Well, evolutionary psychology can claim to explain anything but even evo psych has to make a big leap to claim responsibility for belief that bigger government will make the world Utopia. And I am happy to slap progressives, since I am a liberal socially and a conservative fiscally and progressives are in triangular opposition to both, as I have discussed before regarding science, but it just doesn't pan out in this case.
The usual group in science, who will be primarily progressives yet call themselves liberals because that word enrages Rush Limbaugh, will object to the word 'progressive' being bandied about and go off on that, and I can't imagine the tailspin bloggers at Psychology Today are in if evo psych is under cultural fire (fortunately, few of them there are actually psychologists so they might not have noticed) but I am going to stick to the issue and not go off on a cultural rant, since a whole legion of science bloggers will do that.
A 'science of morality' always had sort of a vague, non-sciencey feel to it. Steven Pinker can sure turn a phrase but declaring an age of understanding "the psychology and biology of morals" seemed a bit ahead of itself and more philosophy than grounded in evidence. So other than some ridicule we mostly let it slide. As Gary Taubes said in an interview here
I used to joke with my friends in the physics community that if you want to cleanse your discipline of the worst scientists in it, every three or four years, you should have someone publish a bogus paper claiming to make some remarkable new discovery — infinite free energy or ESP, or something suitably cosmic like that. Then you have it published in a legitimate journal ; it shows up on the front page of the New York Times, and within two months, every bad scientist in the field will be working on it. Then you just take the ones who publish papers claiming to replicate the effect, and you throw them out of the field. A way of cleaning out the bottom of the barrel.The Wall Street Journal seems to dislike evolutionary psychology for more cultural reasons - if people cooperated in the early days, then capitalism and competition are not superior to that darling of aging progressives, socialism. Conservatives go more for Darwin because the fitter prosper and get jobs in radio. Eric Felten at the Wall Street Journal Opinion section writes
Not so long ago, the initial bloom already was off evolutionary psychology. The field earned a bad name by appearing to justify all sorts of nasty, rapacious behaviors, including rape, as successful strategies for Darwinian competition. But the second wave of the discipline solved that PR problem by discovering that evolution favored those with a more progressive outlook.That's a strange way to look at progressives, who I generally think are bad for science because insisting on fairness, artificial or otherwise, leads to bad science and good science requires both freedom and excellence while fairness is averse to both of those. It seemed to me that evolutionary psychology was (a) basically making stuff up and (b) mapping research data into a cultural topology it wanted (and it turned out the big name in the field was even making up the data), so maybe that is what Felten means. Certainly we all agree fad science is bad science, like in the Cold Fusion instance that inspired the Taubes quote above.
Evo psych proponents may still feel like they are onto something - it might not be a bad world psychologically if we could strip out religious people on one side and post-modernists on the other, as evolutionary psychology would make possible - it would simply be a lot more boring.
Instead of hammering on evolutionary psychology some more by making it the preferred brand of psych for progressives, we can just let it die a natural death. As Frans de Waal said when asked by Nature what impact the Hauser controversy will have, "It is disastrous." So the field will die without any help from the Wall Street Journal. Or us.
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