Chapter 4: Living Systems have Male and Female Characteristics

Why did life create males and females? What was the evolutionary benefits of life evolving through the two sexes? There are a couple of advantages of sexual reproduction. By combining DNA from both partners, you allow for greater DNA variation. This leads to greater diversity, allowing life to evolve faster to its environment. It also allows for greater specialization, with the female having and caring for her offspring, while the male protects and provides for the family.

When a living system senses its environment, what does it see? Does it find itself in a hostile environment or friendly environment? Life has two main qualities to use in these settings, male and female. The male side is aggressive, and competitive, while the female side is caring and nurturing. This gives life all the qualities it needs to deal with any problem that it may confront.

The male side deals with issues related mainly to the outside world, such as protection, and competition for resources. The female side focuses on the processes that go on inside of the organism, by promoting care and integration.

Both male and female forces are needed to sustain life. Care has a female orientation; this is a circular process of attention. Male aggression is goal oriented, it is a linear process of achievement.


We are currently living in a male dominated world. We need to move to a more balanced male/female approach that looks to provide more care and less exploitation, helping us address many of the problems that we face.

In the male world, we compete; it's a world of competition and achievement. In the female world, we have integration, where the life forces are linked together, creating a problem-solving network that can develop new emergent properties.

The Republican and Democratic parties represent these two life forces, with the Republicans representing the male qualities of achievement and independence, and the Democratic side representing the female qualities of care and integration.


Previous Chapter

Read Chapter 5: Living Systems Live in a Competitive Environment