I'm surprised this article is getting as positive feedback as it is. The author is clearly guilty of a pretty significant straw-man argument, presenting evolutionary biology in very simplified, extreme terms, casting it as essentially hardline biological determinism.

The author is clearly uncomfortable with the suggestion that violent and socially unacceptable actions may be very normal parts of human behavior (given the right environmental conditions) and seems very eager to validate any suggestion that we are "blank slates."

The idea that there is no such thing as human nature is patently ridiculous. Is there no such thing as dog, or elephant, or orangutan nature? If we accept that at least one important aspect of what a human being is is an evolutionarily-developed biological organism, than how can this also not apply to us? At the same time, the idea that we are hopelessly determined to express our instincts and innate drives in any one particular way is also surely not valid.

Are evo-psych researchers suggesting that the existence of genetic tendencies makes their (extreme) expression (via rape, murder, infanticide, etc.) acceptable? Clearly not, though that is what the author of the article is unavoidably hinting at with lines like "[l]et's not speculate on the motives that (mostly male) evolutionary psychologists might have in asserting that their wives are programmed to not really care if they sleep around..."

Her tone throughout the piece communicates the opinion that evol-psych proponents are just looking for excuses for bad behavior, something which I really don’t think is true. Understanding why bad behaviors are so common is not the same things as justifying them and, actually, seems like a more useful step towards making society better than arguing that they’re just the result of "bad" individuals or something.

Evolutionary biology is effective and meaningful when it is used to explain and account for the particular expression of some genetic tendency (in the form of an observed behavior.) It doesn’t make sense to argue that abuse of stepchildren, for instance, is an acceptable or inevitable thing in contemporary society for several reasons, including the fact that this particular expression of instinct is one we have deemed undesirable for moral/ethical reasons. The underlying idea, that we are genetically predisposed to care for our own offspring ahead of the offspring of others, though, seems a useful observation. Overall, theories like evo-psych are ways of understanding why things occur as they do, not a means of prescribing how they should or must be.

That being said, political ideologies like mainstream feminism and much of contemporary liberalism intentionally strive to deny the existence of human nature or instinct because it doesn’t fit into their worldviews, more so than because it really appears not to be present, I suspect. They start with an abstract idea of how things "should" be and work backwards from there, rather than trying to understand why we are the way we are and then working forward from that. There seems to me a significant weakness and danger in drawing a blind spot upon our underlying motivations and darker, biological imperatives.