.
2010/3/29 Jason Dusek
[...] What we evolved with is a general hability: to play with things to achieve what we need from them, (besides other abilities). The pleasure to acheve ends by using available means. [...] A tool is someting used to solve a class of problems. It does not matter if it is something phisical or conceptual. [...] The more general is a tool, the more we feel pleasure playing with it
So the adaptation you are saying men have in greater degree than women is pleasure in "tool using", broadly defined to include taming animals, debate, programming, sword play, carpentry and more? What are you attributing to men is not so much superiority of ability but greater motivation?
-- Jason Dusek
n terms of natural selection, greater motivation for and greater innate hability are both positiverly correlated in response to an evolutionary pressure (in beings that have learning capabilities). for example, cats are better at catching mouse, and they enjoy to play catching them. A live being end up developping better innate habilities (and is more motivation) for whatever practises more. This is called baldwin effect (some common general learning for the task end up fixed innately). Motivation match ability and viceversa. This is evolutionarily stable. It makes no evolutionary sense that woman and men have the same abilities and tendencias because they had different activities since before they were even humans. The brain has limited computation resources. The optimal behaviours and strategies are in many cases different for each sex. This happen for almost all the animal kingdom. Why humans would be different?. No matter they are very similar in some aspects, they are different and very different in others (fortunatelly). Nothing that your grandparent didn´t know.