Congrats, Tom! Well deserved!

That’s interesting, which ones?

Sorry to tell you that evolutionary psychology continues to flourish.

Political psychology, incidentally, is a domain of great evolutionary psychology work (see work from Michael Bang Peterson et al.)

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

😂. I'm quite happy that many people in America assume I'm mafia affiliated based on my surname!

Thanks, I agree that there’s nothing unique to EP about obstruction.

Also, do you think the flagrant hostility toward evolutionary psychologists might also drive some young scholars away and perhaps cultivate a somewhat defensive mindset among those who stay?

Like any field, many terrible studies and bad actors abound.

Glad to hear you don’t count me among them 🫡

You may be blinded by my sheer sex appeal though 😂😜

ya maybe.

Could also see Walter et al. (2020) failed replication of the greater importance of physical attractiveness in highly pathogenic environments.

Anyway, stay tuned for more inwardly critical work and pre-registered predictions from our lab coming soon. Thanks again for the review(s) 👍

I guess I don't interpret him developing a full competing theory (mate switching) when a hypothesis he originally endorsed (ovulation shifts/dual mating) was falsified as an "uneasy Burgfrieden".

See also his initial chastity mate preference hypothesis being unsupported by his own data.

Nitpicking but both items closer to 3/5 means than 2.

I suppose more research could clarify precisely what scholars mean when they endorse the items “evolutionary psychology’s theories are unfalsifiable” & “assumptions are not testable”.

bsky.app/profile/will...

Finally, that evolutionary psychologists are unwilling to challenge our “friends” is demonstrably false.

My supervisor has well documented disagreements with his former student about dual mating V mate switching and Martin Daly about adaptations for murder.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

It’d have been nice if you raised the @adamrutherford.bsky.social citation concerns in your review. Perhaps you did and we neglected to rectify, the paper was a long time in the works. Many other contemporary examples we could have chosen, but apologies to Rutherford if he feels mischaracterized.

I am confused by your seeming to distancing yourself from falsifying a key prediction (ovulation shifts) stemming from the dual mating hypothesis.

Were these not critical tests of that hypothesis?

bsky.app/profile/rube...

Accusations of panadaptationism have been dealt with thoroughly throughout the decades.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20141266/

Our lab is from an adaptationist tradition, but we do highlight other evolutionary forces in our paper.

Challenging misconceptions is not all evolutionary psychologists do. We publish data in support of pre-registered hypotheses and have work that is much more self-critical of our field. Not all our work can be published all at once. We do discuss some areas for improvement in this already long paper.

I think it is misguided to think that evolutionary psychology should just tolerate widespread misconceptions and that the they will be resolved by being more self-critical and having more pre-registration (although these are of course important).

bsky.app/profile/rube...

I don't think our paper is "aimed at YouTubers"

We cited fairly recent empirical data (Jonason & Schmitt, 2016) about academics beliefs about EP’s falsifiability.

We had one line on a popular YouTube video (concerningly championed by some evolutionary social scientists).

bsky.app/profile/will...

I'm a graduate student preparing to go on the job market. I care a great deal about the (mis)conceptions about our field that pervade academia and cultural consciousness.

I think challenging this misconception in a broad psych journal is worthwhile.

You are free to disagree.

Thanks for this, will respond to a few points in a little while.