"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.
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.