Yet Western people conspicuously avoid having as many
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The Red Quern
children as they could. William Irons of Northwestern University in Chicago has tackled this problem. He believes that human beings have always taken into account the need to give a child a "good start in life. " They have never been prepared to sacrifice quality of children for quantity: Thus, when an expensive education became a prerequisite for success and prosperity, around the time of the demographic transition to low birthrates, people were able to read-just and lower the number of children they had in order to be able to afford to send them to school. Exactly this reason is given today by Thai people for why they are having fewer children than their parents:'
There has been no genetic change since we were hunter-gatherers, but deep in the mind of the modern man is a simple male hunter-gatherer rule: Strive to acquire power and use it to lure women who will bear heirs; strive to acquire wealth and use it to buy other men 's wives who will bear bastards. It began with a man who shared a piece of prized fish or honey with an attractive neighbor 's wife in exchange for a brief affair and continues with a pop star ushering a model into his Mercedes. From fish to Mercedes, the history is unbroken: via skins and beads, plows and cattle, swords and castles. Wealth and power are means to women; women are means to genetic eternity:
Likewise, deep in the mind of a modern woman is the same basic hunter-gatherer calculator, too recently evolved to have changed much: Strive to acquire a provider husband who will invest food and care in your children; strive to find a lover who can give those children first-class genes. Only if she is very lucky will they be the same man: It began with a woman who married the best unmarried hunter in the tribe and had an affair with the best married hunter, thus ensuring her children a rich supply of meat. It continues with a rich tycoon 's wife bearing a baby that grows up to resemble her beefy bodyguard: Men are to be exploited as providers of parental care, wealth, and genes.
Cynical? Not half as cynical as most accounts of human history:
Chapter 8
SEXING THE MIND.
No woman, no cry:
—Bob Marley
0, the trouble, the trouble with women,
I repeat it again and again
From Kalamazoo to Kamchatka
The trouble with women is—men:
—Ogden Nash and Kurt Weill
The pine vole, Microtus pinetorum, is a monogamous species of mouse. The males help the females look after the babies. Male and female pine voles have similar brains: In particular, the hippocam-pus of both the male and female is much the same size. When required to run a maze, male and female pine voles prove equally good at the task: The meadow vole, Microtus pennsylvanicus, is a different story altogether: It is polygamous: Males, which must visit the scattered holes of their several wives, travel farther than females every day: Male meadow voles have bigger hippocampi than females and are better at finding and remembering their way through mazes. Their brains are simply better at such spatial tasks.'
Just like meadow voles, men are better at spatial tasks than women: When asked to compare the shapes of two objects seen from different angles and judge whether they are the same shape or to judge whether two glasses of different shape are equally full or any such task that involves spatial judgments, men generally do better than women: Polygamy and spatial skills seem to go together in several species.
EQUALITY OR 1DENTITY?
Men and women have different bodies: The differences are the direct result of evolution: Women 's bodies evolved to suit the demands of bearing and rearing children and of gathering plant food. Men's bodies evolved to suit the demands of rising in a male hierarchy, fighting over women, and providing meat to a family.
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The Red Queen
Men and women have different minds: The differences are the direct result of evolution: Women's minds evolved to suit the demands of bearing and rearing children and of gathering plant food: Men's minds evolved to suit the demands of rising in a male hierarchy, fighting over women, and providing meat to a family: The first paragraph is banal; the second inflammatory. The proposition that men and women have evolved different minds is anathema to every social scientist and politically correct individual.
Yet I believe it to be true for two reasons. First, the logic is impeccable: As the last two chapters have demonstrated, over long stretches of evolutionary time men and women have faced different evolutionary pressures, so the ones who succeeded will have been those whose brains produced behaviors well suited to those pressures: Second, the evidence is overwhelming: Gingerly, reluctantly, but with increasing conviction, physiologists and psychologists have begun to probe the differences between male and female brains: Often they have done so determined to find none. Yet again and again they come back with good evidence that there are such differences. Not everything is different; most things, in fact, are identical between the sexes. Much of the folklore about differences is merely convenient sexism—And there are enormous overlaps: Although it is a fair generalization to say that men are taller than women, nonetheless the tallest woman in a large group of people is usually taller than the shortest man: In the same way, even if the average woman is better at some mental task than the average man, there are many women who are worse at the task than the best man, or vice versa: But the evidence for the average male brain differing in certain ways from the average female brain is now all but undeniable.
Evolved differences are by definition "genetic, " and any suggestion that men and women have genetically different minds horrifies the modern conscience for it seems to justify prejudice: How can we strive to build an equal society when men are given
" scientific " support for their sexism? Give men an inch of inequality and they will claim a mile of bias. The Victorians believed men and women were so different that women should not even have the vote; in the eighteenth century some men thought women incapable of reason.
SEXING THE MIND
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These concerns are fair: But just because people have exaggerated sexual differences in the past does not mean they cannot exist. There is no a priori reason for assuming that men and women have identical minds and no amount of wishing it were so will make it so if it is not so. Difference is not inequality. Boys are interested in guns, girls in dolls. That may be conditioning, or it may be genes, but neither is "better " than the other. As anthropologist Melvin Konner put it: "Men are more violent than women and women are more nurturant, at least toward infants and children, than men. I am sorry if this is a cliche; that cannot make it less factuaclass="underline" "'' 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 differences 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: