VII. Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Twndividuality

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

Pandey-Pommier, Mamt, Mamta, et al.. Status of Women in Astronomy: A need for advancing inclusivity and equal opportunities. arXiv:2311.15364. As the Abstract conveys, eighteen scientists in France (University of Montpelier), Egypt, India. China, Japan, Poland, the UK, USA, Australia, Spain, Brazil, and Columbia post a (wo)manifesto on their behalf (of the sky and universe) toward an equitable employment and representative membership status in many ways.

Women in the Astronomy and STEM fields face systemic inequalities throughout their careers. The International Astronomical Union Women in Astronomy (IAU WiA) working group is dedicated to increasing awareness of the status of women and the aspirations of female astronomers globally. In August 2021, the IAU WiA Working Group established a new organizing committee and a comprehensive plan: (i) Awareness Sustainability, (ii) Training and Skill Building, (iii) Fundraising, and (iv) Communication. This publication provides an overview that illuminates the factors influencing the scientific status of women, with a particular focus on the careers of mothers.

Pang-White, Ann, ed. Chinese Philosophy and Gender. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Within four sections about Confucian sources, namely Ancient and Medieval, and Modern and Contemporary, Daoist Approaches, and Buddhist Approaches, premier scholars such as Robin Wang, Tak-Ling Terry Woo, and Sandra Wawrytko review the past and present of this most archetypal aspect of human lives. As a capsule, while the feminine yin and masculine yang complements of oriental wisdom offer a pristine model if properly appreciated in their intrinsic essence, throughout a long patriarchal history they have been misdefined and distorted to man’s benefit and woman’s deficit. From our 21st century vantage, we would do well to recognize that these gender principles are the ultimate exemplar and revelation of a dynamic universe and human genesis, but only if their salutary, procreative reciprocity is fully manifest.

Prokhovnik, Raia. Rational Woman. London: Routledge, 1999. To move beyond postmodern critiques and various waves of feminism, a case is made for the need to clearly state and appreciate the real differences between men and women by which to help overcome their dissention and polarity.

Rahmani, Sahar, et al. Star Formation Laws in the Andromeda Galaxy: Gas, Stars, Metals and the Surface Density of Star Formation. arXiv:1512.06675. With Sophia Lianou and Pauline Barmby, University of Western Ontario astrophysicists contribute to the frontiers of cosmological quantification. We especially note here because the three brilliant scientist authors are women. Pauline Barmby is Canadian, Sophia Lianou is French and Sahar Rahmani from Tehran, Iran.

Our main results are as follows: 1) The power-law index of the K-S law is mostly depended which gas is used as a tracer of the gas mass in galaxy. Power-law indices are mostly independent of the star formation rate SFR tracer. 2) This dependence mostly comes from the way each fitting method handles the uncertainty on the star formation law parameters. 3) The star formation laws predict more accurate results on regions with relatively higher star formation. 4) We confirmed the suggestions of Shi et al (2011) that the surface density of stars has an impact on the SFR, and in regions with low gas surface brightness this impact is even more important. 5) We performed statistical tests and found no correlation between the SFR, the stellar mass surface density and metallicity in the case of the whole galaxy. (15-16)

Robb, Christina. This Changes Everything: The Relation Revolution in Psychology. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. A journalist narrates its past twenty-five years from the breakthroughs of Jean Baker Miller at Wellesley and Carol Gilligan at Harvard which articulated the distinct feminine quality of empathic concern between persons. This radical idea proposes that within a dismissive, ruling patriarchy: …the connections between and among everything and everyone are at least as important as what they connect. In contrast to a male penchant to act as competitive agents, women ought to be valued for their nonviolent commiseration and nurturance.

Rogers, Lesley, et al.. Divided Brains: The Biology and Behaviour of Brain Asymmetries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Reviewed more in An Emergent Bicameral Brain, this major summation by neuroscientists makes a strong, effective statement of exemplary gender identities and differences between the analytical left and holistic right hemispheres. And of most significance it is averred that women not only avail their right brain, compared to men, but actually employ a balanced complementarity of both archetypes.

Sex Differences and Hormones These findings suggest that testosterone-treated chicks are strongly dependent on the left hemisphere as they search for food. Testosterone may promote the ability of the left hemisphere to sustain use of recently acquired information, as part of its role in keeping to a course of action. At the same time the left hemisphere of testosterone-treated chicks appears to reduce its inhibition of the right hemisphere, and to elevate aggressive and sexual behavior. (145) In general men perform better than women on feature separation tests, requiring attention to a selected feature. In such tests an ability to separate the path of a moving object from a background may be measured. Women are generally more likely to show collaboration between the two hemispheres rather than suppression of the abilities of the right by the goals of the left. Women perform better than men when it is necessary to remember object identity within an array. If the spatial layout is unchanged but some pairs of objects are exchanged, women are better at detecting this. Comparable female advantage is shown in episodic memory. This holds for a wide range of memories: newly acquired facts, the range of different activities carried out in a session, face recognition, and verbal tasks. Both these examples of female superiority would be explained by more effective use of the abilities of the right hemisphere for accessing memory of patterns made up of multiple items, owing to lesser intervention of the left hemisphere. (145-146)

Rosenlee, Li-Hsiang Lisa. Confucianism and Women: A Philosophical Interpretation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. A philosophy professor at Mary Washington University takes issue with distortions of ancient correlative wisdom both in the West and China. A definitive contrast can be made between the archetypal principles of yin and yang, generalized as feminine and masculine, as complementarity in their dynamic relationship, or as set in hierarchical, binary opposition. Western patriarchy favors polar contradictions, while Chinese culture holds to a vertical, higher-lesser, scale. In both cases, women are conveniently relegated to be inferior and subject to men.

