Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus

The main supposition of John Gray’s hypothesis, “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”, seems to be that the two sexes followed largely independent evolutionary paths on Earth’s planetary neighbours before migrating to their current terrestrial territory. 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. Here, we critically analysed this claim that each gender’s ancestral home predetermines attributes of their personality.

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