The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [123]
Men are more violent than women and women are more nurturant, at least towards infants and children, than men. I am sorry if this is a cliché; that cannot make it less factual.2
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 difference 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 behaviour. 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.’3 The second is that men and women are apes, and in all apes there are great rewards for males that show aggression towards other males, for males that seek mating opportunities, and for females that pay close attention to their babies. The third is that men and women are human beings, and human beings are mammals with one highly unusual characteristic: a sexual division of labour. Whereas a male and a female chimpanzee seek the same sources of food, a male and a female human being, in virtually every pre-agricultural 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).4
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 labour, and the greatest of mental differences between the sexes. Yet, though mankind may have added division of labour 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.5 (And, intriguingly, 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 polygamous7 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, orang-utans, 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 score 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