Book Club: Faye Flam to appear in person to discuss The Score

Humanist Association of Greater Philadelphia Book Club:  Faye Flam in person to discuss The Score

The Score: How The Quest For Sex Has Shaped The Modern Man by Faye Flam

After an amazing talk with Faye Flam in January, Faye will appear at our book club to discuss why & how she wrote the book and what she hoped to say.

Afterwords attendees can discuss The Score and ask Ms. Flam questions about her book.

“What makes a man?” Flam, a science writer who pens a sex column forThe Philadelphia Inquirer, seeks a scientific answer to this often-asked question. Her search takes her from a seduction boot camp for men to the labs of evolutionary biologists, sociologists and physiologists who study gender differences.

From mushrooms with 30,000 sexes to sea worms that compete to be the male, Flam surveys the natural world to explain why human males evolved the way they did, revealing a riotous diversity in the way life begets life. While human males have one X and one Y chromosome, for instance, the oddball male platypus carries five of each kind. Male squid inject females with sperm packages that burst out of her skin to fertilize the egg, while male sea urchins broadcast sperm into the ocean, never knowing whose eggs they may reach.

Flam contends that the fundamental reproductive imbalance between males and females shapes the way men seek love, take risks and view the world — and drives evolutionary strategies.

The Score sometimes flirts with gender essentialism, and the link between other male animals and modern man can often be tenuous. Men may prefer younger women, for instance, but male chimpanzees go wild for older females. While the book may not definitively say what makes a man, it offers a few entertaining clues, capturing the weird and the wacky without being fluffy.

In pursuit of her stories, writer Faye Flam has weathered storms in Greenland, gotten frost nip at the South Pole, helicoptered into equatorial cloud forests and floated weightless aboard NASA’s zero-g plane. She has a degree in geophysics from the California Institute of Technology and started her writing career with the Economist. She later took on the particle physics and cosmology beat at Science Magazine before coming to the Philadelphia Inquirer to write about science for the general public. She wrote two weekly science columns, starting with “Carnal Knowledge,” which covered the science of sex and led to her first book, The Score, How the Quest for Sex has Shaped the Modern Man. Her next column, “Planet of the Apes” explored the topic of evolution. She now writes the Lightning Blog at WHYY/NewsWorks in Philadelphia and critiques her fellow journalists at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker.

more info:

http://fayeflamwriter.com/

The Secular Book Club discusses books relevant to secular humanist values, issues, history, etc.  These meetings are designed to build a stronger secular community, develop our thoughts more coherently, and embrace our history.  Books are chosen by the group during meetings. After 9PM, discussion is sometimes continued at a local restaurant.