Evolution

The evolution of the universe doesn’t care one bit about equality. If there were as many positive bits of matter as negative bits, all would cancel out to nothing. Biological evolution doesn’t care about equality either. It cares about maintaining the vast and complex web of life.

Gender, sex and child rearing come in different forms in different species as a consequence of different ways of solving the problem of mate selection and reproduction. Human reproduction was early on like agriculture. The male plants the seed, and the female nurtures it to harvesting then turns it into something useful.

Humans have the capacity to take reproduction out of that equation, as we often choose to do. How we listen to our hormones and how we listen to our drive to reproduce or how we listen to our culture or how we listen to our morality is really up to us.

Here is where cultural evolution enters the picture. The long and troubled story of sexual equality has brought us to where we are today. In the various societies of the contemporary world, this new sexual awareness has brought hope, fear, liberation, repression, confusion and more. Equality is not in the nature of  evolution. It’s our job. And we’ve still got a lot of work to do in bringing equality to sex.