The Queen - Matt Ridley

Yet I believe it to be true for two reasons. First, the logic is impeccable: As the last two chapters have demonstrated, over long stretches of evolutionary time men and women have faced different evolutionary pressures, so the ones who succeeded will have been those whose brains produced behaviors well suited to those pressures: Second, the evidence is overwhelming: Gingerly, reluctantly, but with increasing conviction, physiologists and psychologists have begun to probe the differences between male and female brains: Often they have done so determined to find none. Yet again and again they come back with good evidence that there are such differences. Not everything is different; most things, in fact, are identical between the sexes. Much of the folklore about differences is merely convenient sexism—And there are enormous overlaps: Although it is a fair generalization to say that men are taller than women, nonetheless the tallest woman in a large group of people is usually taller than the shortest man: In the same way, even if the average woman is better at some mental task than the average man, there are many women who are worse at the task than the best man, or vice versa: But the evidence for the average male brain differing in certain ways from the average female brain is now all but undeniable.

Evolved differences are by definition "genetic, " and any suggestion that men and women have genetically different minds horrifies the modern conscience for it seems to justify prejudice: How can we strive to build an equal society when men are given

" scientific " support for their sexism? Give men an inch of inequality and they will claim a mile of bias. The Victorians believed men and women were so different that women should not even have the vote; in the eighteenth century some men thought women incapable of reason.

SEXING THE MIND

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These concerns are fair: But just because people have exaggerated sexual differences in the past does not mean they cannot exist. There is no a priori reason for assuming that men and women have identical minds and no amount of wishing it were so will make it so if it is not so. Difference is not inequality. Boys are interested in guns, girls in dolls. That may be conditioning, or it may be genes, but neither is "better " than the other. As anthropologist Melvin Konner put it: "Men are more violent than women and women are more nurturant, at least toward infants and children, than men. I am sorry if this is a cliche; that cannot make it less factual: "'' Moreover, suppose there are differences in the mentalities of men and women. Is it then fair to assume and act as if there were none? Suppose that boys are more competitive than girls. Would that not suggest that girls would be better educated apart from boys? The evidence suggests that girls are indeed more successful after education in a single-sex school. Sex-blind education may be unfair education.

In other words, to assume the sexes are mentally identical in the face of evidence that they are not is just as unfair as to assume sexual differences in the face of evidence that they are the same. We have always assumed that the burden of proof must rest with those who believe there are innate mental differences between the sexes: We may have been wrong:

MEN AND MAP READING

With that out of the way, let us examine the evidence. There are three reasons to expect evolution to have produced different mentalities in men and women. The first is that men and women are mammals, and all mammals show sexual differences in behavior. As Charles Darwin put it, "No one disputes that the bull differs in disposition from the cow, the wild boar from the sow, the stallion from the mare." ' The second is that men and women are apes, and in all apes there are great rewards for males that show aggression toward other males, for males that seek mating opportunities, and for females that pay close attention to their babies. The third is

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The Red Queen

that men and women are human beings, and human beings are mammals with one highly unusual characteristic: a sexual division of labor. Whereas a male and a female chimp seek the same sources of food, a male and a female human being, in virtually every preagricultural society, set about gathering food in different ways: Men look for sources that are mobile, distant, and unpredictable (usually meat), while women, burdened with children, look for sources that are static, close, and predictable (usually plants).'

In other words, far from being an ape with fewer than usual sex differences, the human being may prove to be an ape with more than usual sex differences. Indeed, mankind may be the mammal with the greatest division of sexual labor and the greatest of mental differences between the sexes: Yet, though mankind may have added division of labor to the list of causes of sexual dimorphism, he has subtracted the effect of male parental care: Of the many mental features that are claimed to be different between the sexes, four stand out as repeatable, real, and persistent in all psychological tests. First, girls are better at verbal tasks: Second, boys are better at mathematical tasks. Third, boys are more aggressive. Fourth, boys are better at some visuo-spatial tasks and girls at others. Put crudely, men are better at reading a map and women are better judges of character and mood—on average.'

(And, interestingly, gay men are more like women than heterosexual men in some of these respects.) 6

The case of the visuo-spatial tasks is intriguing because it has been used to argue that men are naturally polygamous' by analogy with the case of the mice quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Crudely put, polygamist mice need to know their way from one wife's house to another—and it is certainly true that in many polygamous animals, including our relatives, orangutans, males patrol an area that includes the territories of several wives: When people are asked to rotate a diagram of an object mentally to see if it is the same as another object, only about one in four women scores as highly as the average man. This difference grows during childhood: Mental rotation is the essence of map reading, but it seems a huge jump to argue that men are polygamous because they are better at map reading just because the same is true of mice.

SEXING THE MIND

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Besides, there are spatial skills that women perform better than men: Irwin Silverman and Marion Eals at York University in Toronto reasoned that the male skill at mental-rotation tasks probably reflected not some parallel with polygamous male mice patrolling broad territories to visit many females but a much more particular fact about human history: that during the Pleistocene period, when early man was an African hunter-gatherer for a million years or more, men were the hunters. So men needed superior spatial skills to throw weapons at moving targets, to make tools, to find their way home to camp after a long trek, and so on.

Much of this is conventional wisdom, but Silverman and Eals then asked themselves: What special spatial skills would women gatherers need that men would not? One thing they predicted was that women would need to notice things more—to spot roots, mushrooms, berries, plants—and would need to remember landmarks so as to know where to look: So Silverman and Eals did a series of experiments that required students to memorize a picture full of objects and then recall them later, or to sit in a room for three minutes and then recall what objects were where in the room. (The students were told they were merely being asked to wait in the room until a different experiment was ready:) On every measure of object memory and location memory, the women students did 60—70 percent better than the men. The old jokes about women noticing things and men losing things about the house and having to ask their wives are true. The difference appears around puberty, just as the social and verbal skills of women begin to exceed those of men.'