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

by Leonard Shlain

I suspect that another key factor stimulating earlier menarche and diminishing anovulatory cycles has been the authorities’ recognition of the importance of iron in the diet of females. Iron-fortified foods consumed by children and teenagers, along with a consistently high meat diet, have increased their young bodies’ iron stores. This increase, combined with adequate stores of fat, has signaled the feedback controls in the brains of these young girls that it is now permissible for pregnancy to proceed.

Role of Iron

Both nerves and wires conduct electrical currents that generate electromagnetic fields extending into the surrounding space. These fields will, in turn, activate currents in otherwise dormant wires or nerves nearby. This is the principle behind radio and television transmitters and receivers, dynamos, and transformers, and as with these man-made devices, “interference” (or static) in nerves or wires is a potential problem. To protect signals from corruption by neighboring electromagnetic fields, each individual nerve is encased in insulating material.

Insulation

The proximity of a young woman can make a young man behave stupidly. He will try to impress her with his prowess or reckless behavior—attributes that fortuitously put him in harm’s way in the pursuit of iron on-the-hoof.

Stupidity in the presence of young woman

The greatest threat to a young ancestral woman’s life was a premature pregnancy; the greatest threat to an ancestral adolescent boy was premature injury or death when hunting. The two great themes of the earliest art preserved on cave walls and chiseled in stone are hunting and fertility. Iron and sex bind the two tightly together.

Sex and iron

the fallacy of assuming evolution designs what is best for the species.

Fallacy

Homeostasis is the process by which the body regulates and maintains its delicate internal equilibrium through a continual series of feedback loops. An organism experiences stress whenever some factor disturbs its internal milieu’s homeostasis. Stress comes in two varieties: acute and chronic. Acute stress is sudden and precipitous. Chronic stress intrudes over an indefinite period of time.

Stasis n stress

Margot Fonteyn, the great ballerina, remarked, “One should always take one’s work seriously, but one should never take oneself seriously.”