Aside from outright errors (which everyone who writes for a living makes) every story has imperfections seen from someone else’s angle. Some more than others. The only worthwhile kind of press criticism is to write a better story.

“But it seems that Coyne doesn’t think that evolutionary psychology can be done, period–or at least, he thinks the whole field is pretty lousy.”

Why just this morning I wrote in extenso about a GOOD example of evolutionary psychology, and related what I thought distinguished it from bad specimens. See:

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/evolutionary-psychology-gender-construction/

“Now I don’t oppose evolutionary psychology on principle. The evolutionary source of our behavior is a fascinating topic, and I’m convinced that the genetic influences are far stronger than, say, posited by anti-determinists like Dick Lewontin, Steve Rose, and Steve Gould. Evolved adaptations are particularly likely to be found in sexual behavior, which is intimately connected with the real object of selection: the currency of reproduction. I’m far closer in my views on this topic to Steve Pinker than to Steve Gould. And there are many good studies in the field, so I don’t mean to tar the whole endeavor.”

This is the problem with EP in a nutshell. To people who do behavioral or evolutionary genetics in model organisms, the “evidence” presented in a typical EP paper is pathetic; even worse are the causal inferences and adaptive hypotheses accompanying the Likert scale / IAT score / fMRI or other quasi-empirical tool that happens to give you a p less than .05 in a SNP association. That’s fine, human work is hard for many reasons. What grinds is that conclusions are often presented with a degree of confidence far outstripping the quality of the data (often by the authors, always by the media).

Many people study the evolution of behavior productively…they are called biologists. There is obviously a place for a field called “evolutionary psychology,” but the best work is being done is by those who wisely refrain from referring to themselves as evolutionary psychologists. In its current form, EP is a parochial sideshow of the cultural preoccupations of a particular time and place.

In practice this is often very difficult to find out with enough accuracy to use such a description confidently. I agree that the prase is highly unsatisfactory, but in many cases that’s really all one knows for certain.

This was a tough story. There were some obvious issues with the science, but we knew it would be widely covered elsewhere, probably with fewer caveats, so we felt it was important to give it the Nature treatment and be a bit more sceptical.

In this case, it is a tough debate to quantify. The authors are social scientists who are using some genetic techniques to investigate a hypothesis, while most of the criticism came from “real” geneticists who designed those techniques and use them all the time. Perhaps it would have been better to make this clearer, saying something like “those who use genome assays are not convinced”. Although I am never keen to encourage interdisciplinary bun fights.

I’m not a scientist; rather, I’m science-ish. I’m science-y. I looove the art of science, not the Science of science.

Back in school, Letter-of-the-law Science killed my love of learning and sense of wonder. I crave the whimsey of half-baked theories and want more, more, MORE!!!!!

Except, it’s not. They weren’t looking for a needle in a haystack. They were looking at six genes that had already been discovered to produce known brain chemistry phenotypes whose relevance was great enough to attract attention and be genotyped in a large sample of adolescents.

It is the moral equivalent of looking at six pigmentation genes and writing a paper that concludes that people can accurately sort people into genotypes with remarkably high accuracy without scientific equipment.

These were already winning tickets, we simply weren’t quite sure what prize came with each one.

On one hand, I think Amy Maxmen did a very good job (not perfect, I agree with some of your criticisms, but very good nonetheless, and much better than one usually sees in MSM when this topic comes around).

On the other hand, as a scientist, I am strongly taking the Myers/Coyne side on this topic and see the rebuttals as weak special pleading and apologetics for a field that is based on misinformed fundamental premises.

On the third hand, I literally do the posting of Jesse’s posts now. And I try not to get too annoyed at places where I think he crosses the line that I, as a scientist, think he should not cross. When I post his stuff I want to take off my scientist hat and put on my editor’s hat. And wonder if I am doing it right? Should I intervene or not? How far can I go? He is an independent blogger, so I am not directly his editor who can pick and choose to post or not post his stuff, so I just post everything without any editing (unless I spot a typo which I fix). And much in his posts is good and definitely fun to read – he is a provocative blogger, and in those rare cases when he oversteps the line, commenters come in droves and try to set it straight – which is what the commenters are for, right?

So, should I be blogging about this particular case? What are my conflicts of interest? As an independent blogger I may feel I should rip the pieces apart, just like PZ and Coyne did it, and like I would have done a few years back. On the other hand, should I be ripping into my own blogger who I like a lot and want to promote?

Head hurts!