Desmond Morris is a well known (for a certain value of “well”) writer on us human beings and how we ended up being like we are. He wrote “The Naked Ape” which was really the first popularization of evolutionary psychology: that our mental structure is shaped by evolution just as much as our physical one is. There’s not really many people left who don’t agree with this idea: the question is how much? Anyway, he’s got a new book out and he takes these ideas quite a bit further:

Feminists could take this two ways. The upside is that Morris thinks women should run more or less everything. “We’d be much better off if women ran most of the organisations,” he says. “If women ran the political world rather than men, for instance. I don’t think men are suited to politics. Women are much more suited because they are genetically more cautious and are not going to make stupid mistakes.” The downside, feminism-wise, is that Morris thinks that men, because of their natural risk-taking, will always be better inventors and artists.

Interestingly, there’s been some similar research done in political economy recently. It’s been noted that government has become much larger since women have had the vote. And that this expansion of government has happened at different times in different countries: but then so did votes for women happen at different times and the two seem linked. The thinking here is that women are more concerned about security (as in the idea that what they look for in a man is the ability to support the children) and a larger government, with more redistribution of income, can provide more of that security.

Another way of describing the same thing would be that redistribution, from rich to poor, appeals to that empathic part of womens’ characters, something we know they have more of than men (on average!) from our EQSQ personality tests.

“For every one great woman artist, there are 100 men,” says Morris. “There are more male geniuses than female geniuses, and there are more male idiots than female idiots. If you’re a human female, you can’t afford to be a risk-taker and you can’t afford to be a dimwit. You have to be in between those two extremes.” Man’s artistic dominance, he argues, cannot be explained by opportunity or social conditioning. Over the whole of evolution, women have produced more art than men - in the form of decorated pottery and clothing - but they have tended to produce traditional art. It is men who have flouted the rules and produced most of the great, mould-breaking art.

That’s rather like the comments that got Larry Summers into so much trouble. The thing is, that it does seem to be true: but only on average. And averages are all very well but they’re a very broad brush approach. As we learn more, are able to tease out more about what makes human beings tick, we find that while there are indeed differences between the averages of this or that race, or sex, sexuality or grouping, we also find that variation within these groups is greater than the differences between the averages.

We thus end up with two things (both of which are true about our personality tests as above):

1) We can predict a probability that an individual shares the characteristics of the group, but only a probability.

2) Such probabilities can be tested, so we shouldn’t use group membership to decide how we would treat or evaluate a single person: we should test and find out.

Thus, while there may be more male than female geniuses, that doesn’t mean that we will not find a female genius, and as and when we do, we should treat her as a genius. Just as we should a systemizer a systemizer, whether male or female.