I found this article about evolutionary psychology insights into the behaviour of underprivileged classes to be rather interesting. 

This article, about supposedly-human traits that have been found in animals, is also rather interesting.

These articles, along with an excellent book I read recently entitled "The Biological Roots of Human Nature" by Timothy Goldsmith, convince me that there really needs to be a clearer distinction between evolutionary psychology and evolutionary pop psychology.

I think evolutionary psychology makes a fair point that it is kind of ridiculous to assume that the body can evolve but the mind cannot.  In fact, the point is so obvious to me now that it's been made, and the contrary (that human beings are somehow magically different from other animals) so obviously an implicit nod to anthropocentric religious assumptions that I feel slightly ashamed to not have embraced this point before.  i.e. if one says that everything is cultural, in a sense this means never having to posit a first cause for cultural behaviours, and thus providing an incomplete explanation.

I also think, increasingly, that there is something to be said for the analysis that this point of view offers re: social issues.  i.e. why reject info about why people act the way they do?  Goldsmith's book has a lot about male vs. female strategies for propagating genes - a male most effectively propagates his genes by spreading them widely, whereas the female's approach seems more based in quality over quantity - and how the difference in strategy could explain many stereotypical differences between men and women.  At the same time, he says pretty explicitly that understanding the basis for something is one thing, what to do about it is a different question: i.e. no assumption that just because something is the way it is, that it should be that way.

By contrast, I find that with evolutionary pop psychology, the tendency is much more to imply that because something is the way it is, therefore it should be that way, and/or that one is authorized to look at those to whom the generalization doesn't apply as somehow flawed, not "real" men/women or etc.  This is the sort of bullshit one often sees in papers on slow news days, where the claim is that women like pink because it's the color of the berries they gathered in prehistoric times (never mind that the association of women with pink is neither universal across cultures, nor a historical constant even within Western culture), or that men are intrinsically attracted to some-female-body-type-that-is-so-fucking-obviously-not-universally-attractive.  (In some African cultures, "you are fat" is a compliment - a point rather confusing to one female student I know who lived over there for awhile.)

I find that whenever these articles appear in mainstream news media, as opposed to scientific journals, they have any number of rather glaring flaws.  I think the one that pisses me off the most is the tendency to do these tiny studies with small numbers of people, all of whom are usually of the same culture, race and sometimes even age, and then generalize to the whole human race.  Like, does it not occur to you for half a second that maybe you should check whether other cultures actually share this element or not?  Does this not seem a little bit "we white North Americans are real human beings, all those coloured people there aren't important anyway!"?

I also find it annoying when such articles are written in such a way as to imply "if you are like this, you are normal and you don't need to question at all whether there are any problems with your behaviour."  Often this is combined with the previous issue, e.g. implying it is "natural" for all men to be attracted to barely-pubescent 14-year-old-girl bodies - totally ignoring that other cultures do not have that norm - without any consideration of, however natural that may be, how is it that this type is so common in our culture and not in others?  Could the media be a factor in choosing this nature-justified possibility (e.g. thin = not pregnant = time to get to work on that!) over some other equally nature-justified possibility (e.g. fat = capable of bearing a healthy child)?  Nah, let's say that it's all nature so that there is no need to question existing power-structures. /sarcasm

It seems like real evolutionary psychology understands these complexities just fine.  Goldsmith for example does draw upon multiple cultures as well as comparisons to different patterns of sexual behaviour amongst animals in making his case, which is why I find it fairly convincing.  Yet I really do not get the impression that your average shitty "men are attracted to x, women are attracted to y - it's science, so people who read this article are now authorized to act like you're either a freak or don't really know yourself if you don't match these stereotypes" article does this. 

I admit, what people do with the information may well be more the fault of those people being sexist/racist/whatever and looking for an excuse than it does with the article itself; perception of tone there could be my own delusion.  However, I firmly stand by the other problem re: lazy sampling.  I also think it is really naive to believe that the people who do these studies are always motivated purely by scientific curiosity and "the truth," when it seems obvious to me that gendered power structures are reliant upon first being able to put people into fairly hard-and-fast categories... categories which can be made to look all the more hard-and-fast when one brings "nature" into the matter. 

On a similar note: Frankly I think people are brutal at lazily assuming some kind of ultimate, eternal and perfect factuality as soon as they think that something is "natural."  It's therefore my opinion that, if an intellectual is talking about evolutionary psychology to the masses and cares about avoiding this, they really ought to remind people often that they are not saying that nature is everything, and offer some clear examples of other possible influences.  I really think the psychology of people is such that they are inclined, for whatever reason, to conflate "nature is one cause" with "nature is the whole cause" otherwise.  I therefore think that if an intellectual doesn't clarify which one they mean, they kind of have less right to complain if, due to the public taking it as "nature is the whole cause" and parroting that all over the place, other intellectuals less acquainted with evolutionary psychology assume that it is all pop psychology and therefore bullshit. 

To me, this is a lot like how if you are a "shock" band (e.g. Marilyn Manson, Insane Clown Posse, whatever) and a bunch of your fans use their fandom as an excuse to be assholes, and you don't criticize it, then yeah it's not fair for people to assume that you and all the nice fans are also assholes, but duh, knowing how people's minds work why wouldn't you expect that end result?

I know that I have a lot of instinctual resistance toward evolutionary psychology, and I think this is partly because of my absolute hatred of people using "I'm only human" as an excuse for their failings. 

However hardwired a response may be, it still seems to me that some human beings give into such responses without even trying, while others are capable of more insight into why they act the way they do and put effort into overcoming irrational, self-contradictory or destructive urges.  This implies to me that human beings still have responsibility for their actions.  I don't think that evolutionary psychologists deny this, in fact I know some I've read explicitly affirm it. 

But I really don't like the prospect for people to use evolutionary psychology to justify behaviour that, regardless of its evolutionary fittingness, I have other reasons to see as unfair, unjust, obnoxious or etc.  For example, I could see someone making an argument based on Goldsmith's view that it is less ethically objectionable for men to cheat than for women to.  Yeah, I get it, that's not Goldsmith's fault, and I can say that wholeheartedly because I think he goes out of his way to say that he's not endorsing any particular social arrangement, as opposed to how some of these guys don't really say one way or another and you're just supposed to "know", because they're scientists, that surely they couldn't possibly have an agenda.  But it still makes me uncomfortable - the worry that, above all, it will magically turn out that everything that is evolutionarily sound just happens to undermine women's self-determination, by chance, no offense to women! /sarcasm - and I do have trouble keeping that separate from the the raw data being offered by evolutionary psychologists at times.

I'm working on it though.  It's good to have friends who are both effective and patient at explaining things, and who at least try to be empathetic toward such resistances instead of just acting like they are unreasonable.