the shopping gene myth

Ah, it's the return of the shopping gene myth:

Women have evolutionary gene which makes them born to shop, experts say

Presumably as opposed to non-evolutionary genes, which are acquired by mail-order.

With their talent for sniffing out a bargain and elbowing a safe path through the sales, women have long suspected they were born to shop.

Now scientists have proved them right. [...] While men developed the acute sense of direction needed for hunting, women mastered the art of gathering food such as fruits and berries.

Because remembering where the food is requires no sense of direction.

Apparently displaying a kind of confirmation bias that's startling, the "scientists" involved in this research don't seem to have considered the possibility that women were better in a test trip to a farmer's market because they were more used to doing the shopping.

Hey, in a culture where women are seen as responsible for doing the food shopping - and have been brought up by female figures doing the same thing - don't you think women might have acquire certain skills? That they might just have been socialised into certain behaviour and abilities?

The additional simplistic implication that there's a genetic reason for an awareness of calorie content in food amongst Californian women (hey, is our culture obsessed with female diet sometimes?) is laugh-out-loud silly.

Apparently the possibility of culture influence was just to outrageous or boring to mention - particularly when we can instead pretend a study of 86 people is convincing evidence of a link between genes and social behaviour. Golly, isn't "science" fun?