The Ape That Thought it was a Peacock is a very good article on evolutionary psychology and gender differences, and should be read as a vaccine against the nastier elements of PUA etc… It argues for the position that gender differences between humans, though present, have been greatly exaggerated by evolutionary psychology. It makes several points which were, to me at least, novel:
1)Human children are costly to rear and our females are often pregnant—high cost of childrearing tends to result in more equal parental contributions and monomorphism (sexes being similar)
2)Human females as well as males show morphological indicators of mate choice selection—e.g. enlarged breasts. This again resembles monomorphic species (compare peacocks where females are drab, because males don’t help raise kids, and therefore do not need to choose). Intelligence maybe be a sexually selected trait in both sexes.
3)Distributions in effectively all traits overlap heavily, and the ones which are very different generally concern the tails of the distribution. E.g. we expect murderers to be the very right tail of the aggression distribution, where the slight average difference in the two populations could translate to a large proportional difference.
4)We expect human mating behavior to be facultative, and respond to relevant conditions, such as gender imbalances. This is what we observe anthropologically (Tooby and Cosmides made this point as well I think, in pointing out that variance does not imply the absence of behavioral adaptions).
The Ape That Thought it was a Peacock is a very good article on evolutionary psychology and gender differences, and should be read as a vaccine against the nastier elements of PUA etc… It argues for the position that gender differences between humans, though present, have been greatly exaggerated by evolutionary psychology. It makes several points which were, to me at least, novel:
1)Human children are costly to rear and our females are often pregnant—high cost of childrearing tends to result in more equal parental contributions and monomorphism (sexes being similar)
2)Human females as well as males show morphological indicators of mate choice selection—e.g. enlarged breasts. This again resembles monomorphic species (compare peacocks where females are drab, because males don’t help raise kids, and therefore do not need to choose). Intelligence maybe be a sexually selected trait in both sexes.
3)Distributions in effectively all traits overlap heavily, and the ones which are very different generally concern the tails of the distribution. E.g. we expect murderers to be the very right tail of the aggression distribution, where the slight average difference in the two populations could translate to a large proportional difference.
4)We expect human mating behavior to be facultative, and respond to relevant conditions, such as gender imbalances. This is what we observe anthropologically (Tooby and Cosmides made this point as well I think, in pointing out that variance does not imply the absence of behavioral adaptions).
With some exceptions such as vocal range (effect size = 4.5).