




































DNA Decipher Journal | October 2015 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 | pp. 78-93 
King, C., Evolution, Sexual Reproduction & the Future of Human Society (Part I) 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 
www.dnadecipher.com 

 

78 

Article 

Evolution, Sexual Reproduction  

& the Future of Human Society (Part I) 
 

Chris King
*
 

 

 ABSTRACT 

In this two-part article, the author argues that we urgently need to invest in ethical, social and 

political processes that respect the passage of the generations, and the genetic and fertility 

principles upon which conscious life depends. We need to invest in forms of government and 

decision-making which contain cumulative principles which will both generate a capacity to 

value long-term investment for the future of life and enable social change and cultural evolution 

to have a truly genetic character, as effective for long-term stability and survival as molecular 

genetics are. All people need to respect that fertility is a sacred process through which we all 

become conscious beings, that childbirth is an essential component of the passage of the 

generations. Central to this is protecting the rights of women to reproductive, social and 

educational choice and providing adequate social, financial and contractual employment 

provisions to enable women to have children without compromising their professional or 

entrepreneurial careers. This is the ultimate test and end point of the scientific revolution, and is 

the fulfillment of the sense of living purpose religious traditions try to lay exclusive claim to, in 

which an ethic of living diversity and its protection must needs emerge and assert a natural 

morality for justice to prevail. Science has provided us with the knowledge to understand, in 

confounding detail, overthrowing all our preconceived assumptions, how the natural processes in 

the universe actually work and come together to enable the continuity of life. It is now up to us to 

engender a moral and ethical movement that can function to cherish and replenish the Earth 

throughout our generations to come. 

Part I of this article includes: 1. Introduction; 2. Human Emergence and the Evolutionary 

Paradigm; and 3. Founding Civilizations, Religion and the Patriarchal Reproductive Imperative. 

Keywords: Evolution, sexual reproduction, tree of life, genetic pathway, biological diversity. 

 

 

1. Introduction 
  

Virtually all of the serious global problems facing the planet, from climate change, through 

habitat destruction to use of energy and natural resources, the ability to feed and care for a rising 

future population and our future viability, are long-term issues with time spans varying from 

decades to centuries, millennia and even millions of years. While addressing world poverty and 

resource equitability could take decades to achieve, even with the best of will, climate change 

will cause rising ocean levels and desertification that are likely to continue to reduce viable land 

areas for a thousand years to come. Loss of species diversity will bring a detriment to our 

                                                           
* Correspondence: Chris King  http://www.dhushara.com E-Mail: chris@sakina.org  

http://www.dhushara.com/
mailto:chris@sakina.org


DNA Decipher Journal | October 2015 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 | pp. 78-93 
King, C., Evolution, Sexual Reproduction & the Future of Human Society (Part I) 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 
www.dnadecipher.com 

 

79 

planetary genetic resources on a time scale since the last mass extinction of around 65 million 

years. Many of these losses will never be recovered. 
 

 
 

 
Fig 1: Four global scenarios requiring urgent long-term solutions, clockwise from top left: 

(1) Predicted world average July temperatures, indicating loss of crop production due to temperature 

and rainfall changes (NASA). (2) Biodiversity zones surviving four different global warming 

scenarios (Groombridge 1992 Global Biodiveristy). (3) World gross national income per capita 

shows spread of world poverty and affluence. (4) Loss of land area in a 6m sea level rise 

(Wikipedia). Because of the long response time, it has been estimated that we are already committed 

to a sea-level rise of around 2.3m for each degree of temperature rise within the next 2,000 years. A 

temperature rise of 3 degrees would lead to a 6.9m rise, but up to 50m if Antarctic ice sheets melted 

from below. 



DNA Decipher Journal | October 2015 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 | pp. 78-93 
King, C., Evolution, Sexual Reproduction & the Future of Human Society (Part I) 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 
www.dnadecipher.com 

 

80 

These issues require collective action on a planetary scale and a sense of future consciousness 

which can weigh up needs for major and potentially costly action in the present, whose effects 

will only slowly be felt, because they are cumulative over much longer time scales and the 

capacity to balance immediate priorities against much longer term goals. Yet all the evidence is 

that as the pace of change accelerates, our future time horizons are shrinking towards rapid 

reaction on ever shortening time scales as technology and communication provide more rapid 

ways of reacting to accelerating changes and instabilities, which dominate our crisis management 

and tantalize our investment opportunities. 

 . 

  
Fig 2: Top left: Increasing instability in forex trading over two decades due to accelerated 

computer trading. Top: right The Flash Crash. Explanations included order flow toxicity, 

market order depth and net aggressive buy volume, but eventually Navinder Singh Sarao, the 

"Hound of Hounslow" was charged with wire and commodities fraud, and market manipulation 

using an automated trading programme, "spoofing" financial markets using commercially 

available software to place $200m of false trades. Lower charts: The extent to which global 

wealth has become corralled by a virtual handful of the so-called 'global elite' (2014 Oxfam). 

