In an interview on Toxic Boys

What did you discover from your next book?

Simon Baron-Cohen is a professor at Cambridge who researches autism, the condition he thinks describes the extreme male brain. He uses evolutionary biology and what people know about early cognitive development. He says that research shows that when babies are born they are driven to pursue two tasks. The first is to make sense of the material world they live in. The way they do that is to categorise things. Baron-Cohen calls that systemising thought – or S-type thought. Babies are also driven to understand other people because we are social animals. And Baron-Cohen calls that E-type thought for empathising. For evolutionary reasons, he thinks that boys are slightly more inclined to S-type thought and girls to E-type thought. I read this book when it first came out and found it quite fascinating.

But there is a lot of scepticism towards this kind of research.

Yes there is. But I’m convinced of the evolutionary argument, which is: for thousands of years men were more likely to be hunters out on the open plains and therefore would have better visuospatial skills; whereas females were looking after the little ones or were stuck back at camp with the other women, so they had to be better at social skills.

I know that critics say it is wrong to categorise men and women like that, and of course men can empathise and women can do men’s things. But I do think it’s important to be aware of the fundamental differences when you are bringing up boys and girls.

Baron-Cohen makes me interested in the way we rear children in the first few years of life, say up until they are three years old. My next choice looks beyond that at the whole nurture argument.

In an interview on Men and Women

Your first book is The Essential Difference by Simon Baron-Cohen. Why have you chosen this one?

Baron-Cohen’s book is one of the best popular books on the evolved sex differences in the brain. It explains how and why men's and women's brains have their distinct strengths and weaknesses. Men’s need to invent, manufacture, and improve tools and weapons throughout evolutionary history has made the male brain particularly strong on systemising (logically and rationally dealing with things), whereas women’s need to leave their natal group upon puberty and marry into a neighbouring group full of strangers has made the female brain particularly strong on empathising (relating to other people). Women’s need to take care of infants, by anticipating their needs when they cannot yet speak, also makes them better able to read others’ minds. At the same time, ancestral men’s need to engage in solitary hunting and to wage wars against enemies has made their brains particularly low on empathising. It is easier to be alone or brutally murder others if you don’t feel for people very well.

Men’s higher average ability for systemising explains why they excel at occupations such as science and engineering, while women’s higher average ability for empathising explains why they are more social and why they are better judges of character. However, when men’s (and, very occasionally, women’s) brains are too systemising and too little empathising, they can exhibit symptoms of autism or Asperger’s syndrome. Baron-Cohen is a world-renowned autism researcher at the University of Cambridge, and his extreme male brain theory of autism makes a lot of sense.

So he thinks these differences are inherent in brain structure, does he?

Through a series of very ingenious experiments, Baron-Cohen and his collaborators convincingly demonstrate that these sex differences in the brain are innate, not learned through socialisation. In one of the experiments, they use babies who are less than 24 hours old, and yet boys still prefer mechanical objects while girls still prefer human faces. It would be very difficult to argue that anything that emerges within 24 hours of birth is not innate and evolutionarily designed. Other researchers have shown that children’s toy preference may also be largely innate, because males and females of other species show the same preference. Male monkeys still prefer the cars and balls that human boys prefer, and female monkeys still prefer the dolls and cooking pots that human girls prefer. Since monkeys are not socialised by human parents, and they have not even seen these stereotypically masculine and feminine toys before the experiment, it’s difficult to argue that their preferences for “sex-appropriate” toys are learned. Preponderance of scientific evidence shows that men and women have entirely different brains, and such differences are evolutionarily designed and therefore innate.