a feminist/cultural anthropologist political agenda that seems to not be interested in basing itself in science. It is amazing to me that most people cannot comprehend the obvious- the mainstream refusal to understand the difference between ultimate and functional causality or the naturalistic fallacy is a formidable obstacle. Nature is amoral. Humans have a capacity for morality. If rape is shown to have some biological basis (which it must), this says nothing about excusing men for their behavior. We can all agree that rape is wrong and something that we must work to prevent. Studying ALL of the reasons that compel men to rape, is crucial, and finding the ultimate, biological reason is the best way of all we have to learn how to prevent human rape. END

As a woman, a feminist, and a sociologist by training, I still find nothing offensive in this book. Thornhill and Palmer have tackled one of the most sensitive and inflammatory topics that exist and it is only natural that they will receive a lot of knee-jerk reactions to it. However, this book is well-written, well-researched and thought-provoking. Whether you ultimately believe their theory or not, T and P will make you seriously consider some of your assumptions about rape.

I'm not sure if some of the other reviewers have actually read this book, because nowhere in it do the authors assert that women are to blame for their rapes or that they provoke them through sexy clothing. They do suggest that sexy clothing might be one of many factors that lead men to rape and that women may CHOOSE to use this knowledge when deciding how to dress for certain situations. Why this particular issue is so offensive boggles me. I have had many people suggest that I take a women's self-defense class to help me avoid and/or survive an attack. But that suggestion in no way implies that if I *don't* take a self-defense class I am somehow responsible for causing my own rape. Similarly, women can arm themselves with the knowledge that how they dress may have an effect on how some men behave towards them, without being responsible for that behavior in any way.

I'd advise anyone interested in this topic to read the book carefully and thoroughly. Does the book prove that rape is an evolutionary adaptation? Of course not, but it certainly offers some compelling evidence and an interesting alternative to current theories on rape.