The richest 85 people on the globe control $1 trillion, as much wealth as the poorest half of the 

7 billion global population put together. The wealth of the one percent of richest people in the 

world amounts to $110 trillion, 65 times as much as the poorest half of the world and the 

situation has clearly been getting more inequitable between 1980 and 2012, as the right hand 

chart shows. This is not progress. Far right super-exponential L-shaped curve of extreme 

affluence displayed in a logarithmic plot of US income. 

. 

We have entered an age where it has become demonstrably obvious that the time scale of major 

decision-making has shortened to the detriment of our long-term planetary futures. We are 

depleting non-renewable resources that have taken hundreds of millions of years to accumulate 

in a matter of decades, precipitating climate change whose effects will exacerbate for a thousand 



DNA Decipher Journal | October 2015 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 | pp. 78-93 
King, C., Evolution, Sexual Reproduction & the Future of Human Society (Part I) 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 
www.dnadecipher.com 

 

81 

years and a mass extinction of the diversity of life that will deplete the living resources of future 

generations for millions of years to come. 

 

At the same time our investment horizons are ever shortening, both in terms of national and 

global economic management and in terms of the dynamics of commodity trading and 

investment to the point where future horizons look forward no more than six months and light-

speed commodities trading using computer algorithms on a time scale of milliseconds has 

become a norm, causing instabilities like the 'flash crash' in which over a thousand points were 

abruptly wiped off the US stock exchange in a matter of seconds due to predatory computer 

trading algorithms, only to recover minutes later. 

 

Winner take all venture capital investment and its tendency to cause a tragedy of the commons 

through the struggle to capture resources before a competitor can do the same, and with it 

intellectual property rights which extend to the natural gene system of the planet hold sway over 

international diplomacy and the foundation of major trade agreements such as the prospective 

Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). In such a climate, short term investments realizable in the 

immediate term take precedence over long term investments, which may themselves be unwound 

by short term gains of competitors, so that in a so called informed era, long-term precautionary 

actions essential for our long-term viability and survival are given scant attention or put in the 

'too hard' basket. 

  

The inability of even the most educated and highly-developed democratic countries to some to 

terms with effective long-term strategies, which can balance short-term economic growth against 

our long-term future survival has become a pathological feature of an electoral system where 

competing parties vie with one another to promote often highly emotive conflicts of agenda 

which will serve their short-term goals, targeted to each upcoming election cycle, to the 

abandonment, or even outright denial, of serious long term issues that could harm the future 

welfare of generations to come. 

  

How has this situation come about? Is it a function of the failure of human intelligence to deal 

with completely understandable issues in the mass, or is it a product of something deeper to do 

with how cultures have emerged out of an evolutionary paradigm, which until recently 

maintained long-term stability through generation-by-generation conservation of social patterns 

modulated only by gradual changes at the genetic level through mutation and natural selection 

over many generations. 

  



DNA Decipher Journal | October 2015 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 | pp. 78-93 
King, C., Evolution, Sexual Reproduction & the Future of Human Society (Part I) 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 
www.dnadecipher.com 

 

82 

 
Fig 3: Latest high accuracy predictions show no sign of population growth peak by 2100. Left: 

World population trends in the latest 2014 study show high confidence estimates of world 

population growing from the current 7 billion to 11 billion by 2100 with no sign of reduction 

(10% and 5% variations in darkening colours). Right: Growth by continent with Africa failing 

to curb population growth (Gerland P et al. 2014 World population stabilization unlikely this 

century doi:10.1126/science.1257469). This shows that the unrestrained population growth is 

largely confined to Africa, with other continents stabilizing and some countries experiencing a 

population decline due to falling fertility rates. Inset left: Current fertility rates in children per 

woman. 

  

At the same time that the world human population is reaching potentially unsustainable levels in 

terms of food and energy supplies, precipitating the destruction of the natural wilderness for 

large scale agricultural production, human reproduction rates have become highly unstable. The 

advent of hormonal contraception has led to a divorce between sexuality and reproduction which 

has resulted in educated secular populations and particularly educated intelligent women 

choosing not to reproduce in favor of their work and careers. At the other extreme, conservative 

religious followers, driven by patriarchal doctrines, try to ensure their womenfolk get pregnant at 

every opportunity to "go forth and multiply", expanding the utopian power of their religious 

hegemony and underprivileged and maladjusted individuals who fail to manage contraception 

continue to reproduce unabated in an age where medical science has vastly reduced the natural 

limits of infant mortality in all but the most deprived economies. 

  

The end result is a series of evolutionary paradoxes where the most capable people are tending to 

breed themselves out of existence, while the least advantaged and most religiously traditional 

sectors of society are reproducing in a relatively unrestrained trajectory. Many developed 

countries, from Germany to Japan are failing to replace their existing populations and are likely 

to be gradually overtaken by migrant subcultures, while overcrowded countries such as Egypt 

and India are becoming even more overcrowded. This picture raises fundamental questions both 

about how human society got itself into this situation and how we can learn from these events to 

develop a sustainable culture which both respects individual freedoms and freedom of 

reproductive choices on the part of both sexes in a way which is also consistent with our future 

evolution as a species and our planetary survival as a species and a culture. 

