Mapreaders & Multitaskers: Men, Women, Nature, Nurture

by Gavin Evans

In Mapreaders and Multitaskers, Gavin Evans argues that male and female minds do not emerge from different planets, and that our emotional and intellectual capacities are moulded more by culture than biology.



A great many of the supposedly innate gender differences between men and women have been invented or exaggerated by evolutionary psychologists and self-help authors. Evans offers fresh insight on gender roles through proposing unconventionally wide and flexible definitions of what it is to be masculine and feminine, from a firm biological base.



This book challenges ideas rooted in conventional wisdom, including the idea that 'male brains' are fundamentally different from 'female brains'; that men have evolved to be inherently more promiscuous than women; that women have evolved to spend more time in front of the mirror; that there are more male geniuses and more idiots, that maternal instinct is 'hard-wired', and that men are better at mapreading and women at multitasking.

Genres: Nonfiction

338 pages, Paperback

Published January 12, 2017

Reviews

[Bridget Pitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a refreshing read this is, after years of being bombarded with the ‘innate gender polarity’ assertions that have long dominated the pop psych narratives. I can strongly recommend Gavin Evans highly intelligent book, Map readers and Multi-taskers. A worthy compliment to Black brain, White brain, the book develops a compelling argument, solidly backed by evidence, that while men and women obviously have physical differences, gender is primarily a social construct.

Evans thoroughly debunks the studies that claim to prove the existence of “hardwired” gender determined differences, such as a preference for the colour pink, a passion for shopping or gossiping, and inability to be a natural genius. He exposes these studies as based on spurious conclusions, poor research protocols, and fanciful speculation regarding the behaviour and thought patterns of our hunter gatherer ancestors. Evans explores the some times harmful implications of the mythology created by this pseudo-scientific body of work in the spheres of education, child development, sexuality and parenting, and demonstrates just how poorly it stands up to scrutiny. He reveals how popular media’s enthusiasm for these studies has given them a weight far beyond their merit, and contributed to grafting these ideas onto popular notions of what distinguishes men and women.

Despite its scholarly underpinnings, the book is an easy, entertaining and often amusing read. It is essential for anyone who has ever questioned the assumptions underlying biologically determined gender identities – and should be compulsory for any who have swallowed the evolutionary psychologists claims on these. Let’s hope this well researched and meticulously argued text is given the media attention it deserves.

[Phil Webster · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this excellent book, Gavin Evans does a great job of demolishing the view that the brains of men and women are very different and that gender roles are programmed in our genes.

If gender roles were genetically fixed, then the fight for women’s equality would be pointless. But if “nurture” plays a bigger role than “nature”, then things can be changed for the better. This goes for other types of inequality, too. As Charles Darwin wrote in “The Voyage of the Beagle”, “If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”

It is very convenient for society’s rulers to be able to point to pseudo-scientific theories which claim that social inequalities are caused by “the laws of nature”, and that it is therefore pointless to try to fight against these inequalities. And there has been a long history of such theories of biological determinism, from “Social Darwinism” to sociobiology and “evolutionary psychology”.

Almost 35 years ago, in their book “Not in Our Genes”, Steven Rose, Richard Lewontin and Leon Kamin said that the critics of biological determinism are like members of a fire brigade who constantly have to rush around putting out the fires of the latest false theories of race and intelligence, gender roles or “criminal genes”.

Gavin Evans has shown himself to be a very useful recruit to this still very busy fire brigade by producing two great books which provide evidence to show that biological determinism is bad science.

In this book, “Mapreaders and Multitaskers”, he ends by saying: “What I have tried to do with this book is debunk much of the pseudo-scientific mythology that stands in the way of female and male progress. The ideas punted by evolutionary psychologists, sociobiologists and their journalistic praise singers - that, for evolutionary reasons, the minds of males and females belong in different metaphorical planets – are simply wrong.”

And in his other book, “Black Brain, White Brain”, he shows that “recent research in evolutionary science, palaeontology and biological anthropology has led to a decisive conclusion: that there are no racial or ethnic differences when it comes to innate intelligence.”

Evans unfortunately does not fully ground his books in a dialectical view of science and a critique of capitalism and its ideology in the way that Marxist scientists like Lewontin and Rose do. And some of the content has already been covered in books like the late Stephen Jay Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man” and Cordelia Fine’s “Delusions of Gender”.

Nevertheless, Evans has done us a great favour in providing us with plenty of up-to-date facts and arguments for challenging those who claim that gender and “racial” inequalities are genetically fixed and therefore cannot be challenged.

Just one quibble: although there are extensive references and a bibliography, the book contains neither a contents page nor an index.