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is the essential difference between anthropology and Darwinism. Anthropologists insist that a western, urban man is far more different in his habits and thoughts from a bushman tribesman than either is from his wife. Indeed, it is the foundation of their discipline that this is so, for anthropology consists of studying the differences between peoples. But this has led anthropologists to exaggerate the motes of racial difference and to ignore the beams of similarity. Men fight, compete, love, show off and hunt all over the world. True, whereas bushmen fight with spears and sticks, Chicagoans fight with guns and lawsuits; whereas bushmen strive to be headmen, Chicagoans strive to become senior partners. The stuff of anthropology – the traditions, the myths, the crafts, the language, the rituals – is to me but the froth on the surface. Beneath lie giant themes of humanity that are the same everywhere and that are characteristically male and female. To a Martian, an anthropologist studying the difference between races would seem like a farmer studying the differences between each of the wheat plants in his field. The Martian is much more interested in the typical wheat plant. It is the human universals, not the differences, that are truly intriguing.43

One of the most persistent of those universals is sexual role-playing. As Edward Wilson put it:

In diverse cultures men pursue and acquire, while women are protected and bartered. Sons sow wild oats and daughters risk being ruined. When sex is sold, men are usually the buyers.44

John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have put the challenge to cultural interpretations of this universal pattern even more baldly:

The assertion that ‘culture’ explains human variation will be taken seriously when there are reports of women war parties raiding villages to capture men as husbands, or of parents cloistering their sons but not their daughters to protect their sons’ virtue, or when cultural distributions for preferences concerning physical attractiveness, earning power, relative age and so on show as many cultures with bias in one direction as in the other.45

Just as it is foolish to deny the differences between the sexes in the face of the evidence presented here, so it is foolish to exaggerate them. In the matter of intelligence, for example, there is no reason to believe that men are stupider than women, or vice versa – nothing in evolutionary thinking suggests as much and no data test the proposition. As noted earlier, the data do suggest that men are probably better at abstract and spatial tasks, women at verbal and social ones, which vastly complicates the job of anybody trying to design a test that is gender-neutral. Indeed, it helps to demolish the farcical notion of general, unitary intelligence altogether.

Nor does an appeal to sexual difference excuse anything. In the words of Anne Moir and David Jessel:

We do not consecrate the natural, just because it is biologically true; men, for instance, have a natural disposition to homicide and promiscuity, which is not a recipe for the happy survival of society.46

People easily seem to forget that the word ‘is’ is different from the word ‘should’. If we choose to redress the sexual differences between the minds of men and women through policy, we are going against nature, but no more than when we outlaw murder. But we should be clear that we are redressing a difference, not discovering an identity. Wishful thinking that they are the same will be mere propaganda and no favour to either sex.

CHAPTER NINE

The Uses of Beauty

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,

Men were deceivers ever,

One foot in sea, and one on shore,

To one thing constant never.

Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, Act II, Scene 3

There are currently three teams of American scientists looking for the ‘gay gene’, the human gene that causes some men to be homosexual. They all believe that the gene or genes for sensitivity to androgen hormones such as testosterone, which lies on the X chromosome, may prove to be different in gay and in heterosexual