"Women generally go out in groups and search for good sources of roots, ripe berries or nuts, which they use their acute powers of observation to spot and collect. Without knowing it, [...] shoe retailers are setting up a sort of ersatz echo of the gathering field."
I'm a big fan of ev-psych, but this argument sucks. You could name dozens of counter-examples of "spot and collect" activities that are not only gender-neutral (e.g., buying music or DVDs) but also heavily male-dominated (trading cards, comic books, coins, stamps, electronics). There are even collection-simulating video games like Pokemon, which is pretty clearly a young male demographic.
There's obviously some non-random structure to what it is that men and women choose to hoard, but to suggest that evaluating and gathering in general is a female-specific adaptation is just silly.
Agreed; this sounded very post-hoc to me. The point about golf throwing back to projectile-hunting seems off to me, too. If anything, I would think we're wired for exhaustion-hunting... that is, running after prey until they collapse from exhaustion. That seems to be what we're good at, right?
Regardless of their relevance to golfing, hunter-gatherers do use spears and projectile rocks extensively for hunting. They're ubiquitous among modern hunter-gatherers, and archaeologists have uncovered wooden spears from over 400K years ago. For scale, agriculture didn't become important until 10K years ago. This is much more than enough time for humans to develop complex functional adaptations specifically related to projectile weapons.
Evolutionary psychology can sometimes provide useful insights, but "women like shoe shopping because it is similar to foraging" and "men like golf because it is similar to hunting" is weaker and hand-wavier than usual.
Weird graphic design point: the way each blue paragraph is separated by a strip of white makes each paragraph look like an entirely separate point, and destroys the flow of the writing. Usually Matt Ridley is one of my favourite writers, but this was painful to read.
"It was only reinforced when the invention of the placenta and the mammary gland gave male mammals a gigantic prize to compete for: nine months and several years of somebody else's bodily efforts."
There are plenty of species, humans included, where male parental investment, over the life of the child, is comparable with that of the female. The average human child receives significant investments of time and effort from his or her father, not only in the form of playing catch and going on trips, but also because that father will spend a good portion of his working week earning resources to be used for the child's benefit. And weigh that with the fact that, until recently, it was even impossible for the man to know for sure that the child was his.
The Facebook friend who told me about this link is a tall woman. She says that when a woman is shopping for size 11 shoes, it's more of a hunt than a gather.
Oh come on, that one's at least obvious. It comes down to laziness.
Both sexes take a pee more often than they take a dump; but while women do both activities the same way (sitting), men do them differently. So for women, it takes more sense to keep the seat down, so it's ready for them the next time; for men, up is a more practical position, as they need to sit only a fraction of times.
I'm a big fan of ev-psych, but this argument sucks. You could name dozens of counter-examples of "spot and collect" activities that are not only gender-neutral (e.g., buying music or DVDs) but also heavily male-dominated (trading cards, comic books, coins, stamps, electronics). There are even collection-simulating video games like Pokemon, which is pretty clearly a young male demographic.
There's obviously some non-random structure to what it is that men and women choose to hoard, but to suggest that evaluating and gathering in general is a female-specific adaptation is just silly.