Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [29]
Once you look at things through the lens of sexual selection, there is almost no aspect of human culture that remains untouched by it. Geoffrey Miller argues that most of our cultural behavior is largely instinctual and derived from sexual selection—not that we’re conscious of it. This isn’t a crude and straightforward expression of our sex drive or a case of Freudian sublimation; rather, sexual selection has hijacked qualities that were quite likely already being chosen through natural selection. To bolster his claim, Miller looked at when artists in different fields were most productive, and what he found was that male artists tend to peak around the age of thirty, which is strangely youthful if you think about the importance of artists maturing and developing, but an age that makes perfect sense if you think of artistic production as a means of attracting sexual partners. He also found that men produce vastly more than women. Of course, there is a cultural element to this, but Miller suggests that there is also a sexual element—that men are under more pressure to attract women (remember—cheap sperm, precious eggs). So, sexual selection taken to its logical extreme can explain virtually everything in human development from Bach to skyscrapers, because, at the end of the day, our intelligence has developed largely thanks to the pressures of finding a mate.
THE SEXY—OR AT LEAST SEXED—BRAIN
Even as both men and women have developed an extraordinarily large and complex neocortex, though, their brains have not grown in precisely the same way, which is exactly what we should expect given that each sex faces different evolutionary challenges. Before I delve into those differences, though, I want to make one thing absolutely clear: these remarks should not be taken as confirmation of sexual stereotypes. They are based on averages. On average, men may have a greater capacity for math, and women may have a better facility with language. But that does not mean that women can’t be brilliant mathematicians or that men can’t be excellent writers. Our sexual prejudices are so ingrained that the first part of that statement is essential, while no one needs to be reminded about the second part.
These sexual differences are not simply the result of cultural conditioning. They exist in the physical structure of the brain itself and are the result of a surge of testosterone released in male babies during fetal development. For example, women have roughly 11 percent more neurons in the part of the brain that handles language and hearing. Also, the hippocampus, which is the principal location of emotion and memory formation, is larger in women than men (perhaps finally providing an answer to many women’s frustrated sense that men never remember anything). And the brain center for observing emotion in others is more developed in women than men. Men’s brains tend to have larger areas devoted to action and aggression, and male brains devote more than two and half times the space than women’s to sex, although scientists have not yet determined how large a portion is devoted to sports. Because of these differences, women on average tend to be better with language, and men tend to be better at math and map reading.
These differences are so fundamental that, according to one study, the way men and women find their way through the world is different. When you present men with a maze, they tend to use geometric reasoning to move through it. Women, on the other hand, use landmarks. Both groups struggle when you force them to use the other sex’s method. And it is quite possible that even this is related to finding a mate because, in a statement