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A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
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VII. Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality

5. Half the UniVerse: A Woman's 2020 Wisdome

Brizendine, Louann. The Female Brain. New York: Morgan Road Books, 2006. In this popular work, the Founder and Director of the Women's and Teen Girl's Mood & Hormone Clinic and Endowed Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of California at San Francisco, contends that feminine and masculine brains are indeed biologically different. As we all know, men tend to competitive aggression, and women to relational emotions, which can now be traced to ones lifetime hormonal and neuronal ebb and flow. Although the book has been criticized, check the author’s website (her name.com) for many endorsements by women who have found it most helpful and right on target.

Cahill, Larry. An Issue Whose Time Has Come. Journal of Neuroscience Research. 95/1-2, 2017. The UC Irvine behavioral biologist (search) introduces a double Sex/Gender Influences on Nervous System Function issue with 70 articles across Behavior, Cognition, Synaptic Plasticity; Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience; Developmental Neuroscience; Neuroimmune Function; Systems and Circuits; and Translational Neuroscience aspects. This copious edition is intended at last to sufficiently establish, albeit with nuances, that women and men indeed possess significantly different cerebral and behavioral profiles. It opens with Basic Steps toward Clinical Progress by Claudette Elise Brooks and Janine Austin Clayton, NIH scientists, about how this correct perception, previously not factored in, is for real medical advances.

In the Trenches with the Corpus Callosum by Ralph Holloway follows as a recount of his 1982 paper with Christine De Lacoste-Utamsing which first proposed that a woman’s brain uses both hemispheres in concert, along with the heated debate since. Some more entries are A Very Short Review on Sex, Sex Hormones, and Functional Brain Asymmetries by Marcus Hausmann, Sex on the Brain by Anna Grabowska, Sex and Gender Affect the Social Brain by Marina Pavlova, A General Theory of Sexual Differentiation by Arthur Arnold, and Sex Differences in the Human Visual System by John Vanston and Lars Strother, whose quotes offer a synopsis. See also Two Minds: The Cognitive Differences Between Man and Women by Bruce Goldman in Stanford Medicine, Spring 2017 for a good review of this timely volume and resolve.

Briefly, they found that females had higher sensitivity in the lower spatial frequencies and males had higher sensitivity in the higher spatial frequencies. These authors speculated that this sex difference reflects differences in visual pattern analysis mode in which females
emphasize use of low spatial frequencies that carry information about overall object form, whereas males use a more “segregative” mode that emphasizes individual objects and fine detail inherent in high spatial frequency visual input. Based on their conjecture, this finding of differences in the contrast sensitivity of males and females may be related to subsequent reports of sex differences in local vs. global visual processing. (Vanston & Strother, 618)

The most commonly reported sex difference in cerebral laterality is decreased laterality in females compared with males. This type of finding has led to the general idea that males’ brains are optimized for within-hemisphere connectivity, whereas females’ brains are better wired for between-hemisphere connectivity. Although this idea has clear limits, it is conceivable that males and females exhibit universal differences in degree of laterality within the visual system, and, even if these differences are small, they could be important. (V&S 620)

Cahill, Larry. Fundamental Sex Difference in Human Brain Architecture. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 111/577, 2014. A commentary on Sex Differences in the Structural Connectome of the Human Brain by Madhura Ingahalikar, et al (below) in the same issue by the UC Irvine neurobiologist and authority on cerebral asymmetries. This formidable work is seen as a robust confirmation which can finally verify a characteristic reciprocity between feminine and masculine faculties. A later note Sex Influences on the Brain by Cahill and Dana Aswad (Neuron, 88/6, 2015) goes on to advocate, based on multiple findings across neural studies, affirms that women and men do have distinctive, pervasively different, brains.

In fact, Ingahalikar et al., using a number of different methods of analysis, report clear and striking sex differences. Most notably, the brains of men exhibit a far smaller degree of interconnectedness, both within and across the hemispheres, than do those of women, which, conversely, exhibit a significantly greater degree of interconnectedness both across the hemispheres and across lobes within a hemisphere. Essentially, men’s brains on average appear wired for more localized, modular function compared with those of women, whose brains on average appear wired for more connectionist, cross-module function. (577)

Campbell, Anne. A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Professor Campbell argues that for any effort to set right and clarify this contentious EP endeavor, a feminine-based viewpoint is imperative. But feminist studies themselves are divided among many factions such as liberal, Marxist, Afro-American, radical, and so on. Much ground clearing is achieved toward understanding how women and men behave as they do and might intentionally do better.

Cochran, Tracy, ed. The Divine Feminine. Parabola: The Search for Meaning. 41/1, Spring, 2016. A 40th Anniversary issue devoted to this diminished, desperately needed Anima life complement to save a Gaiasphere in terminal planetary peril from male animus abuse and violence. Contents include Reclaiming the Feminine Mystery of Creation by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee and views of Dorothy Day, Marion Woodman, Mothers of Islam, a Tantric goddess, Ave Maria, and more. Half of humanity, Sophia sapiens, half the sky and universe, is missing, brutalized, not permitted to be the right and whole brain woman’s vision and wisdom.

