Wilson, David Sloan. "Evolutionary Psychology and the Public Media: Rekindling the Romance." HUFFINGTON POST June 25, 2009.

Evolutionary psychology, once the darling of the public media, has been dumped in a recent Newsweek article by journalist Sharon Begley. Return accusations are beginning to fly from evolutionary psychologists, who accuse Begley of willful distortions and scientific incompetence. As usual for romantic quarrels, there are legitimate grievances on both sides that get lost in a hail of recriminations. I have always had a love-hate relationship with the school of thought that most people associate with the term "evolutionary psychology." When it appeared in the late 1980's, it made some great points but also got other things profoundly wrong. Begley's article made some cheap shots but it also made some fair shots about evolutionary psychology that need to be acknowledged. As for the public media, covering science must be one of the toughest journalistic assignments. First, one must understand the nature of the scientific process in general terms. Then, one must master the specific topic that is being reported. Finally, one must convey what is genuinely newsworthy to a general audience--the fair shots--while avoiding the cheap shots that get people's attention but become part of the problem in the long run. Judged by these standards, the Newsweek article scores rather low.Here are some issues that need to be resolved to get the romance between evolutionary psychology and the public media back on the right track. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sloan-wilson/evolutionary-psychology-a_b_220545.html.

Mason, Kelby. Review of Robert C. Richardson's EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AS MALADAPTED PSYCHOLOGY. NDPR (June 2009).

Richardson, Robert C. Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. In recent years a range of philosophers have been making a similar charge against evolutionary psychology, that it's neither evolutionary nor psychology -- or, at least, that it isn't good evolutionary or psychological science. David Buller has most forcefully argued that evolutionary psychology is no good as psychology, and now Robert Richardson has provided the corresponding argument against its evolutionary bona fides (Buller 2005). Richardson's main contention is that once we hold evolutionary psychology to the same evidential standards applied elsewhere in evolutionary theory, we should reject its "pretensions" as "unconstrained speculation" (p38). On Richardson's account, doing evolutionary science is hard -- really hard -- and evolutionary psychology has simply failed to provide the kind of evidence that is required. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16331.

"Darwinian Answers to Social Questions: Why We Are, As We Are." THE ECONOMIST December 18, 2008.

Traditionally, the answers to [many] questions . . . about modern life, have been sought in philosophy, sociology, even religion. But the answers that have come back are generally unsatisfying. They describe, rather than explain. They do not get to the nitty-gritty of what it truly is to be human. Policy based on them does not work. This is because they ignore the forces that made people what they are: the forces of evolution. The reasons for that ignorance are complex. Philosophers have preached that there exists between man and beast an unbridgeable distinction. Sociologists have been seduced by Marxist ideas about the perfectibility of mankind. Theologians have feared that the very thought of evolution threatens divine explanations of the world. Even fully paid-up members of the Enlightenment, people who would not for a moment deny humanity’s simian ancestry, are often sceptical. They seem to believe, as Anne Campbell, a psychologist at Durham University, in England, elegantly puts it, that evolution stops at the neck: that human anatomy evolved, but human behaviour is culturally determined. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12795581.

Herrnstein Smith, Barbara. "A Cognitive Revolution? Naturalism, Otherwise." THE IMMANENT FRAME June 23, 2008.

The past fifteen years or so have been a period of extraordinary activity in pursuit of what are called “cognitive” and/or “evolutionary” explanations of religion. These include, in addition to Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (the focus of my previous post), a number of other self-consciously innovative books with titles like How Religion Works: Towards a New Cognitive Science of Religion, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, and Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. What unites these works and distinguishes them from the broader naturalistic tradition in religious studies is, first, the centrality for their approach of methods and theories drawn from evolutionary psychology and the rather sprawling field of “cognitive science” and, second, the more or less strenuous identification of their efforts with “science,” itself rather monolithically and sometimes triumphalistically conceived. In these two respects, these and related works constitute what could be called the New Naturalism in religious studies. The New Naturalist program requires, in my view, careful review and discriminating assessment. The intellectual interest of the general program and the promise of its cognitive-evolutionary approaches for affording better understandings of important features of human behavior and culture should, I think, be recognized. But I also think that critical attention should be given to the intellectual confinements represented by some of the program’s characteristic theoretical assumptions and methodological commitments, especially when viewed in relation to existing methods in the naturalistic study of religion and alternative theories of human behavior, culture, and cognition. Indeed, in spite of the disdain New Naturalists commonly exhibit for prior achievements and alternative methods (as illustrated by Boyer’s wholesale brush-offs), their characteristic cognitive-evolutionary accounts of religion are likely to become more substantial, persuasive, and illuminating when joined to studies by researchers and scholars working with other naturalistic approaches to religion, both social-scientific and humanistic. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/06/23/naturalism-otherwise/.

Fox, Robin. "Demonic Males and Missing Daughters." EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY 6.3 (2008): 432-435.

Gottschall, Jonathan. The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer. Cambridge: CUP, 2007. Jonathan Gottschall, himself a Greek scholar and Homer expert, . . . has taken the trouble to learn the best of evolutionary theory and information and asked himself the question: can our knowledge of behavioral evolution inform our interpretation of Homer and archaic Greece? Not to explain away Homer at all, but to elucidate what is happening in the great epics. He asks the simple question: Why did the men in the Iliad and the Odyssey fight? What were they fighting about? The Trojan war was not typical of Greek fighting in the Dark Ages (12th and 13th centuries BC.) More usually "war" was raiding expeditions of one tribe against another. Huge armies engaged in 10-year sieges was exceptional, and while the Iliad may have been a literary fiction nevertheless it is an incomparable record of life and fighting at the time. Erick Havelock (Preface to Plato) called it, and its companion volume, a "tribal encyclopedia" and so it is. Gottschall mines it for information on the motives and methods of the Greek warriors in a tribal society (not a nation) addicted to conflict, not unlike the Vikings. What was the conflict about? . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep06432435.pdf.

Tavris, Carol. "It's All in the Behavioural-Genetics." TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT April 16, 2008.

What a difference a century makes. One hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud’s answer to Daniel Nettle’s question – “What makes you the way you are?” – would have begun with your unconscious mind: the unique pattern of fantasies, defences, and instinctual conflicts that create your neurotic insecurities and self-defeating habits. These unconscious mechanisms would, in turn, have been profoundly influenced by your parents, who overpunished you or underappreciated you, who told you too much about sex or not enough. You can’t do much about your personality, though you can tweak it a bit with years of psychoanalysis. Today, personality researchers almost uniformly agree that the things that make you the way you are consist of a combination of your genes, your peers and the idiosyncratic, chance experiences that befall you in childhood and adulthood. Your parents influence your relationship with them – loving or contentious, conflicted or close – but not your “personality”, that package of traits we label extroverted or shy, bitter or friendly, hostile or warm, gloomy or optimistic. Your genes, not your parents, are the reason you think that parachuting out of planes is fun, or, conversely, that you feel sick to the stomach at the mere idea of doing such a crazy thing voluntarily. You can’t do much about your personality, though you can tweak it a bit with cognitive therapy. . . . Read the whole article here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3757737.ece.