Book contents
7 - Sex: The Brains of Female Hyena Twins
from II - Science, Fiction and Reality
Summary
Female hyenas have high levels of androstenedione (a male hormone) throughout life, which possibly contributes to their aggressive nature. Interestingly, …they behave normally in reproduction and are excellent mothers, showing that the ‘female’ parts of the brain are protected from the androgens that masculinise their aggressive behaviour…
Laurence Frank, behavioural research associate, in New Scientist, 5 March 1994Carey points out that we already have a wonderful genetic marker for violence: ‘It's detectable at birth and in many cases before birth,’ he says, ‘The high-risk genotype is probably about nine-fold more likely to engage in violent acts… for some crimes the ratio is even more dramatic.’ Carey's marker is being male.
Rosie Mostel, in New Scientist, 26 February 1994, quoting geneticist Gregory CareyTwo out of three women around the world presently suffer from the most debilitating disease known to humanity. Common symptoms of this fast-spreading ailment include chronic anaemia, malnutrition, severe fatigue… Premature death is a frequent outcome… the disease is often communicated from mother to child, with markedly higher transmission rates among females. No, this disease is not HIV. It is poverty.
The Health Of Women, A Global Perspective edited by Marge Koblonsky, Judith Timyan, Gill GayPreamble
The battle of the sexes heats up and cools down, waves of ‘feminism’ rise and fall: but received wisdom regards human gender as a given: one of the pillars of the universe. Men and women are two sides of the same coin. No matter how they bicker, in the end and by and large they have to accept the complementary nature of their relationship, and get along the same old way… But increasingly this ‘business as usual’ world-view is maintained in the teeth of the evidence. In the course of the last century world-wide creation of wealth has been making insidious attacks, finally far more damaging than anything sexual-politicians can achieve, on the concept of sexual gender. The lowering of the death-rate, high infant survival, improved standards of living, improved quality of life itself, all go to create a situation in which, inexorably, the human male's propensity for violence and the human female's capacity for childbearing, come to be regarded not as natural facts of life but as problems that threaten the prosperity and comfort of human society.
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- Deconstructing the StarshipsScience, Fiction and Reality, pp. 99 - 107Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1998