Love Sick: Love as a Mental Illness

Darwin was correct then – and he remains correct today. Even if we take into account the fact that historically women have always been disadvantaged because of social inequality, the disparity of artistic and scientific achievement that divides the sexes is quite extraordinary. From an evolutionary perspective, this strongly suggests that male talent has been shaped by sexual selection. Men might appear to be more gifted than women, but this is only because women have ‘made’ them that way! If women in the ancestral environment hadn’t expressed a distinct preference for gifted mates, such a disparity would never have arisen in the first place. With social animals, the young males have to pass through many a contest before they win a female . . . But to avoid enemies or to attack them with success, to capture wild animals, and to fashion weapons, requires the aid of the higher mental faculties, namely, observation, reason, invention, or imagination. These faculties will thus have been continually put to the test and selected during manhood; they will, moreover, have been strengthened by use during the same period of life. Consequently . . . we might expect that they would at least tend to be transmitted chiefly to the male offspring at the corresponding period of manhood.