I missed this in 2011 - I don't use Google or any other sort of vanity search tool to know when someone talks about me. But I finally saw it today.
Robert Kurzban, an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote at the time that my critical pieces about the field were because I don't know anything about the field, so I figure I will give him a link. I mean, he has a point - but it is limited. I could not have found the Higgs Boson, for example, but I know it won't lead to time travel so if I debunk people who claim magical cause and effect, it would be silly for someone who wants HEP to be magic to claim I am not a HEP expert and can't prove it won't lead to time travel.
The real problem with the argument, he lists 4 Useful Tips, all of which are cleverly the same thing, is the same problem with evo psych; cleverness is where it starts and ends, there isn't a lot of substance, and that afflicts a number of psychology papers that rely on creating a premise for media attention and then engage in opportunistic observation, voodoo correlations and lots of other causal inference errors. I have hope for psychology, as I have said any times, because young people who have entered the field have seen it is rife with dodgey methodology and are tripping up their superiors and getting them thrown out.
But he has a point that I don't really understand evolutionary psychology. What he leaves out is that no one understands evolutionary psychology, including evolutionary psychologists - it is a meaning different even to people in the field, because it has no real theoretical framework. That is why it is not science. He says at one point a paper I talked about was not evolutionary psychology. Well, the author disagreed. I certainly get that social psychologists are an even bigger mess but anyone who insists all biology has functions and that behavior has a biological hook is talking about evolutionary psychology. So it's possible to criticize me for calling something evolutionary psychology - but the time would be better spent telling psychologists not to invoke evolution.
I suppose I got off easy, he didn't call me a Creationist Of The Mind.
Link: Four Useful Tips For Our Friends At Science 2.0 by Robert Kurzban, EPJournal.net
Four Useful Tips For Science 2.0 From An Evolutionary Psychologist