The Queen - Matt Ridley

When a family in a car gets lost, the woman wants to stop and ask the way, while the man persists in trying to find his way by map or landmarks. So pervasive is this cliche that there must be some truth to it. And it fits with what we know of the sexes: To a man, stopping to ask the way is an admission of defeat, something status-conscious males avoid at all costs: To a woman, it is common sense and plays on her strengths in social skills.

::: 252 :::

The Red Queen

NURTURE WITH NATURE

These social skills may also have had Pleistocene origins. A woman is dependent on her social intuition and skills for success at making allies within the tribe, manipulating men into helping her, judging potential mates, and advancing the cause of her children. Now this is not to claim that the difference is purely genetic: It could well be true—it is in my marriage—that men read maps more and women read novels more: So perhaps it is all a matter of training: Women think about character more, and so their brains get more practice at it: Yet where does the preference come from? Perhaps it comes from conditioning. Women learn to imitate their mothers who .are more interested in character than maps: So where did the mothers get the interest? From their mothers? Even if you suggest that the original Eve took an arbitrary step in deciding to be more interested in character than Adam, you cannot escape genetic change, for Eve's female descendants, concentrating on one another 's character, would have thrived in proportion to their skill at judging character and mood, and so genes for better ability to judge character and mood would have spread: If such skill was genetically influenced, people could not avoid being influenced by genes for preferring what they were genetically good at, and so genetic differences would be reinforced with cultural conditioning: This phenomenon—that people specialize in what they are good at and so create conditions that suit their genes—is known as the Baldwin effect since it was first described by one James Mark Baldwin in 1896. It leads to the conclusion that conscious choice and technology can both influence evolution, an idea explored at length by Jonathan Kingdon in his recent book Self-Made Man and His Undoing:' It is impossible in the end to deny that even a highly conditioned trait can be without some basis in biology—or vice versa: Nurture always reinforces nature; it rarely fights it: (An exception may be aggressiveness, which develops more in boys despite frequent parental discouragement:) I find it very hard to believe that the fact that 83 percent of murderers and 93 percent of drunken drivers in America are male is due to social conditioning alone.'°

SEXING THE MIND

::: 253 :::

It is hard for a nonscientist to realize how revolutionary the implications of these ideas were when men like Don Symons first began to sketch them out in the late 1970s." What Symons was saying—that men and women have different minds because they have had different evolutionary ambitions and rewards—accords easily with common sense, but the overwhelming majority of the research that social scientists had done on human sexuality was infused with the assumption that there are no mental differences.

To this day many social scientists assume—not conclude, assume—that all differences are learned from parents and peers by identical brains: Listen, for instance, to Liam Hudson and Bernadine Jacot, authors of a book called The Way Men Think: " At the heart of men 's psychology is a ' wound, ' a developmental crisis experienced by infant boys as they distance themselves from mother 's love and establish themselves as male: This makes men adept at abstract reasoning but vulnerable to insensitivity, misogyny, and perversion:" Through their assumption that the cause must lie in a childhood experience, the authors are condemning 49 percent of the human race as " wounded" perverts. How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience: Deborah Tannen, author of a fascinating book about men 's and women 's styles of conversation called You Just Don't Understand, while not considering the possibility that men ' s and women ' s natures are on average innately different, at least has the courage to argue that the differences are better recognized and lived with than condemned and blamed on personality: "When sincere attempts to communicate end in stalemate, and a beloved partner seems irrational and obstinate, the different languages men and women speak can shake the foundations of our lives. Understanding the other's ways of talking is a giant leap across the communication gap between women and men, and a giant step toward opening lines of communication:"

::: 254:::

The Red Queen

HORMONES AND BRAINS

There is, nonetheless, a sense in which sexual differences cannot be strictly left to the genes. If a gene appeared in a Pleistocene man for, say, better sense of direction at the expense of poorer social intuition, it might have been of benefit to him: But, as well as his sons, his daughters would have inherited it from him: In them the gene might have been positively disadvantageous because it left them less socially intuitive. So its net effect, over time, would be neutral, and it would not spread."

The genes that would spread would therefore be ones that responded to signals of gender: if in a male, improve the sense of direction; if in a female, improve the social intuition. And this is precisely what we find. There is no evidence of genes for different brains, but there is ample evidence of genes for altering brains in response to male hormones. (For reasons of historical accident, the

" normal brain" is female unless masculinized:) So the mental differences between men and women are caused by genes that respond to testosterone.

We last met the steroid hormone testosterone in fish and birds where it was rendering them more vulnerable to parasites by exaggerating their sexual ornaments. In recent years more and more evidence has been found that testosterone affects not just ornaments and bodies but also brains: Testosterone is an ancient chemical, found in much the same form throughout the vertebrates. Its concentration determines aggressiveness so exactly that in birds with reversed sex roles, such as phalaropes and in female-dominated hyena clans, it is the females that have higher levels of testosterone in the blood. Testosterone masculinizes the body; without it, the body remains female, whatever its genes. It also masculinizes the brain: Among birds it is usually only the male that sings. A zebra finch will not sing unless there is sufficient testosterone in its blood. With testosterone, the special song-producing part of its brain grows larger and the bird begins to sing. Even a female zebra finch will sing as long as she has been exposed to testosterone early in life and as an adult: In other words, testosterone primes the young SEXING THE MIND

:::255 :::

zebra finch 's brain to be responsive later in life to testosterone again and so develop the tendency to sing. Insofar as a zebra finch can be said to have a mind, the hormone is a mind-altering drug.

Much the same applies to human beings. Here the evidence comes from a series of natural and unnatural experiments. Nature has left some men and women with abnormal hormonal doses, and in the 1950s doctors changed the hormonal conditions of some wombs by injecting some pregnant women with certain hormones.