The gene is the basic unit of heredity. Different arrangements of genes make ducks, oranges, spiders, bacteria, flatworms and humans. In our case, human genes are arranged in 23 pairs of chromosomes, found in all human cells with the exception of sex cells---egg and sperm---which receive only one randomly selected chromosome from each pair. There is often gene swapping between a pair of chromosomes before that selection is made.
When fertilization takes place and one sperm outcompetes all the millions of others in swimming to and penetrating an egg, 23 paternal chromosomes meet 23 maternal chromosomes. And a new individual with 46 chromosomes---23 pairs---is made possible. That individual has inherited an X chromosome via the mother's egg. And it will be genetically female or male, depending on whether the successful sperm delivered by the father carried, to partner it, another X chromosome (female) or a Y chromosome (male). If the partnership produces an XY pairing, then the uphill struggle to be male begins.
A human being is a sex cell's way of surviving to make more sex cells. Put another way, a human being is a gene's way of surviving to reproduce itself. And it is at the genetic level that the process of evolution must be understood. Each individual is a living test bed for a particular combination of genes, a particular mingling of DNA, a genetic stab in the dark. If the combination of genes is successful, then the individual survives to reproduce the genes, which can then continue the evolutionary game into the next round. But if it is not, and the individual has some disadvantage that keeps it from reproducing, then the genes are withdrawn from the game and disappear.
Evolution works through survival to gene reproduction: Genes governing the urge to have offspring will always outlast and dominate, by definition, any combination of genes governing the urge to remain childless. We are all of us children of children, back hundreds of thousands of generations. The genes that favored an absence of children have left no progeny. It is in this sense, then, that the drive toward reproduction is a fundamental one. And it is in this sense, too, that the female drive to power, inasmuch as it is genetically based, can succeed only if those who have it have more children than those who do not.
That sobering thought should remind us that the processes of Darwinian evolution take a long, long time. And genetically we are still the hunter-gatherers who roamed the thinly populated earth until 50,000 years ago. If human life is a day, then our movement into settled communities was 16 and a half-minutes ago; the Industrial Revolution, which has unalterably changed the patterns of our lives, was 14 seconds back; the rubber condom and the computer were invented just as you got to the end of this sentence. And that is not enough time for any fundamental genetic change. Just as the heart hasn't changed in 15,000 years, neither have the instincts and qualities that were selected for in human men and women in the 1,000,000 or more years that preceded them.