  

 

 



DNA Decipher Journal | October 2015 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 | pp. 78-93 
King, C., Evolution, Sexual Reproduction & the Future of Human Society (Part I) 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 
www.dnadecipher.com 

 

83 

2. Human Emergence and the Evolutionary Paradigm 
  

If we look back to our human origins and the societies of our sister species, we can see that 

stability in evolutionary epochs is maintained through the genetic process. A lion a gazelle and a 

shark have the form and behavior that they do because, over countless generations, small 

changes to their genes have been fixed through mutation and selective advantage in a paradigm 

which otherwise conserves the genetic pattern and with it their social behavior from generation 

to generation. The evolutionary process is thus cumulative on a comparable time scale to 

geological, and natural climatic change. A shark does not transform into a sea gull in the next 

generation nor a gazelle into a lion. The greatest changes we see from generation to generation 

are differential - a small increase in flipper size for a mud dwelling fish as it moves out of the sea 

onto land over many generations, or a greater facility with talking and understanding speech. 

 

  

Animal societies share many features with human societies. For example chimpanzees like 

humans are female exogamous, with the females moving to join patrilineal troupes consisting of 

related male individuals, dominated by an alpha male. Unlike humans, chimp females are openly 

promiscuous and mate in estrus with all and sundry from their home troupe so as to avoid 

infanticide. However, like humans, females will also mate on the side with partners of their 

choice 'on safari' when they are out discretely foraging in the forest. Ape societies thus maintain 

a genealogical paradigm not unlike a human gather-hunter band of related individuals. They 

learn forms of tool use for catching termites with sticks and cooperative group hunting for 

smaller prey. They form both hierarchies of power and cooperative coalitions and express both 

support for trusted comrades and retribution for individuals who have threatened their security or 

attacked their offspring. But the form of the society is rooted in the reproductive paradigm and in 

well-established ecological niches of the species in its foraging and hunting and protection from 

larger predators. 

  

The relative dominance of males in chimpanzee society can be contrasted with that 

of bonobo societies, where a dominant female holds sway over a coalition of females who keep 

male aggression in check, with a young male gaining status through his mother and both female-

female and male-female sexual engagement being a universal mediator of tension in which 

female-female sexual intimacy can occur up to seven times more frequently than heterosexual 

coitus. 

. 

http://dhushara.com/paradoxhtm/homo.htm#Anchor-Pan-58521
http://dhushara.com/paradoxhtm/homo.htm#Anchor-Pan-13458


DNA Decipher Journal | October 2015 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 | pp. 78-93 
King, C., Evolution, Sexual Reproduction & the Future of Human Society (Part I) 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 
www.dnadecipher.com 

 

84 

 
 

Fig 4: The evidence from human sexual evolution implies that female reproductive choice has 

been pivotal in the emergence of human culture and super-intelligence. Lower center: The 

human female makes one of the greatest parenting investments of all mammal species in a 

pregnancy which comes at great risk because of the large human baby's head. She is also highly 

vulnerable. It is thus essential for her to be selective about who she gets pregnant with to ensure 

enough support and protection. Female sexual characteristics include voluptuous breasts, not 

shared by the apes, and an hour-glass physique emphasizing her fecundity. Unlike the overt ape 

estrus, human females are permanently sexually receptive, except perhaps during menstruation, 

have clandestine ovulation and display lunar-coupled menstrual synchrony (lower left). It has 

been suggested this was linked to granting of sexual favours for meat. It was noted in 

19
th
 century South Africa that Bushmen were driven to steal cattle to satisfy their women's 

demands for meat for sex. The related Sandawe have a fertility rite called phek'umo resembling 

the San eland dance of menarche, fig 5, in which the women twerk their buttocks at the men in 

the full moon. All these factors imply that in early human societies, female coalitions, who 

provided 85% of the diet through gathering, were astute in their sexual choices of men who 

were skilled hunters who provided meat for pregnancy, while also being resourceful and 

entertaining partners. Top-left: The human vagina and clitoris is ecstatically orgasmic, 

providing human females with an ultra-sensitive measure of how intimate they feel with a 

sexual partner. Top right: The human penis, by contrast with the muscular bony ones of the 

chimp and bonobo (illustrated) are larger and entirely tumescent, requiring both virility and 

good communication - a genuine evolutionary indicator of fitness evolved through sexual 

selection by the female. Lower-right female bonobos have an enlarged clitoris and mediate 

tensions by frequent orgasmic sex with both sexes. 

. 

The evidence from our own sexual evolution suggests that the large tumescent human penis, 

which differs from the more voluntary muscular boned penises of apes has been selected as a 

genuine indicator of fitness by human female reproductive choice, and that the ecstatically 

orgasmic clitoris, perpetual sexual receptiveness, expanded fatty breasts and hour-glass torso 

indicating nubile fecundity, concealed estrus making it hard for a male to know when a female is 

ovulating, and lunar phased menstrual synchrony are human features of sexual selection 

demonstrating the key role of female reproductive choice and female coalitions in the emergence 

of Homo sapiens as a super-intelligent culture-forming species. 

http://dhushara.com/paradoxhtm/homo.htm#Anchor-Chris-23240


DNA Decipher Journal | October 2015 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 | pp. 78-93 
King, C., Evolution, Sexual Reproduction & the Future of Human Society (Part I) 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 
www.dnadecipher.com 

 

85 

. 

