“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Long pause, one of many.) The challenges and problems of the species were different from those of others. It needed additional safeguards. The more flexible mating pattern was one. With this came a greater diversity in individual characteristics and behavior, so that no individual was bound to a strictly biological role. If that were true, the species never would have been concerned beyond the issues of physical survival, and such is not the case. The species could have survived quite well physically without philosophy, the arts, politics, religion, or even structured language. It could have followed completely different paths, those tied strictly to biological orientation.

If your individuality was programmed by your biological sex, then it would be literally impossible for you to perform any action that was not sexually programmed. A woman cannot father a child, nor can a male bear one. Since you are otherwise free to perform other kinds of activity that you think of as sexually oriented, in those areas the orientation is cultural.

(Slowly:) Children began food gathering and hunting as soon as they were able to — females as well as males — led by the older children, going farther away as they progressed in strength. Qualities of inventiveness, curiosity, ingenuity, could not be delegated to one sex alone. The species could not have survived such a division.

(10:52.) You are so used to thinking in terms of mechanics, that it seems to you that uneducated people did not understand the connection between the sexual act of intercourse and childbirth. You are so used to one kind of explanation for childbirth, so familiar with one specific framework, that alternate explanations appear to be the height of nonsense. So it is fashionable to believe that early man did not understand the connection between intercourse and birth.

(Intently:) It is the height of idiocy to imagine that because of the time taken in pregnancy, the female could not understand the child’s origin in intercourse. The body’s knowledge did not need a complicated language. For that matter, your literal interpretation of childbirth is by some standards a highly limited one. In your terms, it is technically correct.