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S'està carregant… Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution (edició 2004)de Leonard Shlain (Autor)
Informació de l'obraSex, Time, and Power: How Woman's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution de Leonard Shlain
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Apunta't a LibraryThing per saber si aquest llibre et pot agradar. No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra. 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. 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 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. Sense ressenyes | afegeix-hi una ressenya
As in the bestselling The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, Leonard Shlain's provocative new book promises to change the way readers view themselves and where they came from. Sex, Time, and Power 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 Shlain, is female sexuality. Drawing on an awesome breadth of research, he shows how, long ago, the narrowness of the newly bipedal human female's pelvis and the increasing size of infants' heads precipitated a crisis for the species. Natural selection allowed for the adaptation of the human female to this environmental stress by reconfiguring her hormonal cycles, entraining them with the periodicity of the moon. The results, however, did much more than ensure our existence; they imbued women with the concept of time, and gave them control over sex--a power that males sought to reclaim. And the possibility of achieving immortality through heirs drove men to construct patriarchal cultures that went on to dominate so much of human history. From the nature of courtship to the evolution of language, Shlain's brilliant and wide-ranging exploration stimulates new thinking about very old matters. No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — S'està carregant… GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)306.7Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Culture and Institutions Relations between the sexes, sexualities, loveLCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana:
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