With the advent of human culture, cumulative genetic change has given way to much more rapid 

changes. While we share 98% of our DNA with chimps although splitting from their line around 

five million years ago. About 1.5-2 million years ago Homo erectus emerged and by 500,000 

years ago we find the divergence of Homo sapiens andNeanderthal and Denisovan lines. We can 

also see back 150,000 years to founding forms of human culture with the mitochondrial division 

of the San Bushmen into two lines separated by the arid Kalahari between 150,000 years ago and 

about 70,000 years. The discovery of shell ornaments and ochre dating back a similar period, 

along with evidence of ceremonial cave use, shows humans of the time valued their beauty and 

fecundity and had already entered the cultural era. However, like chimpanzee and bonobo 

societies, these early forms of human culture remained highly attuned to the ecological niches of 

their natural environment, in which the females contributed 85% of the diet through astute 

gathering, while the males hunted game as meat in return for sexual favours, displaying their 

targeting prowess, complementing their musical and story-telling skills around the campfire. 

  

 
Fig 5: Top left: Scored ochre block. Blombos (c 77,000). Peasized Nassarius kraussianus shells 

pierced and showing wear from leather thongs (Blombos cave c 75,000). Second row: Hundreds 

of small scale-like carvings on a snake-shaped rock along with 70,000-year-old spearheads 

nearby from a cave in the Tsodilo Hills of Botswana, sacred to the local San people, who call it 

the Mountain of the Gods, has dramatically pushed back the earliest evidence for 'religious' 

ritual behavior. Center: Genographic project study of mitochondrial origins shows a deep split 

separating Khoisan mitochondrial inheritance from other groups, including those migrating out 

of Africa, and a deep division between two Khoisan types L0k (*) and L0d (#) going back 

140,000 years, suggesting a separation of some 100,000 years possibly caused by long term 

drought in Africa (Behar et al. 2008 The Dawn of Human Matrilineal 

Diversitydoi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2008.04.002).  Right: Fulton cave drawing 1000 BC celebrating the 

first menstrual rite, Drakensberg Mountains, Natal (van der Post). The central figure is a young 

robed woman undergoing her first menstruation ceremony in a special shelter. Circling 

her are clapping women, female dancers and (in the outer ring) men with their hunting 

equipment. Two figures hold sticks; the women bend over and display 'tails' as they imitate the 

mating behaviour of elands. Among living San, such rituals are intimately connected with 

success in hunting. Each male figure has a bar across his penis, suggesting abstinence associated 

with menstruation valued for hunting luck. The surrounding figures, are all bending over, their 

buttocks playfully thrust in the direction of the menstruating girl. Left lower row: These details 

match those still practiced by San and related groups in the eland dance of menarche. 

http://dhushara.com/paradoxhtm/homo.htm#Anchor-Erectus-35882
http://dhushara.com/paradoxhtm/homo.htm#Anchor-The-49575
http://dhushara.com/paradoxhtm/homo.htm#Anchor-More-47857
http://dhushara.com/paradoxhtm/culture.htm#Anchor-11481
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http://dhushara.com/paradoxhtm/culture.htm#Anchor-35882
http://dhushara.com/paradoxhtm/culture.htm#Anchor-11481


DNA Decipher Journal | October 2015 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 | pp. 78-93 
King, C., Evolution, Sexual Reproduction & the Future of Human Society (Part I) 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 
www.dnadecipher.com 

 

86 

The San have preserved their gatherer-hunter culture throughout this long period partly because 

their reproduction rates have maintained parity with existing population sizes, through measures 

such as prolonged breast-feeding, which tends to suppress ovulation, and through forms of 

gathering and hunting which depend on taking from the natural environment, through ones 

knowledge of plant diversity and hunting skills, only those resources required to keep the 

existing population fed. While the San currently live on arid land in the semi-desert, which takes 

great skill and effort to eke out a surviving diet, eight thousand years ago they occupied more 

fertile lands across the southern half of Africa, yet the deep trenches in their mitochondrial 

diversity attest to an almost static population living off gatherer-hunting in a stable ecological 

paradigm over periods of a hundred thousand years. 

  

Moreover San peoples show many archetypes of features we might often associate with modern 

emancipated culture, individual autonomy and even spiritual attainment. They are loath to 

censure their children because they need to be able to grow up resourceful in an environment 

where individual prowess and good social judgment is essential. While they are nominally 

patriarchal and have male elders, it is traditional for a young woman delivering her first child to 

do so with the maternal family. They celebrate menarche as a sacred rite of power and 

significance to the whole group in a manner also depicted in cave paintings lasting back 

thousands of years. While they are skilled hunters with potentpoisons that can kill a man or large 

beast even using a small dart, they mitigate personal violence through living in small partially 

related bands in which emotional or physical violence is quickly reacted to. Although men will 

mistreat women, women are able to make choices about whom they care to be with in a manner 

not unlike the hard-won gains of women in modern culture. They share a mystic experience in 

the trance dance and have religious notions of a creator deity and a deity of misfortune, along 

with shadowy sexual consorts, whom they regard in philosophical terms, without slavishly 

worshipping them, and share a concept of the afterlife not unlike those of the theological notions 

of major world religions. 

