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January 20, 2005
How appropriate.
For Christmas, I bought my sister a book she had requested; Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution, by Leonard Shlain. She finished it quickly, and because she enjoyed it, she lent it to me while she was visiting last weekend. So I started reading it early this week, because I'd grown bored of my own book selection.
I can't believe how appropriately it fit in to that essay I wrote in my last entry, and how well it answered a lot of the questions I put forth. The book is, of course, all about human evolution, so I assumed there would be some similarity, but within the first twenty pages, I encountered quotes like,
Contemporary men and women are living relics of bygone days. In the short span of years that we have existed as a distinct species, insufficient time has elapsed to depart radically from the physiological and behavioral patterns we employed to respond to the conditions we found ourselves in at the dawn of our species.
That neatly explains the disconnect between our actions and our instinctual drives, and, as it implies that history will carry us beyond these behaviors, reinforces the idea that we should not defer entirely to the wisdom of our instincts.
Especially since we seem to have almost completely transcended natural selection (emphasis on natural), thanks to medical science, it's not really surprising that we haven't moved beyond possibly obsolete instinctual behaviors; we have no way to breed them out. Cultural mores are so firmly ingrained in our day-to-day behavior that we merely perpetuate them in our offspring. It looks to me like social reform is the only way to go.
On that note, I highly recommend Leonard Shlain's book. Also, be sure to take a look at this site. It's my new favorite website, and I'll be writing more about it later. Also, see
Posted by becka at January 20, 2005 10:23 PM