What some people refr to on the culturl level here in Niorway where Christianity has had a stronghold for centuries is just "creation" where God mad women and man in hir image.

The evolution seems far more complex  with "gendered" receptor markers down to cell mambrane level and also many findings in the CNS indication a kind of "binary" since there seems to be two main kinds of brains, there does however seem to be a continuum between the two.

A good way to find articles is by searching brain and transgender.

A prominent example of dualistic thinking is in-group/out-group (or us versus them), which is sometimes referred to as tribalism. 

Yes, and I also link that to binary thinking - we/them, us/the others - Baumeister and Leary has written well on belongingness, may be that would give you something linking culture and biology, maybe.

One of the things that Claude Levy Strauss and his structuralist followers in the 1960s and 1970s stressed were binary opposites in culture.  Classically such things as 'raw::cooked'  'clean:: unclean'  'tame::wild'. A great deal of Levy Strauss' material came from the New World - both the north and south continents.   It was all the rage at Cambridge when  was there reading Archaeology and Anthropology and we had our own famous structuralist in Edmund Leach.  Binary opposites were, according to Levi Strauss a human universal.   We were seeing binary opposites everywhere - I even did my own undergraduate study of the Tain bo Culainge (Irish myth ?) where the hero Cu Chulainn is sometimes small and (in Leach's words) sweet and sometimes a roaring mighty warrior with a fountain of blood rising through the top of his head (lots for the anthropologist to think about there... how we love bodily fluids!).  All this was punctured for me when a perceptive lecturer (Dr Ray Abrahams) pointed out that in Africa his research had shown that the people did not think in binary opposites but in circular patterns - such as in the Yorkshire song 'On Ilkley Moor bar tat'.

This is long way of saying that binary opposites are ONE way of human thought pattern, but that there are others.  They are probably influenced by the people's culture rather than any human universal pattern of  thinking.

That is a great point, Charles! But I still wonder if humans have evolved to think dualistically, perhaps thinking non-dualistically (as in the example you cite) is a cultural variation on a more deeply ingrained adaptive process that has to do with our survival? I am not sure, and I wonder if there is a definitive answer to this question from evolutionary science. 

May I enter an experience that I guess a share with many:

My uncle "Odd" when I was I child, showed me a flag, painted on a black background. The flag was the Norwegian one in stucture/composition, but the colours were wrong. He asked me to watch this image intensely for 20 seconds and then bend back and look up into the white ceiling. So I did, and there it was: The Norwegian flag in bright red, white and blue.

This to my thinking does tell a story about our physiology of comprehension: It does opereate with binaries of complementary colours. Maybe that comprehension also "like"  binaries and hence has a tendency to choose them for more complex options?

Thank you, Esben, for the example!

I believe you are speaking of the "opponent process" theory of how we see colors. 

I guess I am. I do by the way myself represent a point of selfpersption that breaks the bastion of the binary. I see myself neither as man, nor woman, but as trans(gifted)

That's a wonderful statement, Esben!

I am working on a Project that develops a revised version of the Weil-Levi-Strauss transformation formula. The weakness of Levi-Strauss' formulation is that he so often reduced the results of the Weil formula application to a simple analogical ratio (a is to be as c is to do), otherwise known as a metaphor kat' analogion. My revised version discards the ratio approach, emphasizes that the Weil formula best interpreted as a non-linear and non-reversible transformation that arrives at imaginal inverse components (traditionally called 'transcendence' in religious studies and anthropology of religion).  I have not published this yet or posted it until I get a better understanding of the mathematical interpretation of my revision from a mathematician. 

Several comments.

(1) There are two or three neuroimaged areas of the brain that appear to be substrates for conceptual dualisms, one in STS Wernicke, a LHS homologue to the node for prosody in the RHS.

(2) In and out group topic has dozens of neuroimaging studies. Peak activated nodes are especially in the Amygdala, and also the Precuneus. For free I've attached my background database notes on neuroimaging studies of the Amygdala.

From this first glance it looks to me as if 'dualism' is a term the covers disparate neural networks. In other words, a term with multiple denotations, so any use needs to be rigorously defined.