  

It is thus clear that human culture emerged as an extension of ecologically attuned animal 

sociobiology and that well into the cultural era, and the development of language, this 

attunement continued through the ethos of gatherer-hunter culture which sought to survive in the 

natural environment by consuming only what it could sustain to feed a small human population, 

without straining it to the point of depleting the natural supply. 

  

 

3. Founding Civilizations, Religion & the Patriarchal Reproductive Imperative 
  

However with the advent of agriculture, triggered by discoveries by the female gatherers and 

animal husbandry as an extension of hunting, the emphasis shifted to intervening in the 

environment and ecology on a massive scale. We then enter a period of rapid change, in which 

the time scales of evolutionary and geological change become disrupted by vastly more rapid 

cultural changes. Spoken languages diversify rapidly and written languages emerge on a time 

scale of transformation vastly faster than evolutionary change. Cultures and civilizations rise and 

fall even more rapidly due to conflict between populations as new resources are exploited. 

  

http://dhushara.com/paradoxhtm/culture.htm#Anchor-24819


DNA Decipher Journal | October 2015 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 | pp. 78-93 
King, C., Evolution, Sexual Reproduction & the Future of Human Society (Part I) 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 
www.dnadecipher.com 

 

87 

Agriculture and animal husbandry resulted in a sudden ballooning of human populations, 

expanding tribal bands to become our early civilizations, although the evidence of deficiency 

diseases points to a qualitative reduction in human dietary health, and denser populations became 

subject to the emergence of epidemic diseases. This also had major repercussions for social 

stability. As populations grew, so did the conflicts between burgeoning societies, leading to 

increasing militarization and the formation of male armies, which could protect a large 

population against invasion, but also served to repress social unrest internally in favour of 

dominant male leaders. The biological basis of morality is a reduction of intra-social strife 

through foregoing individual advantages over one another so that a society can maintain internal 

vitality and dominance in the event of inter-social conflicts. As urban societies grew, the cycle 

and pace of inter-social conflict increased, setting the process into overdrive, with large empires 

from Assyria and Rome, to the later conquests of leaders such as Genghis Khan. Such leaders 

almost without exception used their power to enhance their own reproductive dissemination. 

Currently around one in 200 people worldwide share the Y-chromosome of Genghis Khan, and 

up to 8% in wide areas of Central Asia, due to he and his next two generations of male heirs 

siring a hugely disproportionate number of offspring. Likewise Tamerlane was said to have held 

10,000 virgins behind flaming walls and Solomon had seven hundred wives of royal birth and 

three hundred concubines (1 Kings 11:3). In this sense, monarchy is and has always been a 

reproductive paradigm intended to be dynastic and pass on sovereignty to the royal line. The 

same hierarchical reproductive paradigm applies to rule by a clan strongman and to feudal rule 

by a local military land-holder. 

  

Recent genetic evidence points to a massive change in the reproductive paradigm across all 

cultures and continents, from the establishment of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Only 3% of 

mammals are socially monogamous due to the females delivering live young and having a 

principal reproductive investment in parenting, while males have a principal investment in 

fertilization. The variance in male reproductive success is thus always much greater than that of 

females, due to male competition for reproductive success among the available females, all of 

whom can get pregnant unless they are physically infertile. And social monogamy means just 

that, not reproductive or genetic monogamy. In socially monogamous species, from the albatross 

to the prairie vole, where circumstances favour a parenting resource from both sexes, females 

exert reproductive choice through clandestine sex with other males of superior genetic fitness as 

the opportunity arises, because, given the much greater parental investment of the female, it is 

counterproductive in evolutionary terms for females to literally put all their eggs in one 

resourcing partner's basket. Humans share with such species a pattern where between 10 and 

20% of offspring, allegedly of the resource-bearing partner, are sired by another male. 

  

Although humans do show traits of strong pair bonding, and mutual partner choice as a function 

of the need of human infants for full-time care up to the age of about four, when they become 

socially and physically competent enough to fend for themselves as active members of an 

extended family, female reproductive choice is essential for the long-term viability of the human 

germ line because astute female choice of which male to entrust their huge parenting investment 

to is key to maintaining the mammalian XY based sexual selection, where the male has a single 

X and thus manifests the X-linked genes, many of which are involved in brain function in a 

unique pattern unmasked by the paired alleles of female double X. Astute female reproductive 

choice thus plays a pivotal role in evolutionary selection. 

http://dhushara.com/paradoxhtm/fall.htm#Anchor-Emergence-23240
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DNA Decipher Journal | October 2015 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 | pp. 78-93 
King, C., Evolution, Sexual Reproduction & the Future of Human Society (Part I) 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 
www.dnadecipher.com 

 

88 

. 

Humans and most traditional human cultures still share mammalian features ofpolygyny if a 

male has the prowess and resources to support (or even seduce) more than one female to 

reproduce with him, he will do so. Thus in such societies around one in eight men have two 

wives. In Western culture serial monogamy also serves as a clandestine form of polygyny, with 

men seeking new younger nubile partners to sire a second family with on divorcing their original 

wives whom they will generally have already had children with. 

