At 08:56 PM 4/20/99 -0500, Scott Badger wrote:
>
>But here's a question for you (at the risk of being kookified). Men are
>from Earth and women are from Earth but we clearly differ when it comes to
>what we want out of a relationship and these differences are often at the
>heart of our inability to maintain loving relationships. Should we be
>viewing these differences as a human limitation to be transcended? Should
>we try to redesign our psyches in order to enhance our mutual capacities for
>successful marital relationships? Shall we make men more like women, women
>more like men, or try to identify the most adaptive and resilient attributes
>of both and head everyone in that direction. Then there'd be two sexes but
>only one gender. Would that be a bad thing?
Having two genders is an important part of the survival strategy for many species. Our biology and psychology is well-adapted to this the two-gender survival strategy.
Moving humans to a single gender for both sexes could have a long-term impact on the survivability of the species. After all, every aspect of both genders is extremely useful under some circumstance. Having two genders allows a species to embody multiple conflicting characteristics, which appears to be a strategy to maximize adaptability; to a certain extent, differences between cultures would seem to be a manifestion of a selection process among the large number of characteristics found across both genders.
Cultural artifacts such as patriarchy and matriarchy would then seem to
demonstrate selection for attributes that are closely tied to gender. A
change in the selection pressures among the two genders will inevitably
change the culture as well, and I think history is full of examples of
this. For example, civilizations that are becoming increasingly dependant
on skill specialization have decreased the value of some male-specific
characteristics that can probably be linked to most patriarchal cultures.
IMO, skill specialization has done more to decrease the amount of
patriarchy in Western civilization than any other factor by selecting for
attributes that are common to both genders. However, future evolutionary
pressures may lead to cultures that are (necessarily?) strongly female or
male dominant.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com