On Fertile Ground: A natural history of human reproduction by Peter Thorpe
Ellison, Harvard University Press, £19.50, ISBN 0674004639
PETER ELLISON grips your attention from his opening contrast between a
difficult birth in the central Africa that ended in the death of the baby and a
successful delivery in the US that mobilised up-to-date medical facilities.
He isn’t sensationalist. Fascination comes from following the progress from
conception to maturity in minute detail. From the first invasion of an egg cell
by the sperm, the processes relate to human evolution—the defeat of the
female’s immune system, for example. A fertilised…