 
 

Fig 6: Reproductive bottleneck in Y-chromosome diversity began about 10,000 years ago and 

continued for several millennia (Karmin M et al. 2015 A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome 

diversity coincides with a global change in culture(doi:10.1101/gr.186684.114). 

  

Because of these factors, over all time in human genetic emergence, from our last common 

human ancestors, the mitochondrial Eve dating back 176,000 years and Y-chromosome Adam 

dating back some 73,000 years (Wilder et al. doi:10.1093/molbev/msh214), one can verify a 

sexual reproduction ratio of around one reproducing male to every two females, with half of the 

males failing to find reproductive partners. This leads to manifest differences between the 

evolutionary trees of the Y-chromosome carried only down the male line, and the mitochondrial 

DNA carried only through the ovum of the mother to her children. However, with the emergence 

of agriculture and animal husbandry, the reproductive sex ratios became wildly skewed to a 



DNA Decipher Journal | October 2015 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 | pp. 78-93 
King, C., Evolution, Sexual Reproduction & the Future of Human Society (Part I) 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 
www.dnadecipher.com 

 

89 

value of 17:1 over the entire period from 10,000 years ago to around 4,000, so that powerful 

agricultural landlords had their pick of an average of 17 female reproducing partners, while the 

other men effectively had no offspring, existing only as slaves, serfs, or soldiers maintaining the 

military domination of the mighty lords. The result was a precipitous decline in Y-chromosome 

diversity unparalleled in mitochondrial evolution that became apparent only when extensive 

genetic studies of many populations were completed in 2015. Neither is the effect confined to 

one historical culture, but extends to very degrees of severity across all the populated continents 

of the planet, confirming this has been a species-wide phenomenon, as shown in fig 6 (Karmin et 

al. doi:10.1101/gr.186684.114). 

  

Human cultures have been predominantly of patriarchal 'chimpanzee-like' patrilinial pattern, in 

which a woman moves to her husbands locale, and joins his patrilineal line, however there have 

also been significant matriarchal cultures, following a more 'bonobo-like' paradigm, in which 

women remain with the maternal family, sometimes having only transient encounters with their 

partners as lovers, in a so-called 'walking marriage', while maternal uncles act as surrogate 

fathers. The root reason this became an issue of violent conflict, as we shall see, is not just that 

men like to live with their wives in conjugal intimacy, but the uncertainty that comes from men 

never being sure who their offspring really are, while a woman is absolutely certain that each 

natural born child that comes out of her womb is hers. Thus while jealousy in a woman is 

primarily about losing her relationship resourcing, jealousy in a man evokes potentially 

homicidal emotions because he fears his partner has been 'polluted' by another man's sperm and 

may give borth to a child who is not his. 

  

Paternity certainty is the probability that you are your children's father. At the critical figure of 

1/3 the following two calculations for patriarchal and matriarchal societies are equal: 

1.  You are therefore related to your own children by (1/2)(1/3) = (1/6), since if you were certain 

you were the father and half your child's genes come from the mother, the value is 1/2. 

2.  Your relatedness to your "full" sister is at least 1/4 (representing your common mother) plus 

1/4 (your putative common father) times the paternity certainty of 1/3, totaling 1/4 + 

(1/4)(1/3) = 1/3. Since you thus share 1/3 of your genes with your sister and she provides 

1/2 the genes of her children, you are related to her Children by (1/2)(1/3) = 1/6. 

Thus patriarchal societies enforce marriage to a husband to try to ensure paternity certainty is as 

close as possible to 1 even though this comes at the expense of curtailing female reproductive 

choice. 

  

There is clear evidence for early violent conflict between these two traditions in the founding 

civilizations of the Fertile Crescent. The Book of Genesis notes that polygynous Jacob had to 

tarry for seven years for each wife with Laban's maternal family before being ordained by God to 

depart with Rachel and Leah and his cattle to found the twelve patriarchal tribes of Israel. Rachel 

steals the maternal teraphim (house gods) and hides them under her menstrual skirt 

when Laban comes to search for them, confirming the women have made the transition to 

religious patriarchy. 

. 

This is followed by a homicidal warning in Judges 19, that matrilineal patterns were to be 

violently overthrown by a zealous patriliny. The concubine of Bethlehem-Judah is accused of 



DNA Decipher Journal | October 2015 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 | pp. 78-93 
King, C., Evolution, Sexual Reproduction & the Future of Human Society (Part I) 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 
www.dnadecipher.com 

 

90 

'whoring' by going back to live with her father-in-law for four months. When the Levite returns 

to claim her, the father-in-law keeps saying to stay a little longer for six days, nigh on a week. 

When the couple leave and turn in at Gibeath of the Benjaminites, men of Belial ask to 'know the 

man within'. In an attempt to avoid sodomy, the host offers his daughter, to which they refuse. 

