Whenever I hear someone argue that human beings must be one way or another because it's "natural" ~ or draws an analogy from our close primate relations and assumes that their behavior must provide a close mirror to ours, or gives societal or dietary prescriptions based on theories of human evolutionary adaptation... well, let's just say that my skepticism radar gets deployed.

As Marlene Zuk demonstrates in her fascinating and persuasive new book, ''Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can't Learn About Sex From Animals,'' the tendency to hold up animals as role models -- to see in their behavior inspiration or vindication for our own -- is as rampant in science as the common cold, and considerably more debilitating. ''The lens of our own self-interest not only frequently distorts what we see when we look at other animals,'' she writes. ''It also in important ways determines what we do not see, what we are blind to.''

Zuk's book points out many examples of biological research blinded by assumptions about sex and behavior ~ including pointing out that part of the difficulty in acceptance faced by the theory of Darwinian selection was the notion that females chose whom to mate with (which contradicted prevailing cultural notions of female sexual passivity).

As the New York Times review quotes Zuk, "'nature does not provide object lessons so much as challenges to our assumptions.''

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