Abolish male supremacy not binary gender

The basic gender binary is an analogy to binary sex in all human societies, indigenous American and all around the globe. Hermaphroditism , homosexual , transvestitism have been incorporated forever, not just since the bourgeois "trans" fad. But third genders don't demolish the basic binary, because biology has an absolute binary - eggbearers and sperm bearers. There are no third types. So , the basic binary pair female-male: woman-man, remains even as third genders are added. 

The goal is abolish male supremacy, not binary gender.

Different combinations and numbers of X and Y chromosomes do not produce a third type of gamete cell, so they all result in one of the two sex cell types if they result in a sex cell type. Sex is ultimately a phenotype , not a genotype. 

Cave drawings as totem/taxonomyDid alcohol and mood altering substance contribute to human evolution/civilization/development?

I don't think it affected  at the deep evolutionary level.

I also don't think cave drawings etc. were "art" in the modern bourgeois sense of "individual creative expression. " pictures of animals are probably animal taxonomy and kinship totems combined ; non-linear writing.  Not hallucinating Greenwich village artists ; that's an anachronistic error.



Yes I've seen them .Have you read Levi-Strauss's _Savage Mind_ . Stone Age people are botanists ,zoologist a and taxonomists.How about his _Totemism_ ? and I teach my class that ancient Stone Age people were scientists . Also, kinship is the fundamental organizing principle of Stone Age societies , and it is a phylogeny , family "tree," just like the tree of life used to represent taxonomy.

No way they were thinking like modern bourgeois individualist artists, "creating " some individualist expression. 

Just seeing them with a 21st century consciousness , without self -critiquing that consciousness with anthropological knowledge on how fundamental biological and kinship thinking is for foragers will mislead you.


I was an undergrad in Ann Arbor in 1968; you better ask somebody. 

There were discussions of ancient hallucinogenic use in Marshall Sahlins class. I've known about the theory for 40 years. I have after long deliberation concluded the above. 

I also teach the origin , history and structure of writing in my class. I have concluded that it is more like that cave drawings ( 2 dimensional representations of 3 dimensions) were probably a form of pre-linear writing as I say the animals may be a clever combination of biological and kinship taxonomy.
"Just" totems and taxonomy is the opposite of the point. Totems as kinship categories and biological knowledge were profoundly and centrally important for Stone Age people. See Levi-Strauss and Marshall Sahlins.


Modern groups have kinship totems that are different animal species. All animals are related through a common ancestor species ( Darwin); all members of a kin group are related through a common ancestor person ; that is , both are taxonomic structures.



Main way cooking may have affected our biological evolution is to allow selection for smaller teeth and jaws because cooked food requires less chewing . Brain size increase is continuous from Homo erectus ( 2 million years ago) because culture is selected for and bigger brains allow more intelligent use of culture. Discovery of fire may contribute to bigger brain because less teeth and bones in the skull leaves more space for brain size. 

There I just explained your own point better than you did.

Beautifying the Beast in human evolution

Dear Prof.

I am teaching anthropology at Wayne County Community College in Detroit, Michigan , and we use your  book Physical Anthropology . I would like to run a couple of ideas by you.

1) I'm thinking of our culture bearing species as having a LaMarckian-LIKE adaptive ability in that culture allows inheritance of acquired adaptive characteristics by one generation from parent , grandparent and dead generations of the species; acquired by human invention.

2) This creates a Darwinian neo-teleology for Natural History ( replacing the theological teleology with "Man" as the direction toward which natural history tends that Darwin's theory negated); because culture as a LaMarckian-like adaptive process does not depend on a random and coincidental fit between the survival problem posed by the environment and the genetic solution to the problem . What is inherited , extrasomatically, is designed to solve a survival problem posed by the environment .

///

On the origin of culture and humanity: Perhaps upright-bipedalism/ ORIGIN OF HANDS was selected for because , NOT BECAUSE HANDS ALLOWED THE INVENTION OF TOOLS FOR HUNTING OR PROCESSING MEAT p;BUT AS THE FIRST INSTRUMENTS OF LANGUAGE, SOUND MAKERS -MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS. ;So, homo habilis Also, dancing or body language . Culture ! Culture as communicating symbolically with music was one selective advantage of hands. . But culture originates with hands as sound communication-music.

More importantly music conferred mating -courting advantage on the musician . Especially music and dancing.  In general , culture bestows all around superior courting skills, manners. They are the original manners.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly , erect posture exposes genitalia of both sexes to sight more than on all fours. It is sexier .   So, erect posture gives the ultimate selective advantage compared to on all fours: superior differential fertility !

Beautifying the Beast theory of prettifying trend in morphology among hominins ( hominids with hands):

Why this trend of reduction of sexual dimorphism , rough and big and protruding faces ? Because human females were the first scientists of genealogical and reproductive  physiology ; noticing a correlation between appearance of their children and which male they let fertilize them .  Mother Nature selection or Mother as natural selector .

This derives theoretically from Antoinette Blackwell's feminist critique of Darwin's masculinism, validated by modern Darwinisms recognition that differential fertility is more important than differential mortality in determining fitness

There are a couple of other "lemmas," .

Do you have any criticisms ?

Charles Brown


Detroit



http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/05/our-mother-nature-antoinette-blackwell.html?m=1

http://biosex.univ-paris1.fr/fileadmin/Axe_de_recherche_BIOSEX/Blackwell-1.pdf