A tour of some of the basest instincts and vice-related mysteries of the animal world includes profiles of drunken moose, cheating penguins, lazy worker ants, and other oddities.

A leading zoologist takes a fierce and often humorous look at the females of the animal kingdom and subverts the prevailing opinion among evolutionary biologists who have insisted that males are more interesting. Humans are locked in a battle over sex and gender: one side argues that evolutionary biology dictates how we should be, and the other that it's a patriarchal tool that shouldn't matter at all. Rewriting the science of evolution and sex,...