The most compelling attempt to date to build a thorough inventory of humanity's basic toolbox comes from the anthropologist Donald Brown. Inspired by Chomsky's idea of a "universal grammar"--the deep syntax shared by all human languages--Brown set out to document the basic social patterns, beliefs and categories shared by all known human societies, without exception. Pinker devotes an entire appendix to Brown's list, which has a strangely moving, abbreviated style: "cooking; cooperation; cooperative labor; copulation normally conducted in privacy; corporate (perpetual) statuses; coyness display; crying; cultural variability; culture; culture/nature distinction; customary greetings; daily routines; dance; death rituals..."

There is much for the left (and the right) to both condemn and admire in this litany; for every "cooperative labor" there is a "females do more direct childcare." But the first thing that should be noted about Brown's list is its inclusiveness: We may in fact possess an innate tendency to divide the world into "in groups" and "out groups," but the first instinct of evolutionary psychology is to group us all together in the shared family of human universals. Even if we don't always like the traits we find there, that unifying impulse should be at the heart of any progressive politics, not an outcast from it. Pinker quotes Chomsky on this very point:

A vision of a future social order is...based on a concept of human nature. If, in fact, man is an indefinitely malleable, completely plastic being, with no innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cultural or social character, then he is a fit subject for the "shaping of behavior" by the State authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the central committee. Those with some confidence in the human species will hope this is not so and will try to determine the intrinsic characteristics that provide the framework for intellectual development, the growth of moral consciousness, cultural achievement, and participation in a free community.

Of course, the one place in which the neo-Darwinians have in fact emphasized differences over commonalities is the fraught world of the sexes. Because so much of natural selection is predicated on reproductive success or failure, and because men and women have such differing biological stakes in the act of reproduction, it is inevitable that natural selection would craft slightly different toolboxes for each sex. This is no problem for the many schools of feminism that embrace the "different but equal" assessment of the sexes, but it is a major irritant for those on the left who imagine all gender differences to be the product of cultural biases. I suspect, though, that the sexual blank slate isn't long for this world, for several reasons.

For one, the science is increasingly making its advocates into Flat Earthers. Viewed with modern imaging technologies, men's and women's brains are nearly as distinct from each other as their bodies are. As Pinker writes: "Men have larger brains with more neurons (even correcting for body size), though women have a higher percentage of gray matter. (Since men and women are equally intelligent overall, the significance of these differences is unknown.) The interstitial nuclei in the anterior hypothalamus, and a nucleus of the stria terminalis, also in the hypothalamus, are larger in men; they have been implicated in sexual behavior and aggression. Portions of the cerebral commissures, which link the left and right hemispheres, appear to be larger in women, and their brains may function in a less lopsided manner than men's." And of course, those brains--and the bodies they are attached to--are partially shaped by two totally different kinds of hormones, the androgens and the estrogens, which play a key role both in development and adult life experiences. Men and women are most certainly not from Mars and Venus, but it is entirely fair to say that they are on different drugs. A world in which the sexes were entirely mentally alike might be a better world, though it might also be a little duller. But the truth is, that is not the world we inhabit, so we might as well build a feminist politics around this fact, rather than building on the illusory sands of the sexual blank slate.

Besides, the news for feminists isn't necessarily bad, as writers and scholars like Barbara Ehrenreich and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy have argued in recent years. Women may turn out to be more collaborative, on average, and the stronger connection between their left and right hemispheres may make them more adept at integrating emotional, intuitive understanding with logical decision-making. Most of the crude gender stereotypes that emerged with the first round of sociobiology in the 1970s have been replaced with much more nuanced accounts. Darwinian logic predicts that women will be more discriminating about their partners, and more attentive to their children, than men, but Hrdy has convincingly shown that strategic adultery makes Darwinian sense too, an insight corroborated by famous studies showing that where paternity was in question, up to 25 percent of American and Canadian children were not in fact conceived by the man claiming to be their father. Darwinian anthropologists have argued that the most alienating environment possible for a mother--the one furthest removed from the ancestral hunter-gatherer lifestyle our brains evolved in--is the stay-at-home suburban mom, disconnected from extended family, cooperative work and the social bonds of tribal life. As Matt Ridley argues, during a discussion of labor divisions in hunter-gatherer communities: "None [of this material] says anything about the woman's place being in the home. After all, the argument goes that men and women both went out to work in the Pleistocene, one to hunt, the other to gather. Neither activity was remotely like trooping off to an office and answering telephones all day. Both sexes are equally unsuited to that."

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