A Convergence of Two Minds: Origins of Self-awareness and Identity (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780996117609)

Annotation Text: A Convergence of Two Minds

100,000 years ago, the two sides of our brain began to deliberate, marking our emergence as human. This is the story of how that ancestral male and female convergence has shaped the modern world. "Gender arrives in the form of our reproductive anatomy at birth, which sets the way the world sees us, whereas gender at the level of the mind sets the way we see the world. The mind is the legacy of life experiences from our male and female ancestors, expressed as "maleness" and "femaleness" in the respective hemispheres of the brain--our Two Minds. We are anatomically male or female, but in matters of the mind--perception and behavior--we are male and female."

So begins the revolutionary view of gender by Randolph Croxton, which Kirkus Reviews has called "...an intriguing theory." Three conclusions are asserted in mapping a new evolutionary pathway into the modern world:

1. 100,000 years ago we emerged as human from an animalistic existence--the result of a convergence of the dominant/aggressive (maleness) left hemisphere with the ascending creative/social (femaleness) right hemisphere of the brain.
2. This birth of self-awareness, simultaneous access to both of our opposite natures (e.g. aggressive/empathetic), gave the ultimate advantage to our species: deliberative thought. Through associated innovation in projectile weapons and social order, we rose to dominate all life.
3. DNA (genetic) was the primary pathway of our evolution up to our emergence, but it was RNA (epigenetic) in the joining of the gendered hemispheres of the brain--our Two Minds--which achieved self-awareness and the infinite variability of the human mindset.

Croxton asserts that RNA/epigenetic processes impart diversity in individual perception, and therefore behavior, with each birth--an immediate resilience across the human population. We are each a combination of sexual and associated non-sexual characteristics, an array that we see every day on the evening news--from saints to psychopaths. The spectrum of non-sexual characteristics includes the conservative + protect and defend + aggressive-analytical (maleness) and the liberal + creative + social-empathetic (femaleness), while the sexual spectrum of preference and identity includes heterosexual, bi-sexual, homosexual and transsexual. For reasons of resilience and survival, there is no such thing as a "normal" brain.

Reviews

In this nonfiction work, Croxton argues that modern human minds succeed through the interaction of the distinctly male and female hemispheres of the brain. Croxton pursues this argument with recent findings from the fields of neurology, psychiatry, and anthropology...this book offers a thoughtful presentation of an intriguing theory. --Kirkus Reviews

Croxton guides the reader on an evolutionary journey across thousands of generations that shaped who we are. His interpretation of scholarly research is spot-on and his writing is extremely crisp and accessible. If you want to know where humans came from--and how our mind largely results from evolving male/female differences--this book is for you.--Glenn Gehar, PhD, Director of Evolutionary Studies and Chair of Psychology, State University of New York at New Paltz