Now one might compare this work far afield to Dean Rickles, et al, wherein male physicists and philosophers ponder seeming polar objects and relations in quantum realms. In each case an obvious resolution would appear as a universal complementarity of discrete entity and social empathy.

On the contrary, the complementarity and the dynamic interaction between the yin and the yang both in the cosmos and in the human body suggests a rather fluid view of the sexual differences between the male and the female body and consequently, if applied to gender, might even suggest a more tolerant view of gender roles. (67) However, the yin and yang are irreducibly complementary. The imposition of the dualistic paradigm onto the yin-yang metaphor is inappropriate and misleading since it not only reduces the Chinese gender construction to two sets of innate gender traits that are contradictory and ontological, but more importantly overlooks the relational aspect of gender that emerges out of kinship roles in the Chinese world. (68)

Roughgarden, Joan. Evolution’s Rainbow. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. A transgender evolutionary biologist at Stanford University shows that “diversity, gender and sexuality” takes on many shifting, ambiguous forms throughout the animal kingdom. From this natural basis, a plea is made for much more tolerance and understanding of human biology and preferences. One may then note that in whatever guise, it always involves an interplay of archetypal feminine and masculine genders.

Rowland, Susan. Jung: A Feminist Interpretation. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2002. Readings into archetypal psychology in search of a dynamic mutuality whereby the Goddess/feminine principle can be reconciled and balanced with the God/masculine. This recent book contains a good annotated bibliography on the subject.

Ryan, Mary Jane, ed. The Fabric of the Future. Berkeley, CA: Conari Press, 1998. As a subsequent complement to the male machine model and its technological extrapolations, this collection by women visionaries from many cultures expresses the empathic, relational, tolerant, nurturing essence of an organically sustainable world community. Their resources are indigenous wisdom, earth as Gaia, partnership societies, personal and social spirituality, the harmonizing feminine principle. Margaret Wheatley, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Joanna Macy, Raine Eisler, M. C. Richards, Brooke Medicine Eagle, Angeles Arrien, and Barbara Marx Hubbard are among the many spokespersons. Some six years later, in time of spreading terror and militarism, the need is even greater for a holistic cosmology of promised peace, humane sanity, and the liberation of children, women and men.

Schaab, Gloria. In the Travail of the Cosmos: God and Suffering in the Evolving Universe. Heythrop Journal. Online April, 2015. An update of the Barry University theologian’s endeavor to integrate a procreative evolutionary genesis with a cosmic pan-en-theism that can assimilate and mitigate a capacity for vicarious tragedy. With Pierre Teilhard, a ‘directed chance’ can be admitted, a contingent chaos leavened by intrinsic, creative order. Such a rapprochement might be served by a Trinitarian icon, as the first quote, of a transcendent creator, an incarnate son, and an immanent essence. But with Fordham University theologian Elizabeth Johnson (search) Divine transcendence is to be seen as not just paternal, but equally maternal. By this insight, per the second quote, the third person can at last be appreciated as fully feminine. A divine milieu at once apart and within can illume a long evolutionary “pregnancy,” groaning in labor. By this view, both Being and Becoming are allowed, rather than in either/or opposition. Although GS does not specify, a true tripartite family of parental father and mother and daughter and son children is at last discerned and established.

My discussion of God and suffering is rooted in God’s intimate and enduring relationships with the cosmos that God has created, relationships conceived as wholly Trinitarian. As the ‘Maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible,’ the First Person of the Trinity has a transcendent relationship with creation. As the One who became flesh in Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity has an incarnate relationship with creation. As the ‘Giver of Life’ who ‘fills the world, [and] is all-embracing’ (Wisdom 1:7), the Third Person of the Trinity has an immanent relationship to creation. These relationships between the Persons of the Trinity and creation suggest a particular model of God-world relation termed panentheism, the belief that the Being of God – as incarnate and immanent – indwells and permeates the whole universe, but that the Being of God – as transcendent – exceeds and is not identified with the universe. (11)

The Immanent God: Sophia The Christian tradition has always associated the immanence of God in creation with the Holy Spirit. This tradition enables Christians to envision God as creatively active in the cosmos and thus has consonance with the creative processes that drive evolution. In this present model, the energies of Holy Spirit permeate the life incarnate in the womb of the transcendent Mother. Envisioned in this way, the Holy Spirit resonates with the female image of God known as Sophia. The name Sophia is the Greek translation of the term ‘wisdom,’ female in gender not only in Greek, but also in Hebrew (hokmah) and in Latin (sapientia). While the meaning of her name is explicitly ‘wisdom,’ the purview of Sophia is decidedly creativity. (14)

Scheuringer, Andrea et al. Recruiting the Right Hemisphere: Sex Differences in Inter-Hemisphere Communication during Semantic Verbal Fluency. Brain and Language. August, 2020. In this year which also represents a bicameral balance, University of Salzburg cognitive psychologists quantify that while men tend to form left intra-hemisphere clusters, women engage in whole brain inter-hemisphere right and left side integral cognition. So once again by way of another perspective, the same dot reduce and image expand proclivities are evident.

Troyer et al. (1997) suggested that verbal fluency requires the cooperation of two different strategies, clustering and switching. The clustering strategy refers to the generation of words within one sub-category, described as a relative automatic process. The switching strategy reflects the generation of successive words not belonging to the same subcategory, requiring increased cognitive flexibility and reflecting a more effortful process. (2)

In line with results from previous behavioral studies that men prefer a clustering, while women prefer a switching strategy, men show stronger activation in the clustering network, while women show stronger activation in the switching network. Finally, a more inter-hemispheric connectivity pattern in women might underlie their previously observed superior task performance. In sum, our results suggest that distinct patterns of inter-hemispheric interaction may explain previously observed sex differences in performance and strategy use during verbal fluency (11)

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