Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life

A revelatory history of sex, gender and science from Linnaeus to Darwin

What did Darwin and Linnaeus really think about sex? In print, their descriptions of animal courtship painted a comfortingly traditional picture: males were belligerent show-offs, females were choosy and skittish, and the two came together in unions curiously akin to human marriage. But in truth, the forefathers of evolutionary science were acutely aware that this was not the whole story. The reality was far more messy and ambiguous.

In this iconoclastic history, Ross Brooks shows how queerness was at the heart of evolutionists’ thinking about the natural world. From hermaphroditic slugs and sex-changing birds to male pigeon lactation, pregnant male seahorses and bisexual pigs, Darwin and his fellow naturalists were privately in awe of nature’s sexual diversity. These encounters fundamentally shaped their understanding of plants, animals and humans, even if they were never fully acknowledged in their published writings.

Brooks radically exposes us to the hidden queerness of Georgian and Victorian science—and shows how nature has always been more sexually diverse than we’ve been told.