The other sexual revolution: hormonal control of family planning in plants

The development of hormonal contraceptives stands out as a key contribution of biochemistry to the 20th century, part of the wider ‘sexual revolution’ that dramatically changed society in many Western countries. But unbeknown to them, the pioneers of the contraceptive pill had been beaten to the idea by a few hundred million years, by a rather unlikely group of organisms that have been using hormones as contraceptives since their own sexual revolutions back in the swinging Palaeozoic. Since their successful conquest of land in the Ordovician, land plants had been restricted in the genetic mixing and expansion of populations by their relative immobility. A series of key innovations in the seed plant group, and in particular in flowering plants, enabled plants to mate and to disperse their offspring over much longer distances, by harnessing the wind or animals to provide mobility. However, all this ‘outsourcing’ created new challenges; coordinating and optimizing reproductive effort is not straightforward when it depends on a third party. Here, I discuss some of the key signalling molecules – sex hormones, as it were – that plants use to plan their families and manage their fertility, and why this matters to us, now more than ever.

“The Siren Song of Yoga”

Yoga writ large helps illuminate the nature and the limits of evolving countercultures. Yoga in the 1960s and 1970s United States operated as a crucial vehicle for expressing critiques of patriarchy and sexual repression. Expressive forms of sexuality became pervasive in yoga culture, symptoms of the increased discursive and physical openness of the sexual revolutions. The broad-ranging spirituality associated with yoga often challenged rigid religiosity, frequently by pitting Eastern against Western belief systems, often oversimplifying this duality. The American encounter with yoga has been a vehicle for the rise of a capacious spirituality, often defined as “New Age” and more recently subsumed within the “spiritual-but-not-religious” movement, which today over 30 percent of Americans reportedly embrace. Yoga has been a crucial vehicle for expressing how Americans see themselves as spiritual, sexual, and physical beings, and the 1960s and 1970s represent a period in which these identities were articulated, if not always enacted, as distinctly countercultural. At the same time, this famously experimental era paradoxically corresponded to the incorporation of yoga into a popular mainstream fitness culture. The mainstreaming of yoga at times sapped this spiritual practice of a significant measure of radicalism and at others merely expressed that radicalism differently.