Nicholas Wade

They wanted to reconstitute themselves as families.

They wanted to be paid according to how much they worked.

Yes, it's very fair.

And there's a current movement on the left to say that men and women are no different, that apart from a few minor physiological differences with reproduction, they are exactly the same thing.

But this couldn't be further from the truth.

Their minds are as different as their bodies because evolution has shaped them for very different roles.

You gain a lot by specialization.

Evolution hasn't specialized us to the extent it has done, say, with ant societies, because we haven't been around as long as they have.

But it has taken every chance to specialize men and women.

So women are specialized for bearing and raising children and for relationships within the family and the neighborhood.

And men are specialized.

for essentially for defense, for fighting, and for organizing the larger scale institutions of society.

That's certainly the case among chimpanzees, who are uncannily similar to us in their societies.

You see female chimps sort of prising the stones away from male chimps who are about to batter their skulls in, because they know that if the males kill each other, the community will be so weak that the chimps next door will come in and invade them and kill all their children.

So I can imagine the same instinct being there in women, but I haven't thought

to what extent it may operate, because at least in early societies, women didn't have a lot of political power.

Yes, I think this is a tremendously important issue, because the two roles I was describing to you are what evolution has shaped.

But of course, culture is enormously strong in our society, so culture can sort of reshape and modulate what evolution has done.

And one of the most notable aspects of human societies

is that women have been liberated from the home.