Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution

Read an Excerpt

Iron / Sex
Juxtaposing the words 'iron' and 'sex' creates an odd couple. The two rarely have occasion to appear together in the same sentence, much less find themselves standing side by side with so little editorial support.

Iron / Sex, Part 2
Consider my consternation and sense of helplessness when I discovered that it was exceptional to find one among the late-term women visiting my clinic in possession of a normal hemoglobin count.

Iron / Sex, Part 3
These musings have convinced me that significant differences in iron levels between the sexes were the initial driving force behind many uniquely human cultural innovations. I shall trace the connections of art, calendars, marriage, mayhem, fatherhood

As in the bestselling The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, Leonard Shlain's provocative new book promises to change the way readers view themselves and where they came from.

Sex, Time, and Power offers a tantalizing answer to an age-old question: Why did big-brained Homo sapiens suddenly emerge some 150,000 years ago? The key, according to Shlain, is female sexuality. Drawing on an awesome breadth of research, he shows how, long ago, the narrowness of the newly bipedal human female's pelvis and the increasing size of infants' heads precipitated a crisis for the species. Natural selection allowed for the adaptation of the human female to this environmental stress by reconfiguring her hormonal cycles, entraining them with the periodicity of the moon. The results, however, did much more than ensure our existence; they imbued women with the concept of time, and gave them control over sex a power that males sought to reclaim. And the possibility of achieving immortality through heirs drove men to construct patriarchal cultures that went on to dominate so much of human history.

From the nature of courtship to the evolution of language, Shlain's brilliant and wide-ranging exploration stimulates new thinking about very old matters.

Leonard Shlain is the author of Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time & Light, and The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. He is the chief of laparoscopic surgery at California Medical Center in San Francisco..

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