The world’s population is largely the result of trillions of sexual encounters stretching over millennia. Today, intercourse happens as often as 215 million times every day. Whether a birth results depends on the participants’ desires, knowledge and resources, complex biological processes, culture, and just plain luck. More examines all of those factors, revealing the workings of our fecundity, our age-old attempts to control it, the dangers of living in an overcrowded world, and the vital role women play in all of this. In More you will learn:

– The key to a sustainable global population is to understand what women want: more for their children and not more children.

– When women control their own future and contraception and safe abortion are available, population growth will soon end-and that makes empowering women the most important step in saving the global environment.

– On any given day more than twice as many people begin their lives (373,000) as end their lives (159,000).

– The “most likely” prediction that world population will stabilize at 9 billion is most likely wrong.

– Silphium, an herb used for birth control in ancient Greece, became so popular it was depicted on a coin-and then was overharvested to extinction.

– “You run like a girl” is a boy’s taunt, but with likely roots in our evolution.

– Plants like aloe, sage, common milkweed, and mistletoe were once used for contraception.

– Why experts say women are “K” and men are “R” when it comes to survival.

– The evolutionary explanation of why Monica Lewinsky longed for more than oral sex with Bill Clinton, and why she didn’t get it.

– Some medieval European prenuptial agreements stipulated precise birth control, including withdrawal, oral contraception, pessaries, and the rhythm method.

– The evolutionary rationale for menopause and why grandmothers are essential to our survival.

– Former President George H. W. Bush was nicknamed “Rubbers” for staunchly supporting family planning as a congressman.

– The original “two-income family” was Paleolithic man hunting and Paleolithic woman gardening, and those “dual incomes” were essential to the rise of modern humans.

– Americans will feel population growth in rising home, food, and energy prices, along with crowded land, more traffic, and possibly much worse.

– The world will feel population growth in scarce food, water, and energy, the spread of disease, and widespread environmental damage.