http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005738
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
http://pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1302997110

Psychology in general, and evolutionary psychology in particular, were once casually considered part of the scientific circle. I am not sure why, maybe it is a 'well, they are on our side against creationists' thing for biologists or a 'well, they are on our side against Republicans' thing for the rest of science academia.

Whatever the reason, when it came to protecting funding from the NSF or not letting surveys of psychology undergraduates get criticized too much, science academia pitched in to help. I can remember a time when I was just about the only person who went after evolutionary psychology for what it was; trying to link biological functions to all behavior.

Now, the tables have turned. Psychology is being shelled by so many different people I have to wonder how much is populist piling on, like blaming second-hand smoke for cancer or food types beating on sugar because the New York Times told them to do so.

The somewhat second-order Cold War between Science and Psychology recently went hot. Good luck finding a winner - for evolutionary psychology is one of my favorite outreach biologists, the author of "Why Evolution Is True", Prof. Jerry Coyne - no, really, he wrote one of the best consumer books on evolution you are ever going to read. Generally speaking, if he argued for Hitler and vampire babies, he would be pretty convincing. 

Against evolutionary psychology is Prof. P.Z. Myers, the anchor of Scienceblogs.com and legendary smiter of Religion and Republicans. (1)

But just this once Coyne is not very convincing and Myers is - yes, Myers is not letting some attach political motives to science beliefs while Coyne says that critics of evolutionary psychology are "both motivated by and justifying conservative political views like the marginalization of women". 

Wait, so anyone making fun of the notion that we evolved to like a certain car grill or that we evolved to dislike black women is against women and liberalism?  Give me a break.

Myers, by comparison, is positively enlightened: By slapping 'evolutionary' in front of psychology, he notes, they are trying to legitimize "a grandiose exercise in leaping to conclusions on inadequate evidence, it is built on premises that simply don’t work, and it’s a field that seems to doe a very poor job of training and policing its practitioners, so that it primarily serves as a dump for bad research that then supplies tabloids with a feast of garbage science that discredits the rest of us."

And questioning the motives of evolutionary psychology critics is just terrible logic, Myers notes. It's convenient nonsense that isn't worthy of scientists. I have never had a scientist claim I must be a conservative if I criticize psychology, it's all been psychologists and liberal bloggers who are defending their political allies. And among them it has happened a lot. Every point is invalid if you are not a registered Democrat. But they can't really claim that Myers is not a reliable liberal, he absolutely is. 

That's the best reason not to circle the wagons around something just because it calls itself science. It does not weaken science if practitioners cut off nonsense from the herd, it makes science much stronger in the eyes of the public.

Compare that to even a few years ago, when a Senator rightly called out the NSF for duplication and waste and funding junk social studies about playing Everquest. Scientists had the opportunity to get more funding for science just by doing nothing, but instead they defended absolute rubbish because it was a Republican doing the critique. That is the kind of crazy, partisan mistake that makes science and its $120 billion constituency look like just another PAC.

Even magazines like The American Conservative have taken notice of the sudden nuance among biologists. As Robert Long writes, they "are all secularists and atheists, showing that the disputes over evolutionary psychology are not a mere proxy war for other politics, but a genuine controversy over how the scientific community can account for our human nature."

NOTE:

(1) I know, I know, Steven Pinker is for it too. Let's stick to science.