When there are so many pressing questions that remain unanswered, it is stunning that researchers find funding for such appalling pseduo-science that can only result in speculation based on the flimsiest of evidence. This is then compounded by shock headlines in the press that consider it good fashion sense to blame it all on our genes. Speculation compounded by misinformation. If anything, this study shows that the cultural preferences instilled in infancy remain strong throughout adulthood. When we stop blaming genes for everything, we may start taking responsibility for the mess we have made of ourselves and this planet.

Nick M, Liverpool,

Pseudo-science.

Subjects are obviously strongly influenced by their current cultural norms and there was nothing whatsoever to indicate an influence from so far in the past.

Furthermore, ripe fruits are often other colours than pink or red, and clean water inland sreams are definitely not blue.

Too many bad "scientists" around with not enough to do.

Peter Lloyd, BLACKER HILL, South Yorkshire

blob,
Archaeology not only supports this, but is not even necessary as a source of proof; basic anatomy will do.

Frederick Davies, Oxford, UK

They could have added more cultures, in some cultures like the Akan in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, red is the color of death and not universally preferred. Red in other cultures is a masculine color not like in China where red not pink is associated with women. I think this test is rubbish.

Why do they always do this? If you are going to make tests on people's preferences and attribute them to genetics or whatever, shouldn't you have a much more wider range of peoples and cultures? 208 Brits and Chinese. Oooh, what a definite sample. Why couldn't they have tested Inuit people and Kalahari hunters tooo? Rubbish. Red is also the color of many poisonous berries so there's that fruit picking theory.
For your info, pink and red rank low on my least favorite colors and I'm a woman.
Pink is merely light red, and being hyped up in Western culture as a separate color when it's not. Orange didn't use to be a separate color.
I hope they get igNobel prizes.

Ana, madrid, spain

Given that the group were 20-26 year olds, it is hard to see how the study can have controlled for the impact of years of marketing to the boys and particularly the girls that one colour was more appropriate than another. Have you seen the colour uniformity of young girls clothing and accessories in the shops? Pink is a lazy way of labelling something feminine or female. The marketeers have a lot of power making the market, not just responding to it.

Michelle, Stanford, California, USA

Quite frankly, I find both "baby pink" and "baby blue" a lot too sickly for my taste. As a child and even now my 2 favourite colours are orange and purple. I wear almost every other colour as well including vibrant pinks and blues, but generally the pastels I find insipid in the extreme.

It took 50 years for fashion to catch up with my taste, and again this autumn and winter we are about to be shoved into grey, black, beige, white and brown yet again. Hell, no! I won't go! and I found a lot of older women who felt the same.

Often in fashion, the fabrics are wrong: slimy man-mades make any outfit horrid to wear because they don't breathe: Viscose is only good in a hot summer, as it's cool. Jeans are a disaster to ski in, because they are cold and stay cold. Even cotton with a bit of lycra or elasticine can be agony as it makes you sweat.

I think they once asked little boys what colour little girls liked best: the boys said purple. Seems the boys got it right all along!

Carlyle Braden, Croydon, U.K

What a waste of money on useless speculation. There must be more useful ways to gain a PhD! Men are not the same as women and it doesn't take a genius to work that out.

Keith, Bishop's Stortford,

Dear oh dear,

Is it silly season?

What a piece of non-news about a non-discovery.

Mights and mays and "I can only speculate", and it transmogrifies to that headline?

Please arrest this deplorable tendency to join the rest of the press in the abyss of populism.

Pretty please with pink spots on...

No blue spots, no, actually no pink...... no....

Kidd Garrett, Bristol, UK

At last, science discovers why blue is for boys but girls really do prefer pink - Nonsense! This is not a discovery but a speculation; a manipulation of doubtful data to fit the theory.

Roger Bingham, Lauzun, France

I heard this on the Today program (R4) this morning. What a load of rubbish, isn't there something useful that these researchers could do rather than waste time and money on this - who paid for it anyway? I hope it wasn't me in any way!

John Turner, Leicester,

I can't believe someone actually funds these pointless studies. Too many factors in adults that cannot be accounted for. And studies with babies would be hard to do.
It might just be ok that they conduct their zero-gain research and then publish the results. But to jump on to socio-cultural conclusions from that?!? Good grief. How can they know that men only hunted and women only gathered berries? And not all berries are red. Etc.

Please somebody shut these people down and give the money to cancer research or something.

