Culture: Biology As Destiny

(Also under "Physical")

April 6, 2003

[Note from Channel: This discussion seems to have been brought about by the reassertion of the right-wing Christian view of females.]

As we have discussed in the past, above reptiles all embryos begin as females, and only the requisite hormone "bath" can serve to create a male. When this has occurred, the results of course affect more than secondary sex characteristics. Most profoundly it affects the development and complexity of the brain, and for that reason male brain patterns tend to be less multi-layered and complex than female ones, and of course in humans the ability for language, although significantly developed in both sexes, is far more extensively developed in the female than the male.

As we have observed in the past, cultural patterns based around male supremacy may reflect in fact the simplicity of brain function in males as compared to the complexity of brain function in females, but it also has to do with the abnormally long period of childhood in human beings requiring fairly constant attention from adult human beings. Even among elephants, a ten-year-old is significantly well-developed as compared to a ten-year-old human, and the capability of species members to survive on their own when necessary for most mammals requires a period of one to five years. In humans of course that period is doubled, for although there have been feral children who have survived in the wild from age three on, in fact those with social ability and linguistic capabilities require human interaction until age seven at a minimum and human protection until age ten. Without this period technically known as childhood, young humans are unable to survive as members of a human society. Much of this stems from, of course, the nature of brain activity as well as the slow maturation of the physical body.

The third and probably most important component is the sociocultural one, which is not only tied to language but to the whole notion of Personal, World, and Universal Truths, and this long time of development is more or less consistent from human group to human group. In the embryonic development the sexual differentiation can prove "crucial" to the way in which the fragment is received into the community at birth and the degree to which the fragment is supported by the community afterward. In societies in which linguistic favorability [sic] is given to females -- and there are very few of them -- female development is in fact more or less "level" with male. In societies which give preferential development to males -- which is indeed most of them, despite brain complexity -- females function at a social disadvantage, and as we have remarked before but we will reiterate, this is in fact contrary to the nature of the species, although of course it is part of choice, as adherence to culture is part of choice.

There are many instances culturally in which perceptions lead the community to support beliefs and conduct contrary in fact to brain function, and this is reflected very clearly in the tendency for most cultures to educate males and not to educate females, for as regards subtlety of reasoning, given the nature of brain development, females have by far the greater capacity for it. By defining brain function in male terms, the society tends to limit itself to a "model" that is not in accord with species development, and of course, as has been observed in many mammal species, undermining the female "authority" tends to leave species groups in disorder, as well as bring about group conflicts that are not apparent when the female hierarchy rules the group.

That does not mean that we advocate a female overthrow of human society -- we did not say that nor did we mean to imply it -- only that by limiting female participation, the human species deprives itself of its most complex and most linguistically sophisticated conceptual reasoning potential, and thereby brings about far more conflict and far more blunt-edged disunity than is the case when the full potential of the female of the species is given access to cultural functioning.