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 behavior. 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." ' The second is that men and women are apes, and in all apes there are great rewards for males that show aggression toward other males, for males that seek mating opportunities, and for females that pay close attention to their babies. The third is
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that men and women are human beings, and human beings are mammals with one highly unusual characteristic: a sexual division of labor. Whereas a male and a female chimp seek the same sources of food, a male and a female human being, in virtually every preagricultural 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).'
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 labor and the greatest of mental differences between the sexes: Yet, though mankind may have added division of labor 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.'
(And, interestingly, 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 polygamous' 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, orangutans, 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 scores 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 because they are better at map reading just because the same is true of mice.
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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 60—70 percent 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.'
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 cliche that there must be some truth to 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.
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NURTURE WITH 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 one another '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: If such skill was genetically influenced, people could not avoid being influenced by genes for preferring what they were genetically good at, and so genetic differences would be reinforced 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:' It is impossible in the end to deny that even a highly conditioned trait can be without some basis in biology—or vice versa: Nurture always reinforces nature; it rarely fights it: (An exception may be aggressiveness, which develops more in boys despite frequent parental discouragement:) I find it very hard to believe that the fact that 83 percent of murderers and 93 percent of drunken drivers in America are male is due to social conditioning alone.'°
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It is hard for a nonscientist to realize how revolutionary the implications of these ideas were when men like Don Symons first began to sketch them out in the late 1970s." What Symons was saying—that men and women have different minds because they have had different evolutionary ambitions and rewards—accords easily with common sense, but the overwhelming majority of the research that social scientists had done on human sexuality was infused with the assumption that there are no mental differences.