Steve Moxon blog

[Re-post after computer spam rogue posting]

Forthcoming, November 2016 (book)

Sex Difference Explained: From DNA to Society -- Purging Gene Copy Errors.

This is a 'bottom-up' from biology cutting-edge holistic understanding of men/ women: a layman's guide to the converging lines of evidence for profound male-female distinction serving complementarity. A monograph for the New Male Studies journal, it's to appear open-access on the NMS website with the option of a print-on-demand hard copy (book) format.

Here's the back cover blurb .....

In SEX DIFFERENCE EXPLAINED: From DNA to Society – Purging Gene Copy Errors, Steve Moxon argues that all major aspects of male-female human sociality necessarily stem from biological principles; which all arise in solving the core problem faced by all life-forms: the relentless build-up of mistakes in the repeated copying of genes. The 'genetic filtering' to deal with this is the function of the male: why males came into being, and why men so fiercely compete with one another to form a hierarchy.

The female contribution is carefully to choose only the most dominant/prestigious males, cross-checking that indeed they do possess the best gene sets. This ensures genetic mutations and other errors that would seriously compromise reproduction are purged from the local gene pool.

Pair-bonding serves to exclude lower-ranked, whilst allowing access by still higher-ranked males; and to provide a serial father of children, thereby in effect projecting forward in time a woman's peak fertility, compensating for her deteriorating store of eggs, and consequent declining fertility and attractiveness.

With men tied to a hierarchy, women evolved to 'marry out' to avoid in-breeding. In preparation for this, girls have a very different social organisation, rehearsing for when later they have to make close bonds with non-kin, stranger-females for mutual child-care. This explains why female grouping is so tight and exclusionary, whereas males group all-inclusively.

Moxon sees the underlying sex dichotomy as being perfectly complementary, with the sexes of equal importance in what amounts to a symbiosis.

# posted by Steve Moxon @ 3:53 pm