
David Baker’s Sex: Two Billion Years of Procreation and Recreation condenses the story of the evolution of (predominantly) reproductive sex into 300 pages. That is quite a feat.
The book is one of the latest additions to the popular “Big History” genre. First defined by Macquarie University historian David Christian in the early 1990s, the idea of Big History is that the temporal scale on which history should be studied is “the whole of time”. Its ambition is no less than to survey history from the Big Bang to the present, taking an interdisciplinary approach to its scholarship.