ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book provides a framework of ideas to think about how sex organizes human social life. Sex is regarded inaptly as an attribute or interaction of persons instead of as a fundamental dynamic of the species. The bias to see sex in terms of the individual, a bias that runs pervasively through theories of evolutionary biology and social complexity, has kept social science from seeing clearly how sex figures in the social life of the species. By dividing a unitary species into opposed male and female parts, sex compels play and integration of those parts. The book describes the sexual basis of social life in terms of four “moments”: unity, division, play, and order. Sex is the living dialectic of the species, a female thesis and male antithesis ever in need of synthesis.