The Levite then offers his concubine. She is raped and abused all night and dies on the doorstep, 

while her master sleeps peacefully. The story is a glaring affront to those matriarchal traditions, 

which expected the son-in-law to stay with the wife's family as Jacob did. He then cuts her in 

twelve pieces and sends them to all the coasts of Israel setting off the Benjaminite wars. These 

are finally resolved in moving four hundred virgins of Jabesh-Gilead to their husbands homes, 

capped by the abduction of the daughters of Shiloh dancing at a festival, to satisfy the 

remaining Benjaminite men. 

  

Religions in successive cultures have acted to reinforce the patriarchal reproductive paradigm, to 

ensure male control of female reproductive choice and the hyper-fertility of the religious 

community. While the Code of Hammurabi ordains drowning for adultery, but allows for 

forgiveness, Deuteronomic law invokes the cruel and unusual punishment of stoning: 

. 

22:20 But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel:  

Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house,  

and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die. 

. 

22:23 If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband,  

and a man find her in the city, and lie with her;  

Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city,  

and ye shall stone them with stones that they die;  

the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city. 

. 

Islam has taken this homicidal tradition, which had centuries before been discontinued by the 

Jews, and applied it to Muslims as well: 

. 

Narrated 'Abdullah bin Umar: The Jews brought to the Prophet a man and a woman from 

among them who had committed adultery. The Prophet said to them, "How do you usually punish 

the one amongst you?" They replied, "We blacken their faces and beat them," He said, "You have 

told a lie! Bring here the Torah and recite it if you are truthful." So the Prophet ordered the two 

adulterers to be stoned to death, and they were stoned to death near the place where biers used 

to be placed near the Mosque. I saw her companion bowing over her so as to protect her from 

the stones. 

. 

To this day women suffer this diabolical form of torture and homicide at the hands of Muslim 

men, buried to their waists and slowly knocked to pieces. These crimes against women and 

against the sanctity of all humanity occur both in Sunni countries such as Saudi Arabia and in 

Shiite Iran. They are an unforgivable stain on the Muslim tradition, which has an endless river of 

blood of women on its hands throughout history. It is compounded by patriarchal tribal customs 

enshrined in the Quran and more restrictively in dubious hadith, that a woman is only half the 

value of a man in law and that women have to be veiled because their bodies are almost entirely 

sexual pudenda seductive enough to corrupt all men, to be confined to the home and sequestered 



DNA Decipher Journal | October 2015 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 | pp. 78-93 
King, C., Evolution, Sexual Reproduction & the Future of Human Society (Part I) 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 
www.dnadecipher.com 

 

91 

by their male relatives to avoid any chance of them being impregnated. Honour killings abound 

if a woman so much as touches a man of her own choice. 

. 

 
Fig 7: Islam is unique among world religions for invoking violent and homicidal penalties for 

non-lethal and sometimes harmless offences to society, completely inconsistent with its claim to 

be a religion of peace. Left: Genocide and sexual slavery (Fitna) Seven hundred Jews were 

beheaded in the souk of Medina, despite not actually betraying the Muslims to the Meccan 

Quraysh, and their womenfolk taken into sexual slavery, after Muhammad appointed a mortally 

wounded fighter as judge over their fates. Right: Both Shiite Iran and Sunni Afghanistan are 

among several Muslim countries that stone women to death for alleged adultery (internet news) 

it difficult or impossible for a Muslim to 'switch out'. Center: Muslim women are required to 

cover themselves, sometimes including their eyes and entire face, because Muslim culture fears 

unveiled women are too sexually attractive (Eid news). They are sequestered and in many 

countries not allowed to associate socially without a male member of their family chaperoning 

them. The world needs to consider whether such homicidal crimes against humanity can be 

allowed to continue as an institutional manifestation of 'freedom of religion'. 

. 

This severity of repression of women and reproductive female choice has to be understood 

historically in glaring contrast to the fact that Mecca and its surrounding centers such 

as Taif were places of worship of the goddesses, al-Lat, Manat and al Uzza. Meccan culture 

before Islam respected both religious diversity and women's status. This shows claims that Islam 

improved the lives of women to be a strategic deception. In fact women were killed or maimed 

for opposing the Muslim take over, as Nawal elSadaawi in "The Naked Face of Eve" attests: 

  

"Sarah was a famous slave singer who aimed her barbed words against the Moslems. She was 

among those whom Mahomet ordered to be executed on the day of his victorious entry into 

Mecca. In the region of El Nagir, it was recounted that some women had rejoiced when the 

Prophet died and Abu Bake, the first of the Caliphs, ordered their hands and feet to be cut off. 

Thus women who dared to give voice to their protest or opposition could be exposed to cruel 

punishment. Their hands might be cut off, or their teeth pulled out, or their tongues torn from 

their mouths. This last form of punishment was usually reserved for those who were singers. It 

was said of these women that they used to dye their hands with henna, brazenly display the 

seductions of their beauty, and beat time with their fingers on tambourines and drums in 

defiance of God, and in derision towards the rights of God and his Prophet. It was therefore 

necessary to cut off their hands and tear out their tongues". 

