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

“GYNA SAPIENS awareness of the cause and implications of pregnancy constitutes the first major breakthrough sapients experienced as a result of acquiring knowledge of deeptime. The second momentous insight–the certainty of death–would be the prime mover behind a spray of unique mental states and behavior patterns.

“We are the only creature that relies heavily on the IF=THEN algorithm for success…Unfortunately, behind shining reason lurks a malignant defect…All syllogisms begin with a set of premises. Premises, unfortunately, are often based on unreliable beliefs, and therefore are not often put through the same rigors as the reasoning process that follows. If the premises of a particular IF=THEN algorithm are flawed, then the answer will be false.”

Leonard Shlain

SEX, TIME AND POWER

From Chapter 19,

“Superstition/Laughter”

“Unable to detect any contradiction in the formal statements of the Ancients after an objective confrontation with total Egyptian reality, and consequently unable to disprove them, [Greco-Roman Historians and traditional Egyptologists] either give them the silent treatment or reject them dogmatically and indignantly. They express regret that people as normal as the ancient Egyptians could have made so grievous an error and thus create so many difficulties and delicate problems for modern specialists. Next they try in vain to find a White origin for Egyptian civilization. They finally become mired down in their own contradictions…after performing intellectual acrobatics as learned as they are unwarranted. They then repeat the initial dogma…the White origin of Egyptian civilization.

“…Egyptians themselves–who should surely be better qualified than anyone to speak of their origin–recognize without ambiguity that their ancestors came from Nubia and the heart of Africa.”

Chek Anta Diop

THE AFRICAN ORIGIN OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

From Chapter Three, “Modern Falsification of History”

and

Chapter Seven, “Arguments for a Negro Origin”

“Ancestral humans…concocted fantastic stories about what happens after death…Despite clear, incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, they declared death entirely illusory. A belief in the afterlife seems to have become embedded in the human psyche around [forty thousand years ago, in Central Africa], in the period when the consistent use of mortuary rituals first appeared in the archaeological record… One cannot say with absolute certainty that a belief in an afterlife is a form of self-delusion. One can say with assurance, however, that no one knows for sure, because in all of recorded history no living mortal has returned to tell those who remained among the living exactly what happens on the other side.”

Leonard Shlain

SEX, TIME AND POWER

From Chapter 19,

“Superstition/Laughter”

“…The idea that the universe began in a single primordial explosion, or Big Bang, is accepted without question by most scientists. And this is odd because, although there are compelling reasons to believe that this is true, no one has ever proved this is true. On the other hand, if a near-death psychologist were to flatly state that the realm [Near Death Experience]-ers travel to during their experiences is an actual other level of reality, the psychologist would be attacked for making a statement that cannot be proved. And this is odd, for there are equally compelling reasons to believe this is true. In other words, science already accepts what is probable about very important matters IF those matters fall into the category of *fashionable things to believe*, but not if they fall into the category of *unfashionable things to believe*. This double standard must be eliminated before science can begin to make significant inroads into the study of both psychic and spiritual phenomena…”

Michael Talbott

THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE

The MD Dr. Leonard Shlain’s SEX TIME AND POWER is provocative.

Shlain’s foundational thesis is biochemical, not anthropological. The idea that the human *child* homo sapiens initiated our physical evolution is, though hardly new (see the work of Elaine Morgan for just one example), powerfully represented through his explanation of two things: 1) the new child’s brain size, changing completely the process by which women give birth, and 2) the female need for iron (in the form of meat) that such a drastic change in the pregnancy and giving birth process demanded on the female human body, to make up for the mineral depletion. These two changes all but forced man, according to Shlain, to stand upright and hunt for woman to have meat. WOMAN, in turn, invented everything from sex-strikes to cyclical time to regulate and manage this process. Meaning, WOMEN ushered in the next stage of cultural and sexual evolution.

His view of many things beyond that is faulty to say the least. Though an obviously compassionate man who thinks much about injustice and the perils of misogyny in our culture, his writing reminds me of late Freud: innovative on the surface but both apologetic and representative of the status quo at its heart. His novel ideas owe their existence to the anthropology of Karl Marx, Engels and Dr. Chris Knight of London (see BLOOD RELATIONS): all die-hard socialists who would dismiss much of his other findings (regarding the supposed inevitability of Patriarchy) as a myth of 19th century European capitalism/imperialism, projected onto an African prehistoric past. (And, as I also expected, he quotes absolutely none of the Afrocentric anthropologists and Egyptologists who show his central theory to be both more than a century old and forming the cultural core beliefs of ancient African civilizations, from Egypt on down.) Also, his describing of the psycho-cultural effect of man realizing the “certainty of death” reveals the “malignant defect” of his foundational “IF=THEN algorithm” for scientific study. Like most traditional anthropologists, his understanding of Darwinian evolutionary theory relies on a debunked Newtonian view of the physical universe. (See the explanation of Superstring Theory in the work of cosmologist Paul Davies, and Jenny Wade’s CHANGES OF MIND.) Hence, the post-Newtonian principles of energy & consciousness at the core of most ancient religions and forms of shamanic mysticism occurring as little more than neuroses to this good American doctor of *medicine*–not bio-physics, philosophy or anthropology.

Good book. Some serious biases; but good nonetheless.

Rating: 4 / 5

Leonard Schlain is a creative and panoramic thinker: very like a multi-tasking woman who must focus in the moment and simultaneously “see” the past and future. He’s ingeniously woven the story around the facts into what perhaps is our best guess yet, about our evolutionary underpinnings. Schlain’s a genre of his own, who has mentally freed us up from a scanty and overly focussed scientific box. This medical man is comfortable that the scientist affects the experiment. Read it. ~ Elena Dolan
Rating: 5 / 5