Why are men and women so similar, yet so different? Is your red my blue? Are women just conforming to society when they like the smell of flowers? Today I'm going to present some interesting findings from some of the research I've recently done.

Women perceive a more vibrant world to men

Women's abilities to discern between similar colour shades compared to men are greater. This could explain the more eloquent colour vocabulary that women possess while the men stick with the primary reds, yellows, greens and blues etc.

"The grass is almost always greener to women, for starters, a new study says - and such differences could have roots deep in human evolution." - The National Geographic

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Testing has revealed that minute differences between colours were detectable by female participants, which interestingly, looked identical when viewed by men. As well as this, due to the nature of X and Y chromosomes, men are statistically far more likely to inherit a form of colour blindness.

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Women have a more developed sense of smell

Studies have shown that males are significantly outperformed in tests regarding smell.

Brazilian researchers found that women have on average 43% more cells than men in their olfactory bulbs, which control smell.

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Women are born with these extra cells, hence it is not environmental or societal pressures that can be attributed to these improved cognitive abilities of their opposite gender counterparts.

What does this tell us about evolution

The human species have a hunter-gatherer past.

One of the hunter's (man) primary roles served was to protect the tribe and warn of any dangers in the form of vicious predators.

The gatherer's (woman) primary role was to collect wild berries and herbs, hence it was crucial to be able to distinguish between those safe to eat and those that are not.

Hence, we can attribute the respective cognitive abilities to the survival needs based on the societal structures at the time.

It is a pretty good guess that man's need for distance vision to track fast-moving (sometimes carnivorous) objects as the reason they developed this ability, and for women, incredibly precise colour vision to determine the toxicity of certain foods as well as detecting danger through the sense of smell elevated these cognitive abilities accordingly.