Evolutionary Psychology and anti-intellectualism.

[hifiguy]

29. Why am I not surprised that an ax-grinder is at the base of this?

I read a few of the links, a couple of which looked like Meta-threads, and wound up eventually looping back to a quote from the founders of the discipline:

As Leda Cosmides and John Tooby write: "...in the rush to apply evolutionary insights to a science of human behavior, many researchers have made a conceptual 'wrong turn', leaving a gap in the evolutionary approach that has limited its effectiveness. This wrong turn has consisted of attempting to apply evolutionary theory directly to the level of manifest behavior, rather than using it as a heuristic guide for the discovery of innate psychological mechanisms." In other words, there may be an evolutionary basis for certain meta-aspects of human psychology rather than a direct link to individual behaviors. Which sounds entirely logical and possible, but time will tell.

Which amounts to saying that would-be popularizers are jumping the gun. So let's leave this to the actual scientists and see if the experimental and predictive methodologies develop and improve. It will either proved valid to some greater or lesser degree or it will turn out to be a dead end. To squawk at the outset that "there are questions that shouldn't be asked" is the same kind of bullshit spouted by the young earth creationists and other anti-science crackpots.