Everybody has to be the hero of their own journey, wrote P.L. Travers in the first issue of Parabola, “The Hero,” published in 1976. The curious name of the magazine was meant to echo “parable,” but also to describe the dynamic arc of a hand-held fishing net when it is flung—the soaring shape of a journey out and home again, enlarged by what it found. In recent years, it has become clear that the qualities of a hero have expanded to include the feminine. The Divine Feminine is not strictly related to gender, as Jungian author Marion Woodman and others explain in these pages. This wisdom requires that we learn to ¬consciously hold the truth, respecting even difficult or seemingly opposing aspects without fighting in a traditionally masculine mode. Collectively and individually, we are learning that just as consciousness is not “mine”—not an achievement won in isolation, but shared from a greater source—so the planet itself must be received as a gift, held with compassion, and shared. The good news is that the wisdom of the Divine Feminine is here to help us, waiting like water under the earth, an oracle to guide us home.

Cross, Susan and Laura Madson. Models of the Self: Self-Construals and Gender. Psychological Bulletin. 122/1, 1997. Research studies verify archetypal gender roles whose reconciliation is to be achieved by mutual synthesis.

In general, men in the United States are thought to construct and maintain an independent self-construal, whereas women are thought to construct and maintain an interdependent self-construal. (5)

DeLaney, Barbara, ed. The Power of Yin: Celebrating Female Consciousness. New York: Cosmio Books, 2007. In 1977, Hazel Henderson, Jean Houston, and Barbara Marx Hubbard joined in a weekend of conversation in Princeton, NJ, which was recorded by then graduate student Barbara DeLaney. This volume presents the luminous dialogue by these spokespersons for the feminine future of a viable, just, peaceable, planetary civilization. A 2006 update is added by each contributor, wherein an obvious, encompassing metaphor gains further confirmation. We are in the midst not of apocalyptic destruction, but a global, blessed nativity event. As environmental, militaristic, mercenary, and fanatical forces seem bent on Armageddon, as the TV news relishes, this ‘radically transformative’ vision can offer a much needed positive alternative.

And for some personal history, in 1972 I prepared a reference sourcebook for the Synergistic Convergence SYNCON conference that Barbara Marx Hubbard and her associates ran at Southern Illinois University. Jean Houston was in attendance whose mythic energies and evocations provided much guidance. But an organic natural genesis could not then be scientifically substantiated. A point of cosmic origin had only been detected some seven years before. A main resource was indeed Pierre Teilhard, along with philosophers Oliver Reiser, Alfred North Whitehead, Jan Smuts, and Samuel Alexander, from earlier in the century. Some forty years later, sufficient, worldwide proof is at last available, while earth’s hour is in full occurrence.

Diop, Cheikh Anta. The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity. London: Karnak House, 1989. A classic contribution toward a reappreciation of the endemic maternal basis of African cultures. A recovery of this original life-affirming cosmology, from which Greek and Continental philosophies are derived, could inform and inspire a recreation of traditional village culture, which is presently in ruins due to the ravages of colonial patriarchy.

Douglas, Bronwen. Christianity, Tradition, and Everyday Modernity: Towards an Anatomy of Women’s Groupings in Melanesia. Oceania. 74/1-2, 2003. As a grass-roots case in point, in a special issue on the subject, a research scholar at the Australian National University reviews the social milieu of the South Pacific with its concatenation of indigenous tradition, colonial baggage, Western missionaries, male dominance, corruption and violence, where as a result women, in their child-rearing and domestic roles, struggle toward communal coherence. In trying to emerge from vested submission, their preference is for a “gender complementarity,” rather an unequal opposition. In so doing, they seek to leaven male authority and abuse by caring, peaceful, spiritually sensitive communities.

Dwyer, Molly. Complexity and the Emergent Feminine. www.isss.org. 1999. A paper presented at the 1999 conference of the International Society for Systems Science. Subtitled “A Cosmological Inquiry into the Role of the Feminine in the Evolution of the Universe,” Dwyer equates the linear, empirical approach with the rational masculine while nonlinearity with its qualitative sensitivity to cooperative interconnections is seen as more feminine in kind.

Dyble, Mark, et al. Sex Equality can Explain the Unique Social Structure of Hunter-Gather Bands. Science. 348/796, 2105. Nine University College London anthropologists including Ruth Mace, Andrea Migliano, and Lucio Vinicius, conclude from studies of indigenous Pygmy peoples of central Africa that unlike male-dominated primate and hominid bands, these sapient cultures succeeded by way of extended, tolerant familial groupings with shared egalitarian gender roles.

The social organization of mobile hunter-gatherers has several derived features, including low within-camp relatedness and fluid meta-groups. Although these features have been proposed to have provided the selective context for the evolution of human hypercooperation and cumulative culture, how such a distinctive social system may have emerged remains unclear. We present an agent-based model suggesting that, even if all individuals in a community seek to live with as many kin as possible, within-camp relatedness is reduced if men and women have equal influence in selecting camp members. Our model closely approximates observed patterns of co-residence among Agta and Mbendjele BaYaka hunter-gatherers. Our results suggest that pair-bonding and increased sex egalitarianism in human evolutionary history may have had a transformative effect on human social organization. (Abstract)

Eagly, Alice. Sex Differences in Social Behavior. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1987. A much-cited study that discusses the prevalent representative categories of women as “communal” and men as “agentic.” The consensus in this work and others before and since seems to be that while these qualities do generally apply, men and women surely possess degrees of either complementary attribute.

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