Systemizing Quotes

“The combination of low empathizing and high systemizing abilities might mean a rapid ascent of a man to the top of the social pile. This is because men in every culture compete against each other for success in social rank. As we mentioned above, a male’s position in the social dominance hierarchy in most species directly affects his fertility. For example, in some species it is only the alpha male that gets to reproduce. And even today, among modern humans, men with higher social status tend to have more children and more wives, compared with men of lower social status. To achieve social dominance, males use physical force, or the threat of force, or other kinds of threat (for example, withdrawing support). That is why, in most species, males are bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than females.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism

“Against this catalog of social difficulties, we must keep in mind that AS involves a different kind of intelligence. The strong drive to systemize means that the person with AS becomes a specialist in something, or even in everything they delve into. One man with AS in Denmark who I met put it this way: “You people [without AS] are generalists, content to know a little bit about a lot of subjects. We people [with AS] are specialists. Once we start to explore a subject, we do not leave it until we have gathered as much information as we can.” In effect, the systemizing drive in AS is often a drive to identify the underlying structure in the world.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism

“In one unusual study, people were asked to classify over a hundred examples of local specimens into related species. The people who took part in this experiment were the Aguaruna, a tribal people living in the forest in northern Peru. The following results were found: men’s classification systems had more sub-categories (in other words, they introduced greater differentiation) and more consistency. More striking, the criteria that the Aguaruna men used to decide which animals belonged together more closely resembled the taxonomic criteria used by Western (mostly male) biologists.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism

“According to Laura Betzig, in the first civilizations (ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Aztec, the Inca, imperial India, and China), “powerful men mate with hundreds of women, pass their power on to a son by one legitimate wife, and take the lives of men who get in their way.” As I explained earlier, these men may have been powerful because they were good systemizers. The fact that they eliminated those who stood up to them implies that they were also low empathizers. And they certainly seemed to have an efficient means of disseminating their genes (polygyny). So we can envision how the genotype for brain type S might have spread widely throughout a male population.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism