Men Are From Mars, And Women...
By Lewis Dartnell and Christopher Booroff
University College London, UK.
1. Introduction
John Gray wrote his seminal book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, in 1996. And ever since people have been rushing out in droves to buy it, presumably in the belief that understanding the motivations and planetary origins of their other half will lead them to a more fulfilling and ultimately successful relationship.
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The main supposition of Gray’s treatise is that men and women have fundamentally different psyches, which determines the manner with which they communicate, interact with others, and respond to various situations. The key to a successful (presumably heterosexual) relationship is for both parties to appreciate these differences and attempt to accommodate them.
Having read only the title, we take it that Gray’s main assumption is that the two sexes of our species in fact followed largely independent evolutionary paths on Earth’s planetary neighbours, Mars and Venus, before migrating to their current terrestrial territory and coming into mutual contact for the first time. The theory has come to be known (well, by us at any rate) as the multi-planetary hypothesis for the origin of sexual dimorphism.
This resettlement was very recent on an evolutionary timescale, so that neither males nor females have had sufficient time to re-adapt to the new conditions, and so retain many behavioural and morphological phenotypic traits that were adaptations to the original environments of their ancestral homes. Crazy if you as