Adam's Navel and Other Essays

Four short essays taken from the authors previous books, published as a Penguin 60s book.

These short essays revolve around natural history, and loosely link regarding evolution.

Adam's Navel, is the first essay, and it deals with the argument put forward by the sky-wizard followers that when creating the world, the sky-wizard also created a whole scientific back-story, preparing and placing fossils and laying them in stratified layers of variable mineral containing earth, just so that he could test people. The title comes from the fact the sky-wizard created Adam with a navel he would never have used (being the first man created), in the same way when first created a shark, or a hippopotamus would have been created with worn teeth and that animals were provided with an evolutionary back-story with fossils of their predecessors.

The Median isn't the Message is the second essay, based on misrepresentation via statistics, which basically explains with a personal example of the authors, that misuse of the mean, median and mode can successfully disguise the actual result.

Unenchanted Evening is the next essay, again returning to evolution, and more specifically adaptation, illustrated with snails on a Tahitian island - before their wholesale murder (by introduced snails). A sad story of mankind not learning from previous mistakes with the introduction of one species to control another.

The last essay is titled Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples, although the author advises his preference was Tits and Clits, but acknowledges that this would be misread as sexist, as the reader may not recognise that his reference is to male tits. This essay aims to answer a question posed to the author by a librarian who corresponded with him: “Why to men have nipples?' The answer of course, is that at the embryonic stage, the decision whether the embryo is male or female has not been made, and therefore all the necessary requirements for both are in place.
This of course is taken further with the clitoris and penis having a single origin. We then head off slightly on a tangent to the (male dominated) science of female orgasm, and the written works of Kinsey, Freud, Desmond Morris and others.

Each of the essays are well articulated, and while scientific and technical, are all clearly explained in simple terms, making them very readable. I think they also benefit from their brevity.

So far, the best of the non-fiction P60 books I have read, and as hard as it is to rate non-fiction against fiction, this is worthy of 5 stars for its accessibility and clear explanations.