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Mocking evolutionary psychologists is about as much of a cheap shot as mocking libertarians*, but every so often, I can’t resist. It’s an entire “discipline” seemingly devoted to:

1) Why first-year college boys can’t get any action with the attractive blonde women they see around campus, and
2) Why men basically suck at everything and therefore need female servants to accomplish even the most basic tasks.

Today’s article is a prime example of the latter evo-psych tendency. The Telegraph has a great piece on why women are better at shopping than men. If you guessed that the explanation goes back to the savannah rather than, say, gender expectations, you get a cookie.

The team at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Yale University, was following up years of earlier research which shows that men excel at spatial problems, such as map reading.

This probably has its origins in the African savannah, when men were hunting down highly mobile prey.

But in these ancient hunter-gatherer societies, women collected plants and this begged a key question, said the team: Shouldn’t women more accurately remember the location of plant foods than men?

Experiments conducted on 45 men and 41 women at six gatherings of a large farmers’ market suggest that they do, and that more nutritious foods are more accurately remembered, said Max Krasnow, a member of the team whose paper is published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences.

I’m really wondering where they get funding for these sorts of studies. Is there a board that decides whether getting out of the grocery shopping is a more worthy course of study than, say, cancer research?

Accompanying the main article is Sex and shopping: the female perspective where poor Cassandra Jardine attempts to explain away her husband’s lazy and imbecilic ways using the new study. Says the poor put-upon dear:

Usually he will buy several of each item but he won’t stock up – unless given specific instructions – on loo roll, washing up liquid, canned tomatoes, pasta or any of the other things that come under the “boring but useful” heading.

He would never notice that we are running low and I don’t usually bother to make a list all the basics because a) I know instinctively and b) he would return so late that I would probably have called the police out.

…

I’ve always assumed that my husband’s autopilot is less good in the supermarket purely because he goes shopping less often than I do.

But of course, it isn’t his fault at all!

But now I’m told I may be being unjust. He’s just not hard-wired to stick out one hand to grab the vegetable oil while charging towards the soy sauce.

Evolution has not equipped men for this task any more than it has made it easy for them to find the cheddar in the fridge which their women-folk known with iron certainty is on the third shelf down, left hand side.

Hey, I have a solution: Why not refuse to cook or shop for him until he gets his act together? You might get to witness evolution in action.

* Mocking libertarian evolutionary psychologists, of course, is the cheapest shot you can make. It’s sort of like kicking a puppy, if the puppy in question was one of the yappy ones who liked to publish pseudo-scientific opinion pieces.

(Hat tip: realcdaae)

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 12:10 pm and is filed under "Science", For the ladies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.