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

Recommended to me by my Italian Cinema professor, this is definitely one of the best academic books I could recommend a person. It wasn't difficult to read, but you learned a shitload of things from it about... everything, really. He explains how it was women who taught us about time and thus mortality, and it's knowledge of death that spurns us in just about everything and... It covers so much, I can't even begin to say, except that it's definitely worth reading. It's sciencey, it's abstract, and it can probably be applied to every damn aspect of your life.

Shlain's hypothesis is that early humans' dawning comprehension of time passing is what jump-started the Creative Explosion -- the Upper Paleolithic Revolution -- 40,000 years ago. That, along with women's ability to say no to sex and men's realization of paternity, fueled art and science and culture and everything else humanity has accomplished since. It's very interesting to read, and Shlain's ideas are worth considering.

I had one problem with this book: Too much poetic license. Shlain personifies evolution as Mother Nature and has her metaphorically "designing" humanity. This obscures the reasons why certain things, such as homo sapienns' sense of time, evolved. It can also be very annoying, especially in his waxing poetic about the show more insights of Unknown Adam and Unknown Eve. Yes, it fit a lot of ideas into a concise format, but it was too "cute".

Shlain ends with the hope the recent developments and acceleration of human development will lead to a metamorphosis in the species. It'd be nice if he was right. His section on the origins of misogyny and patriarchy would have been too depressed a note to end on. The optimism of the last chapter was a nice counterpoint.

Good book. Worth reading. show less

although the main position is simplistic in its assumption by glossing over practicalities of execution the supporting research is fairly solid in itself, should be required reading for dudes

This book 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 the author, is female sexuality.