  



DNA Decipher Journal | October 2015 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 | pp. 78-93 
King, C., Evolution, Sexual Reproduction & the Future of Human Society (Part I) 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 
www.dnadecipher.com 

 

92 

According to al-Tabari Muhammad had already murdered Om Kerfa (Mother of Kerfa), one of 

the most revered Meccan matriarchs who was torn in half by camels at the age of 90 for writing 

poetry ridiculing him: 

  

"Mother of Kerfa married a prince of the tribe of Hathifa and bore for him 13 children the first 

of whom was Kerfa by whom she is surnamed. All her children became leaders of their tribes. 

She was the dearest of all Arabs, and an example of honor and pride to them. It was said if two 

tribes fought and Mother of Kerfa sent her scholl on a spear that was displayed to both parties, 

then they would reconcile out of respect for her. She used to annoy the prophet with her poetry 

so in the sixth year of the Hijra (638 AD) he sent Zaid son of Haritha on a military expedition to 

kill her in the most heinous of ways. For he tied her legs with ropes and tied each of the ropes to 

a camel so that she was split in two. She was an old woman when this happened and her head 

was severed as proof to all that she had died. " 

  

Although Judaism still adheres to the biological reality that a person is a Jew by birthright only if 

their mother is Jewish, Jewish culture nevertheless has subjected women to severe ritual 

confinement. The second chapter of Genesis, although beginning in the Edenic garden of 

gatherer-hunter integration with nature, casts a shadow of sexual guilt over the entire female sex, 

because Eve - the mother of all living - enticed Adam to eat the forbidden fruit of the knowledge 

of good and evil, when assured by the serpent that it would make one wise, so that they both 

became conscious of carnal knowledge and covered themselves with fig leaves. Yahweh then 

withdraws the Tree of Life and shuts them out of primal paradise with a flaming sword, to sweat 

in agricultural struggle - "Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat 

the herb of the field" - with woman to be ruled over by her husband and to go travail in the pain 

of childbirth. Nevertheless, the central command of God is "go forth and multiply". 

  

A woman thus takes an intermediate position in the Commandments between a man's house and 

cattle: 

  

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, 

nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is 

thy neighbour's." 

  

Note however that the commandment to honour one's parents is not simply a dictate for 

obedience to authority, but an insightful statement about how inter-generational consciousness 

engenders an enduring life process through the passage of the generations, central to this article's 

thesis: 

  

Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy 

God giveth thee. 

  

Christianity has taken up on the theme of the Fall from Eden, to accuse women of being 'the 

devil's gateway', placing all humanity in the shadow of 'original sin', with women to be seen but 

not heard in the church, and priests of the Catholic tradition being required to be celibate men. It 

regards sex as purely to reproduce and that pleasure outside fertilization is sinful, and treats 

contraception as a crime against God. It has enforced monogamous marriage and outlawed 



DNA Decipher Journal | October 2015 | Volume 5 | Issue 2 | pp. 78-93 
King, C., Evolution, Sexual Reproduction & the Future of Human Society (Part I) 

 
ISSN: 2159-046X DNA Decipher Journal 

Published by QuantumDream, Inc. 
www.dnadecipher.com 

 

93 

divorce in the shadow of Jesus' statement: "Have ye not read, that he which made them at the 

beginning made them male and female - for this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and 

shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? What therefore God hath joined 

together, let no man put asunder." However this does not imply monogamy. Jewish midrash 

claims that Eve of Genesis 2 was Adam's second wife, while the woman made female with him 

in Genesis 1 was Lilith, who took flight when he insisted she take the 'missionary' position in 

subservience to him. 

  

These biased reproductive traditions extend to many other patriarchal cultures, from Hindu India, 

where wives were expected to throw themselves on their husband's funeral pyre in the rite of 

Suttee, and brides are regularly burned to death over the dowry, through China where women's 

feet were bound and a wife's principal task was to be subservient and produce a son for the 

family line, to the Warrior cultures of the Americas, where, among some tribes, such as the 

Yanomamo, up to 20% of women are forcibly abducted and have to bear the burden of hard 

physical work, and to countries from Egypt to Sierra Leone, where girls are genitally 

mutilated to cut off the source their their ability to enjoy sex to ensure they will remain faithful. 

An estimated 130 million women, averaging 6000 a day have undergone sexual mutilation. 

. 

 
 
Fig 8: Left: Female genital mutilation in Muslim Egypt where 75% of women are mutilated 

(CNN) Right: Bride burning in India. Contrast between ages of female burning victims in the 

UK and India, where there is a huge peak at marriageable age, shows the cumulative effect of 

bride burning, which involves around 25,000 deaths a year , a three times higher per-capita rate 

then th UK. Between 1994 and 2001 the proportion of burned women in postmortems rose from 

12% to 30%. 

. 

How sad it is to be a woman!! 

Nothing on earth is held so cheap... 

No one is glad when a girl is born: 

By her the family sets no store... 

She bows and kneels countless times. 

She must humble herself even to the servants. 

Fu Xuan (217-278) 

  

(Continued on Part II) 

http://dhushara.com/paradoxhtm/girlchild.htm#Anchor-Till-49575
http://dhushara.com/paradoxhtm/warrior.htm#Anchor-Yanomamo-54980
http://dhushara.com/paradoxhtm/circ.htm#OLE_LINK1
http://dhushara.com/paradoxhtm/circ.htm#OLE_LINK1