(3) Philosophically speaking, I view dualism, as did Hegel and Levi-Strauss, as the result of not taking into account a full Levi-Strauss transform, which has twelve components.  (For Hegel, basically three components.) 

(4) As practicing Vajrayana Buddhist, I view 'non-dualism' using the lens of Nagarjuna  (not neither X nor Y), eighth mode of the Sanskrit Catuskoti (as outlined in Wikipedia). Derrida came close to this in the logic he used which underlies his deconstruction of binaries. I will review this hypothesis in my Project developing new methods for philosophical ontology.

That's very helpful, James! Aside from the technical details, do we think dualistically (e.g., us vs. them) as a function of the brain's natural evolution or is the dualistic thinking more a function of culture/language as the (post)stucturalists argue?

Sorry. I uploaded wrong database. Here is Amygdala database.

Comment (5). I have presented a PowerPoint presentation on how to analyze the Pecked Cobble from Olduvai Gorge, Oldowan (this is posted at my academia.edu webpage). If Mary Leakey's report is accurate, than it appears this artifact is engraved with earliest evidence for numerosity (set comparison). It has one group of four 'cupules' and one group of two. Each group has different size of cupules. Based on studies of Homo habiline brain expansion areas, I tentatively hypothesize that these marks are evidence for a node in the numerosity neural network that has been activated in neuroimaging studies of 'difference' with respect to distributive fairness, i.e., equivalence of share, unfair share, etc., which I further tentatively hypothesize was evidence for emergence of concept and symbols for equitable meat-sharing. If meat (Omega 3 and 6) consumption was critical for brain evolution, habilines had to overcome the violent conflicts that must have occurred as result of hunting-gathering meat/marine food. Among chimpanzees hunting animals for meat ends up in such conflicts in which males dismember carcasses in intragroup violence. 

"do we think dualistically (e.g., us vs. them) as a function of the brain's natural evolution or is the dualistic thinking more a function of culture/language as the (post)stucturalists argue?"

That is a deep question.  I don't presume to 'answer' it.  One possible approach: compare studies of chimpanzees. What does primatology say about 'us vs them' for common chimpanzee and for bonobo? They do not have language. However they have two dozen or more vocalizations, and variations of threat-displays. Goodall describes these in Chimpanzees of the Gombe. Aggression displays and attacks are used to maintain the dominance hierarchy, which is far more intense than among 'evolved' humans. Chimpanzee culture examined using application of NEO-5-Factor Inventory shows their 'culture' not high on the 'openness/intellect' scale. This is to my mind major factor in their not evolving more human-like culture. Goodall also reports the merciless violence by which one chimpanzee group exterminated another group. If one takes this comparative primate approach, then at first glance it looks to me like the 'us vs. them' behavior is common to primates and prior to human language evo. On other hand, as noted, chimpanzees have their own 'culture/language' or more precisely 'culture/communicative behaviors'.  I have never heard of a study that examined chimpanzee culture/communicative behaviors with respect to creating stereotypes of 'us vs them'.  So that is for future research.  It might help answer the question.

On the other other hand, postmodern emphasis on culture/language and 'us vs them' was a valuable contribution. But seems history of philosophy has explored this for several thousand years, and to that extent not a novel idea. Don't Aristophanes' plays lampoon the way culture/language promoted 'us/them' provokes aggression and war?  And postmodernism did not integrate primatology findings, at least I don't think so -- in my lifespan I found postmodernism somewhat boring and skipped over it.

I also believe from my review of the literature, though could easily have missed some research, that the 'human' language neural network is dissociated from the intergroup aggression network. In neuroimaging the language network is cortical; the 'us/them' network hub is in the limbic amygdala, and, as I recall, has nodes in other limbic areas such as the medial prefrontal, which is hub for concepts of self and harm. 

I had not thought about the Oldowan Pecked cobbles numerosity, the two sets (2 large cupules versus 4 small cupules) for comparison of equitable share, with respect to 'us/them' but it could have easily applied to this for intra-group sharing of resources.