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surprising.

      Many social scientists argue that the reason women seek wealthy men is that men have most of the wealth. But now you know this is universal to the human race, you could easily turn it around. Men seek wealth because they know it attracts women – just as women pay more attention to appearing youthful because they know it attracts men. This direction of causality was never less plausible than the other, and given the evidence of universality, it is now more plausible. Aristotle Onassis, who knew a bit about both money and beautiful women, reputedly once said: ‘If women did not exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.’³⁰

      By proving how universal so many sex differences in mating preferences are, Buss has thrown the burden of proof on to those who would see a cultural habit rather than an instinct. But the two explanations are not mutually exclusive. They are probably both true. Men seek wealth to attract women, therefore women seek wealth because men have it, therefore men seek wealth to attract women. And so on. If men have an instinct to seek the baubles that lead to success with women, then they are likely to learn that within their culture money is one such bauble. Nurture is reinforcing nature, not opposing it.

      With the human species, as Dan Dennett observed, you can never be sure that what you see is instinct, because you might be looking at the result of a reasoned argument, a copied ritual or a learned lesson. But the same applies in reverse. When you see a man chasing a woman just because she is pretty, or a girl playing with a doll while her brother plays with a sword, you can never be sure that what you are seeing is just cultural, because it might have an element of instinct. Polarising the issue is entirely mistaken. It is not a zero-sum game, where culture displaces instinct or vice versa. There might be all sorts of cultural aspects to a behaviour that is grounded in instinct. Culture will often reflect human nature rather than affect it.

      MONEY OR DIAMOND?

      Buss’s study of global similarity in difference proves the universality of different approaches to mating behaviour, but says nothing about how they come about. Suppose he is right and the differences are evolved, adaptive and therefore at least partly innate. How do they develop and under what influences? Thanks to an extraordinary battle in the nature–nurture war, called Money vs. Diamond, there is now a glimmer of light to be cast upon this subject.

      Money is John Money, a psychologist from New Zealand who reacted against his strict religious upbringing to become an outspoken ‘missionary’ of sexual liberation at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, eventually defending not just free love but even consenting paedophilia. Diamond is Mickey Diamond, a tall, soft-spoken, bearded son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants to the Bronx who moved first to Kansas and then to Honolulu, where he studies the factors determining sexual behaviour in animals and people.

      Money believes that sex roles are the products of early experience, not instinct. In 1955 he set out his theory of psychosexual neutrality based on the study of 131 human ‘hermaphrodites’ – people who had been born with ambiguous genitalia. At birth, said Money, human beings are psychosexually neutral. Only after experience, at about the age of two, do they develop ‘gender identity’. ‘Sexual behavior and orientation as male or female does not have an innate, instinctive basis,’ he wrote. ‘It becomes differentiated as masculine or feminine in the course of the various experiences of growing up.’ Therefore, said Money, a human baby can be literally assigned to either sex, a belief that was used by doctors to justify surgery to change baby boys born with abnormal penises into girls. Such surgery became standard practice: males with unusually tiny penises were ‘reassigned’ as females.

      In contrast, the Kansas group came to the conclusion that ‘the biggest sex organ is between the ears, not between the legs’ and began to challenge the orthodoxy that sex roles were environmentally determined. In 1965 Diamond argued the point in a paper critical of Money, charging that Money had presented no case histories to support his theory of psychosexual neutrality, that the evidence from hermaphrodites was irrelevant – if their genitalia were ambiguous, their brains might be, too – and that it was more plausible that human beings, like guinea pigs, experienced a prenatal fixation of mental sex identity.³¹ In effect, he challenged Money to produce a psychosexually neutral, normal child, or one that had accepted sex reassignment.

      Money brushed aside the criticism as he gathered the rewards of increasing fame. His paper had won a prize; that had led to a huge grant; and when his team began transsexual surgery, he became a celebrity profiled in newspapers and on television. But Diamond had hit a nerve, for the very next year Money took on a case of a normal boy who had lost his penis after a botched circumcision. The boy was a monozygotic twin, so the opportunity to demonstrate how he could be turned into a woman, while his twin developed as a man, was irresistible. On Money’s advice the boy was surgically reassigned as a girl then raised by his parents as a girl and never told of her origin. In 1972 Money published a book describing the case as an unqualified success. It was hailed in the press as definitive proof that sex roles were the product of society, not biology; it influenced a generation of feminists at a critical time; it entered the psychology textbooks; and it influenced multitudes of doctors who now saw sex reassignment as a simple solution to a complicated problem.

      Money seemed to have won the argument. Then in 1979 a BBC television team began investigating the case. They had heard rumours that the boy who became a girl was not the success that Money claimed. They managed to penetrate the anonymity of the case and even briefly meet the girl in question, though they did not divulge her identity on air. Called Brenda Reimer, she lived with her family in Winnipeg and was then 14. What they saw was an unhappy youth with masculine body language and a deep voice. The BBC crew interviewed Money, who reacted with fury at the invasion of the family’s privacy. Diamond continued to press Money for details, but got nowhere. Money now dropped all reference to the case from his published work. The trail once more went cold. Then in 1991 in print Money blamed Diamond for inciting the BBC to invade the girl’s privacy. Enraged at the accusation, Diamond began trying to contact psychiatrists who might have treated the case. In 1995 at last he met Brenda Reimer.

      Except Brenda was now called David, and was a happily married man with adopted children. He had endured a confused and unhappy childhood, constantly rebelling against girlish things, though he knew nothing of having been born a boy. When at 14 he still insisted on living as a boy his parents at last told him of his past. He immediately demanded surgery to restore a penis and adopted the life of a teenage male. Diamond persuaded him to let him tell the story to the world under a pseudonym so that they could prevent people having to endure the same fate in the future. In 2000, the writer John Colapinto convinced him to drop his anonymity altogether for a book.³²

      Money has never apologised either to the world for misleading it about the success of the reassignment, or to David Reimer. Today Diamond wonders what would have happened if the little boy had been a gay or transsexual who might have wanted to live either in an effeminate way or as a female, or had not been willing to come out of his closet and tell his story.

      David Reimer is not alone. Most boys reassigned as girls declare themselves boys at adolescence. And a recent study of people born with ambiguous genitalia found that those who escaped the surgeon’s knife had fewer psychological problems than those who had been operated on in childhood. The large majority of those males that were switched to live as girls have reverted, on their own, to live as males.³³

      Gender roles are at least partly automatic, blind and untaught, to use William James’s terms. Hormones within the womb trigger masculinisation, but those hormones originate within the body of the baby and are themselves triggered by a series of events that begin with the expression of a single gene on the Y chromosome. (There are plenty of species that allow the environment to determine gender. In crocodiles and turtles, for example, the sex of the animal is set by the temperature at which the egg is incubated. But there are genes involved in such a process, too. Temperature triggers the expression of sex-determining genes. The prime cause may be environmental, but the mechanism is genetic. Genes can

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