This seems to me a form of equivocation: “different” as used in the first sentence and “the same” as used in the second sentence are not opposites. The context is different; the intended meaning (insofar as any evo-psychologists actually make such claims) is something like this:
“Men and women are more different, on average, than men and other men, and certainly more different than (some? most?) people think. The difference is sufficiently large that we cannot indiscriminately apply psychological principles and results across genders.”
“Humans and chimps are closer than (some? most?) people think; in fact, sufficiently close that we can apply unexpectedly many psychological principles and results across these two species.”
I don’t know of anyone (even in “popular” evo-psych) who endorses the view implied in the quote, which I suppose would be something like:
“Humans are chimps are less different from each other than men and women.”
This seems to me a form of equivocation: “different” as used in the first sentence and “the same” as used in the second sentence are not opposites. The context is different; the intended meaning (insofar as any evo-psychologists actually make such claims) is something like this:
“Men and women are more different, on average, than men and other men, and certainly more different than (some? most?) people think. The difference is sufficiently large that we cannot indiscriminately apply psychological principles and results across genders.”
“Humans and chimps are closer than (some? most?) people think; in fact, sufficiently close that we can apply unexpectedly many psychological principles and results across these two species.”
I don’t know of anyone (even in “popular” evo-psych) who endorses the view implied in the quote, which I suppose would be something like:
“Humans are chimps are less different from each other than men and women.”
In short, I think the quote mocks a strawman.
Here’s how I parsed it:
“You can better extrapolate from a chimp to a human, of the same gender, than from a human to another human of a different gender.”
To be fair, most pop evopsych is extrapolating from imaginary details of caveman behavior rather than actual chimp behavior.