"Women are too emotional; they're never logical. They talk too much, and about the stupidest things."
"There's a strange way men click in and out of crudity and insensitivity. And even though they allow themselves expression and spontaneity, they don't want women to act that way."
Recognize any of these stereotypes? It is a common complaint among men that it is impossible to understand women, and equally, women often say men are incomprehensible.
Why do the sexes seem so different, and if indeed they are, are the differences constructed by culture, or are they based in biology?
Although the two genders are purposefully socialized to be different in all human societies, it turns out that there are some concrete biological and scientific reasons underpinning gender differences.
Neurologically, women possess more connections in the corpus collosum, the tissue joining the right and left-hand side of the brain, making them better, in general, at tasks involving verbal expression and emotional perceptiveness.
Men, on the other hand, possess greater ability to solve problems involving spatial relationships and logical reasoning. Of course, these generalizations gloss over the many individual strengths and weaknesses that a person, whatever their sex, may possess.
But speaking in terms of biology, differences between the sexes and the way they process information are real and tangible.
So why do men and women possess different ways of interpreting information?
Humans are a product of an evolutionary past. For thousands of years, before the development of agriculture, labor had to be divided between the sexes in order to make finding food and other tasks efficient.
The biological differences resulting from this evolutionary gender division then make intuitive sense: men are better at spatial processing because such abilities carry more of an advantage when tracking animals and judging distance, skills necessary to hunting.
And women are better at verbal tasks and dividing their attention among many things at once because they may have had to pay attention to children in addition to gathering food and other tasks.
Recent research, however, is overturning some of the assumptions about where our different abilities may have come from. It appears that many biological specializations between the sexes may have occurred more recently in evolutionary history than previously believed.
For example, there is some evidence that gender differences result from labor division,Psychology professor Stacey Sinclair said.
According to the social role theory, as labor inside the home began to be associated with women, and labor outside began to be associated with men, the personality traits inherent in these roles began to be associated with the characters of women and men.
Thus, the theory ultimately subscribes gender construction and sex differences in personality and behavior to how labor was divided between men and women.
"There is some evidence that social roles are the basis of gender stereotypes," Sinclair said. Misunderstandings between men and women then result from the roles that each is expected to play in society.
Science and psychology may have helped explain why the sexes differ, but can it explain love and attraction?
Gregory Lucan is a graduate student in the University philosophy department, and currently is teaching a course on the philosophical perspectives on love and sex.
He pointed out many examples exemplifying the scientific perspective on love.
For instance, the German philosopher Schopenhauer took a somewhat evolutionary look at love a half-century before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859. He thought that love was ultimately based in biology.
The feeling of love, or of "being in love" was a biological trick, Schopenhauer believed, played on us by our psyche. "The purpose of this 'love trick' was to enable individuals to find partners and bond with them long enough to pass their genes into the next generation and perpetuate the species," Lucansaid.
Thus Schopenhauer believed that what humans call romantic love is a biological adaptation, created by the evolutionary drive to procreate and continue one's genetic lineage.
"Also, by extension, we find most attractive in the opposite sex those characteristics which signal to us a mate is healthy and genetically fit," Lucan added.
Schopenhauer's philosophy reflects much of the current thinking in human evolutionary psychology about why pair bonds form and what makes people attractive to one another.
Also, the two genders pursue different evolutionary strategies in mate selection, and thus find different characteristics attractive.
"Women, for example, can only bear a limited number of children, so they want a mate who can invest a lot of resources in their offspring," Sinclair said.
"They look for wealth, age and other indicators of status when choosing a mate. Men, on the other hand, can potentially conceive many offspring, and thus are looking for physically attractive women of childbearing age," she added.
Although it may seem bleak to reduce something as ineffable as love and attraction to evolutionary drive and biological motives, an understanding of gender and attraction in the light of science can help bridge whatever gap might exist between the sexes by explaining our behavior and rationalizing our decisions.
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