The teaser for Matt Ridley’s post in last week’s Wall Street Journal sounded great:
Can Genes Explain the Sex Divide?
Matt Ridley explores the thought that some of our sex differences might be caused by our culture as well as our genes.
That’s an interesting question, and Ridley seemed the ideal candidate to explore it. He’s a good writer, a best-selling author, and a scientist, and he’s written about genomics, among many other things.
It turns out, however, that he needs to practice his blogging.
Blogs are ideally suited, as many others have noted, for expressing opinions, something we do with relish here on the Tracker. If Ridley had blended some reporting with his opinions about sex differences, I would have read with enthusiasm.
Instead, we get a lazy post that any of us could have scratched out in a hour or two with the help of a glass of wine and Google (and there didn’t seem to be much of that). Ridley doesn’t opine. He guesses, he supposes, he generalizes. He ruminates. What he doesn’t do is add anything to the ongoing, collective conversation about sex differences. (Because I’m writing a book about fathers, I should probably recuse myself here. But, heck, this is too much fun.)
He begins by noting that men and women are a lot alike, but, on the other hand, not much alike. I don’t even know how one would try to quantify the difference. Is a handgun like a bow-and-arrow? If you consider what they’re used for, sure, they’re similar. If you think about what they are made of, they have nothing in common. Are men and women alike? Yes and no. Let’s move on.
“Take the cliché of the golf-playing husband and the shoe-shopping wife,” he says. I’d rather not. I don’t play golf. And I don’t turn to the Wall Street Journal for clichés. I’m looking for a little news or entertainment. And he goes on: “Without knowing it, golf-course designers are setting up a sort of idealized abstraction of the hunting ground, while shoe retailers are setting up a sort of ersatz echo of the gathering field.”
Well, yeah. I guess. Any evidence for that?
The point here is that Ridley, maybe figuring that this was a blog post, not a real story, evidently wrote down a few of the thoughts swimming in his head, came up with a few felicitous phrases, and emailed it in. That’s not a blog post; it’s a doodle. Blogs are good for a lot of things; they are, indeed, different from stories. But if they are any good, they are also different from the first things that come into one’s head.
Many of my earlier posts fell into that category, I’m not ashamed to say–especially because I doubt anyone ever saw them. But I’ve now spent a few years trying to decode this particular format, and I think I’m getting the hang of it. (Commenters are free, of course, to vigorously disagree.) These things take a little reporting, a little thought, and a little time. Whether or not I have it right isn’t the issue; in my view, Ridley doesn’t.
With that in mind, let’s get back to Ridley’s teaser. Can genes explain the sex divide?
He concludes with “the intriguing thought that some of our sex differences might be caused by our culture, yet also ingrained in our genes.”
In other words–yes and no.
– Paul Raeburn
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