The natural world may be mesmerizing, but it doesn’t offer a reliable guide to what is—or should be—socially acceptable. While copulating, female praying mantises often kill their mates and eat them. I understand the impulse, but I try to stop myself.
~ Elizabeth Kolbert via The New Yorker

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In some parts of the Himalayas, parents marry off their oldest son; then, when his younger brothers come of age, they join the marriage and share the wife. No one knows which brother is the biological father of any child that results from these unions, and, it seems, no one particularly cares.
~ Elizabeth Kolbert via The New Yorker

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The Kreung people of northeastern Cambodia build huts for their adolescent daughters to use for erotic liaisons and encourage them to have as many of these as possible before choosing a husband.
~ Elizabeth Kolbert via The New Yorker

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Charles Darwin found sex a mystery. He was perplexed not by the practice—he and his wife, who also happened to be his cousin, had ten children—but by the point of it.
~ Elizabeth Kolbert via The New Yorker

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