Last year, the once-esteemed publication Scientific American argued that, before the late 18th century, “Western science recognized only one sex — the male — and considered the female body an inferior version of it.” It added that the subsequent shift to “the ‘two-sex model’ served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body.”
In “The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong,” an article for the new November issue, Cara Ocobock and Sarah Lacy do not go that far. Their treatment of the history of human development and the differences between sexes contains one argument that is worth considering and another that is interesting but not as potent as they seem to think. Yet these two claims serve largely as dubious predicates for a third that defies all evidence: that men and women are, or at least could be, functionally equivalent in physical performance if not for a kind of conspiracy that is holding women back.
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