Jake, University of Reading,

graft hoax misinformation all the words that means DOUBT. The colour is a personal preference.
Pink/red is not preferred by female humans evolved on african or asian contienents.
Moreover, if this was the case, why it so only humans and not other animals with colour vision.
This is just a study to highlight one culture/traditon. Nothing to do with evolution or things as claimed by so called scientist.

kan, Southampton, uk

It amazes me that anyone takes this seriously. For starters, they gave a survey to 20-somethings who are already indoctrinated into the blue-boy pink-girl association of their particular society, meaning any results of this study can by no means be definitively linked to biology. Furthermore, the reasons these researchers give for why there is such a color association have virtually no further supporting evidence. How would this survey have gone differently had it been done 100 years ago, when pink was considered manly and blue was considered feminine? Perhaps they would have said that "men are attracted to the color pink because of the hunter's necessary attraction to blood and flesh, while women prefer blue because of a need to pick out fruits like blueberries." These reasons are just as logical as the reasons in the official study, but I just made them up. This is just another example of how people attempt to prove any old thing with any old evidence.

David, Fort Wayne, Indiana, United States

Truly ludicrous this. Women prefer pink as they gathered berries when we we're hunter-gatherers, and men prefer blue because we like sunny skies to hunt under? In a normal world these "scientists" would be fired within the week. It reminds me of all that nonsense about men prefering to sleep on the side of the bed closer to the door because when we lived in caves that way we could better protect the women from sabre tooth tigers. And lest you think im joking i read that just last year.

C Smart, Manchester, UK

Historically, pink is a man's colour - how shameful that women seem to have hijacked it!

Farrukh, Woking, UK

Carts and horses here.

The British respondents replied as they did because they have had "Pink for a girl, blue for a boy" drilled into them from the cradle.

The Chinese replied as THEY did because they have had "red is luck and money" drilled into them from the cradle.

This is not science, it is sociological mumbo-jumbo.

Bill McCann, Suzhou, China

I'm a woman and hate pink and pastel colours. I prefer natural colours, greens, browns, and black. The "reasoning" for this is stupid. Boys like blue because of blue skies? I guess girls never look at the sky or appreciate it huh? And not all fruits and berries are of a pink hue. Blueberries? Hello?

Who paid these quacks to do this study is what I want to know?

Tracy, Dayton, USA/OH

I am very pleased to read the comments and see that people do not buy this nonsense. For us researchers who try to be as rigorous as possible, always questioning our asumptions, seeing evolutionary psychology getting so much attention is extremely depressing.

These researchers are absolutely clueless.
They don't know China isn't *one* culture.
They don't know the coast has been considerably westernized.
They don't even know berries can be blue.
But they think they know what was taking place 1 million years ago in human societies.

What an embarrasment.

Frank, Brighton,

Evolutionary? Then isn't it odd that until the turn of the 20th century red and pink were masculine colors?

Gary, Grifton, N.C. U.S.A.

"The male favourite was a pale blue while the female favourite was a lilac shade of pink..."

So the female favourite was, er, a blue-ish shade of pink then?

LOL. What a load of rubbish.

JK, Reading, UK

to believe that rubbbish is to believe boys support chelsea,and girls support arsenal.or boys eat burgers and girls eat kentucy fried chicken,total rubbish usually paid for by dulux.

michael joseph heavey, cahersiveen/adams town, madness

208 subjects, primarily white British caucasians. Not much of a study group.
I'm female. I despise pink.

Mariah, Bend, US/Oregon

So most blokes prefer blue, and most women prefer pink. No wonder not many people like Brown...

Renaud, St.Valery-sur-Somme, France

If the evolutionary psychology was true like they say then why don't both men and women like blue as it indicates a clear day? Do women not like good weather? This is a weak survey that doesn't show any true evidence that men like blue and women like pink.

Jessica, Christchurch, NZ

I've got a theory that most people prefer green to red because it makes journeys by car faster.

Ron Winkworth, Brighton , England

This is all speculation... I prefer blue!

Anna, Isle of Wight, UK

I've also seen a scientific study that found that blue was the favourite colour of both baby boys and girls, pink being way down on the list of both, _until_ the tots hit pre-school, where pink abruptly became the favourite of girls. Socialisation or innate? Evolutionary Psychology has a bad track record of retrospectively finding theory to fit the observations. (It is very hard to _disprove_ as well as _prove_ these theories, the scientific method can be rather shaky.) It tends to be susceptible to the particular social biases of the observers. Not that it's all rubbish (not at all!), just that differential socialisation is also a very subtle pervasive influence that relies too much on a grounding in humanities/cultural studies/politics for many less holistically-minded scientists to take into account too.

Anne, Melbourne, Australia

What a load of rubbish! People actually get paid for carrying out these kinds of "surveys"?

Paul, London,

What nonsense. Haven't the researchers considered that the students may have been consciously or unconsciously reacting to the generally accepted norms of blue for boys and pink for girls, developed over centuries? Less evolutionary claptrap, please, and some more careful thinking about alternative and more likely cultural explanations.

Brian Champness, Callington,

Hum,
are you sure that women were not hunters?
Is this not just an assumption that is culturally based rather than based on archaeological evidence?

blob, Aberdeen,

Were any ethnic Chinese included in the British group? It would be interesting to see how they react to colours...are they influenced more by the British culture they're exposed to at school or by home culture.

Cynthia C, Toronto, Ontario, Canada