Eve

We need to socially bond with our infants, because, let’s face it, that’s just about the only way we will reliably choose not to kill them.* We need to be able to recognise their needs and try to fill them and, above all else, learn to communicate with them as they radically fail to be able to talk for years. What few people in the scientific community have written about, however, is the social learning that the mother needs to do as she adapts to her new role as a mother in a community.

While half of your DNA came from your dad and half from your mom, most of your mitochondria and cytoplasm came from your mother.† Sperm are basically an information delivery system that dumps the father’s DNA into the egg, whereas eggs have to provide all the construction materials to build that embryo. And that’s the major reason eggs are about four thousand times larger than sperm: they’re not just half a set of blueprints; they’re half a set of blueprints plus the entire factory.

One well-studied example is the history of Islam in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. By many measures, medieval Islamic societies were more gender equal than the Arab world today. In fact, the Prophet Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija – famously his most beloved – was older than him, twice widowed, already had children, and was a widely respected businesswoman when he met her.‡ In the twelfth century, the Islamic philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes) wrote that women should be considered equal to men in all respects, including education and opportunities for employment.

Remember, this is the Middle Ages. At the time, Islam wasn’t just more egalitarian than European societies. It was also more intellectually productive. Because Muslims believed reading the Quran was vital for the soul, these societies expected all children, male and female, to be literate and well educated – not just in the Quran, but in a range of topics they found valuable: visual arts, mathematics, the sciences, even music. Public education was both available and well funded. Public schooling didn’t take hold among the Christians of Europe and North America until the Industrial Revolution. If you were a child born between 1100 and 1400, you definitely wanted to be born in an Islamic society, whether you were male or female.

The payoffs were enormous. Islam’s golden age produced algebra, chemistry, the magnetic compass, better modes of navigation, and all sorts of advancements in medicine and biology. While Europe was busy telling itself the plague was caused by an evil fog, Islamic doctors had already figured out that copper and silver instruments were best for surgery (the metals are antimicrobial). Philosophy also flourished, with new ideas about humane government and social interdependence, many of which directly influenced the rise of the European Enlightenment. The golden age of Islam, in other words, produced one of the most intellectual, egalitarian, cosmopolitan, and profoundly influential societies of its time. And women were right there at the fore, contributing to its success.^§