# Shlain, *Sex, Time, and Power*, 2003 > [!cite] > Shlain, Leonard. *Sex, Time, and Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution*. Penguin, 2003. EPUB. --- ‘Consider my consternation and sense of helplessness when I discovered that it was *exceptional* to find one among the late-term women visiting my clinic in possession of a normal hemoglobin count. More often, they ranged from mild (8–10) to severe (5–7) anemia.* My mentors sadly shook their heads, explaining to me that fetal brains would most likely not develop properly if the mother was anemic; at worst the babies would suffer mental retardation, and at best they would fail to attain their full intellectual potential.’ [[Shlain, Sex, Time, and Power, 2003|(Shlain 2003, preface)]] ^7d0e85 A peculiar side effect of iron deficiency is the dulling of the taste buds that sense sweets. To compensate, an iron-deficient woman craves carbohydrates.’ [[Shlain, Sex, Time, and Power, 2003|(Shlain 2003, preface)]] ^770d08 ‘… let me neutralize the contentious nature-versus-nurture debate at the outset. There is no gene-controlled inheritable trait that cannot be altered by the environment. Similarly, the genetic makeup of the organism can overcome the influence of the environment. Each fact can affect and alter the other. Humans enter the world as a work-in-progress. In some cases, the culture or environment into which a person is born more strongly determines his or her responses to the vagaries of life, and sometimes responses are more influenced by the genes he or she has inherited. Nature/nurture is not an *either/or* duality but, rather, represents a *both/and* type of complementarity.’ [[Shlain, Sex, Time, and Power, 2003|(Shlain 2003, chap. 1)]] ^3e1013 ‘Farther east, originating in the same distant era, people began to worship a hermaphroditic deity in China. Quan Yin, born a man but transformed into a woman, is the god/goddess of wisdom and compassion.’ [[Shlain, Sex, Time, and Power, 2003|(Shlain 2003, chap. 17)]] ^7ac73e ‘Three thousand years ago in the West, the powerful idea of monotheism transformed the world. Patriarchy became a defining characteristic of Western culture and religion. Soon after, an unsettling question began to trouble the faithful. If there was but one God, then of what sex was this singular deity? Over the years rabbis, clerics, and mullahs attempted to evade this question by claiming that God has no sex. But this stance contradicted the sacred scripture of their singular God that states, “And God created man in his own image, in the image of god created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27).’ [[Shlain, Sex, Time, and Power, 2003|(Shlain 2003, chap. 17)]] ^16357d ‘In the Mesopotamian myth of the Garden of Delights, two serpents coil around the trunk of the Tree of Life.’ [[Shlain, Sex, Time, and Power, 2003|(Shlain 2003, chap. 17)]] ^ba4e00