The oleander was blossoming in the courtyard of the tekija, a dervish lodge set in a cliff; and in the last light of a September afternoon, the white blossoms shone against the red rock. More than forty species of birds nest in the cliff, which also houses the source of the Buna River, an emerald tributary of the Nerevta flowing through Mostar, in eastern Bosnia, where Sufi dervishes arrived in the fifteenth century. They flourished here until the Communist takeover of Yugoslavia in 1945, when they went underground; they resurfaced in 1991, when Yugoslavia began to break apart, and now there were seminarians talking in low tones at a table outside the kitchen -near a display of prayer ropes, shawls, kilims, and devotional books for sale. A waiter brought Turkish coffee to our literary delegation. In the gloaming, we watched the swallows sweep along the cliff.

The cover illustration of What Is Sex? features what is in this culture an instantly recognizable image. 1 Moonlike, an ovum hangs in the center against a black background. Off to the lower left a single sperm, its curved tail suggesting movement, points its head toward the egg. This image depicts a moment of anticipation, just before the merger of egg and sperm. As part of the cover illustration this image seems to function as the answer to the question posed by the title. The juxtaposition of the title and this image implies a definition of "sex" that is necessarily linked to reproduction and a fixed dual-gender system. This image of egg and sperm, which stands in for human females and males, suggests that when it comes to answering the question "what is sex?" human beings are central to the discussion.

1 Before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, socialists could claim they had done a better job of uniting theory and practice than capitalists. Socialists had generally succeeded in raising the welfare of the bottom end of their societies, typically at the cost of lowering it at the top end. And that is exactly as the socialists would have wanted it. For, even if not all socialists held the rich personally responsible for the plight of the poor, all were in agreement that the rich constituted a structural obstacle in the struggle to overcome mass poverty. In contrast, capitalists have found it more difficult to square their own theory and practice. In theory, everyone should flourish with the liberalization of markets. Yet, in practice, even when the poor increased their income, it was never enough to catch up with the increases in wealth made by the rich. The result was an intensification of existing class divisions, or "relative deprivation," which capitalist theorists could only attempt to explain away by invoking such ad hoc factors as the lack of a work ethic among the poor or the unpredictability of markets. Poroi, 1, 1, January, 2001 can be added through will and effort to one's genetic endowment. In this sense, Singer remains deaf to the quest for recognition, at least in the human species and probably others as well.

The Unity of Knowledge seeks to persuade readers to integrate knowledge "from the natural sciences with that of the social sciences and humanities." 1 Wilson's stated intent is to offer the "strongest appeal" for the linkage of the natural sciences with the social sciences and humanities, an appeal based on "the prospect of intellectual adventure and, given even modest success, the value of understanding the human condition with a higher degree of certainty" (WC, 9). He believes that the biological sciences have much to say about the human condition, and that only by breaching "the boundary that separates the natural sciences on one side from the humanities and humanistic social sciences on the other" can we begin to truly understand human social behavior (WC, 125). In short, the connection that links the "deep, mostly genetic history of the species as a whole to the more recent cultural histories of its far-flung societies" is something that should be further explored by scientists willing to cross disciplinary boundaries (WC, 126).

1 Bruno Latour and Rachel Carson are allies across the span of thirty years. I think that the allegiance is a fact of major importance for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it allows us to get Latour down to earth, where he can do us some good, and out of the realm of mannered high-cultural debate, where he is rendered as useless as the rest of his fellow debaters.