everything after #1 makes me twitch-- most of the evolutionary psychology stuff i run across appears to be, as you say, justifications for racist or sexist behavior, and moreover usually appears to me to be justifications for those behaviors in one specific culture. it's easy to make up a just-so story for any behavior and justification you can think of, but that doesn't make it true, and if you're claiming it's due to something inherently true about all humans it would be nice to at least show it's true across all human cultures.

that said, james flynn has had a lot to say about how tiny hereditary relative differences in abilities of one sort or another could lead to large differences in behavior.

I actually have no problem with it, except maybe #5, which I would like to see some studies of because I think that would be really hard to study. But I never saw EP as the drive for racism that many other people interpret it as. In fact, I think it's so logical and even anti-racist and anti-sexist. To say it is racist or genderist is to assume that EP is complete, that it is no longer progressing, which I think is a major leap and almost definitely not true.

If it is continuing, we know from evolution that we need one thing to ensure the proper survival of our species: diversity. We need a diversity of all the forms of psychology that EP has given us. All the ones in existence today have been successful to date, but EP is continuing, so we need that diversity for future days.

I do see the advent of a new multi-gender society already taking place, and I think it is another step in EP, though I'm no expert so I don't know how it happened to come about.

But really, you can imagine EP is a very simple though process. For instance, a bunch of settlers come to the U.S. They have nothing to eat at first but moldy food or food with bugs, say. People who are squeemish to a fault might not eat and therefore would die. For liekly, they wouldn't have made the voyage in the first place. So then I wonder if there's a reason why many of my European friends don't like convertable and roller coasters where most of my American friends do. Could it be this? Then I found that Northern Europeans are very adventurous; it's the Eastern Europeans who tend not to be. Is this cultural, then? What about someone with 100% Eastern European blood raised in the U.S.? And that's where my issue with #5 comes up. I think it's nearly impossible to see the EP through the culture of a person. So in essence, this is the nature versus nurture on a larger-scale setting, I think, and just as difficult to settle.

Like Skeptics, I find that a lot of my problem with EPers is not with the basic theory but with their baseline assumptions and extrapolations. For instance, most EPers work from the assumption that men brought home most food and women only scavenged for small amounts, when evidence from tribal societies *and* the experiences of westerners who go back to the land strongly suggests otherwise. (Men may be bringing home smaller amounts of a more highly valued food, but that's still a different dynamic)

Also, they tend to say "Well, you have to acknowledge the problem to solve it", but fail to explain why their view of the problem necessitates a different answer. I.e. if rape is evolutionarily rather than societally driven, does that really mean that telling people that it's not okay to rape *now* (which we don't. Not in a society where articles claiming that women should expect to be raped if they dress in a sexy manner and get drunk still get published in mainstream papers. There's just too many loopholes that allow rape to honestly say we're sending a clear message on this) and punishing people for raping won't work? What is the difference in effective strategy implied by EP analysis? Most of the time this question gets ignored entirely (the implication often seems to be "rape is natural and inevitable, so women should just quit whining about it and enjoy it") and even when it is addressed the conclusions don't seem to be any different.

Also, nature vs nurture is a red-flipping-herring. It's both in complex relationship, over and over and over again.