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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 sixty to seventy per cent 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 at puberty.8

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 cliché that there must be some truth in 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.

Nurture not-versus 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 each other’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. Nor, if such skill was genetically influenced, could people avoid being influenced by genes for preferring what they were genetically good at, and so of reinforcing genetic differences 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.9 It is impossible to deny that even a highly conditioned trait can be