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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Angela Saini
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May 29 - June 10, 2018
rather than being distinctly male or female, the brain is a unique “mosaic” of characteristics.
the proportion of people in the studies she has analyzed that have purely masculine or purely feminine brain features is between none and 8 percent.
Our brains are intersex.
yesterday. They were forged over millennia, every part slowly adapting to the pressures of the environment
way Ruben Gur suggests, or did they do
women crouched around a campfire, tending
plagued by controversy. As Charles Darwin’s work in the nineteenth century proves, the narratives
By having as many mates as possible, Hrdy suggested that female langurs might be strategically lowering the odds of a male killing her infant.
we are so close that primatologists routinely refer to humans as another great ape.
“A feminist is just someone who advocates equal opportunities for both sexes. In other words, it’s being democratic. And we’re all feminists, or you should be ashamed not to be.”
there are nearly three hundred primate species, and in about half of them you’ll rarely see a female ape or monkey out of contact with her child.
It really does take a village to raise a child.
“We have very high fertility compared to other great apes, compared to chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. And we tend to produce these very large offspring that require a lot of long-term care,”
the reality, observes Hrdy, is that it’s more common for mothers not to form an immediate attachment to their offspring than we like to believe.
Men: Evolutionary and Life History,
Older siblings had a more positive effect than anyone besides the mother. After this came grandmothers, then fathers, followed far behind them all by grandfathers.
This doesn’t mean that hands-on fathering isn’t important. Just that it isn’t always there.
If society expects men to be involved in child care, they are, and they can do it well. If society expects them to be hands-off, they can do that, too. This plasticity is unique to humans.
We sometimes imagine sexual equality to be a modern invention, a product of our enlightened, liberal societies. In actual fact, anthropologists have long known that the way women are treated throughout the world wasn’t always like this.
Historical investigations have always failed to uncover good evidence for matriarchal societies, in which women hold the reins of power. But that doesn’t mean humans weren’t egalitarian.
Bateman’s theories, once almost forgotten, were transformed into a fully blown set of universal principles, cited hundreds of times and considered solid as a rock.
In the Descent of Man in 1871, he wrote, “The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain. . . . Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman.”
“It’s pretty widespread. Some would even say ubiquitous. Multiple mating is very, very common among females,”
There’s some early research indicating, in other species at least, that when a female chooses the male she wants, her offspring are more likely to survive.
researchers have started to further question the scientific orthodoxy that females are generally more passive and chaste than males.
gender differences are significantly smaller in a nonthreatening environment.
“When a paper like that comes out, you would think that people who are interested in the topic would read it, regardless of which side they’re interested in or which side they tend to agree with.
it’s possible to argue that if ever there was proof that females aren’t naturally chaste or coy, it’s the extraordinary lengths to which some males go to keep them faithful.
Male sexual jealousy, the fear of being cuckolded, and such vicious mate guarding suggest that females aren’t naturally chaste or passive at all.
It cannot be demonstrated that woman is essentially inferior to man because she has always been subjugated. —Mary Wollstonecraft,
For many millions of women, the agony of infibulation is quietly absorbed as an unavoidable part of life.
Throughout history, mutilating a girl’s genitals has been the most viciously effective means of assuring a man that his children will be his own and not someone else’s. It’s as brutal a manifestation of sexual jealousy and mate guarding as anyone has ever seen.
men who followed the traditional Dogon religion were four times less likely to be cuckolded than Christian men, whose wives didn’t use the huts. It suggests that menstrual huts have allowed men to covertly track their wives’ fertility.
From how she dresses and carries herself to how promiscuous she is, most societies expect a woman to behave more modestly than a man.
something was holding women back from being the powerful sexual creatures they were born to be. This something was human culture.
“Generally, men have never accepted strict monogamy except in principle. Women have been forced to accept it.”
He described it dramatically as “the world historical defeat of the female sex.” He went on, “The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.”
Throughout recorded history, virginity and faithfulness have been universally celebrated as female virtues, and rigorously policed.
chimps are our closest genetic relatives in the primate world. Different estimates have dated our last common ancestor to be living eight to thirteen million years ago (the last ancestor shared by humans and dogs, by contrast, was possibly as far back as a hundred million years),
in bonobos, males maintain their relationship with their mother for life.
Bonobos seem to use sex as a kind of everyday social glue. Males have sex with males, females have sex with females.
bonobo society works the way it does because females form powerful bonds with each other, even if they aren’t related.
The common thread that unites species in which females are particularly vulnerable to male violence is females being alone.
it acquired such a shocking reputation that its very name, shortened to Bedlam, became synonymous with chaos and uproar.
The hormonal and physical changes associated with menopause, as well as the shift it marked in their life and status as mothers, had impacts on the mental health of many older women.
At the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in 1692, sixteen accused women were executed or died as a result of their incarceration, and from what we know, at least thirteen of them were menopausal.
When a phenomenon as important as menopause happens in humans, we almost always find it in other species, too, particularly among our primate relatives, like chimpanzees and the other great apes. But with menopause, that’s not the case. It’s freakishly unusual.
Research published in 2003 also showed that pregnancies from older fathers, especially past the age of fifty-five, are more likely to lead to miscarriage and birth defects.)
The earliest recorded mention is often attributed to Aristotle in the fourth century BC, when he is supposed to have noted that women stopped giving birth around the ages of forty or fifty.
fathers (more specifically, absent fathers) might also have helped in the evolution of menopause.
