I don't want to crank the lever and cry 'SCIENCE BRO!' as such, but if your book's title has the word 'science' in it, then - and I did judge the book by its cover - its theses adopt the verisimilitude of having stood up to the scientific method. Which is why the first chapter is, more or less, underpinned by a #critihype take on evolutionary psychology, a proposed subfield notorious for producing unfalsifiable just-so theories at a pace too rapid to be considered happenstance.

👆 That was irony, by the way.

Evopsych (a.k.a 'Darwinian psychology,' 'human sociobiology' and 'A Story of Science-Telling') presents itself as something you can't just casually unpick or disregard, like swiping past a video on social media you almost certainly know is full of #bullshit. It's a bundle of hypotheses about human cognition and behaviour that you can tell to your friends, family, and passersby on the street, and find them nodding in vague agreement. It sounds… truthy.

On the other hand, if you've heard anything about evopsych before, I'm 99% sure it's not because of the actual ideas it posits ("we are products of evolution" isn't a bad premise on the surface), but a certain *audience* those ideas attract. They're the sort of folk who claim that natural selection alone can prove we are genetically wired (read: destined) to seek out criminality, hierarchy, war, or greed; believe that, and they can make you believe much worse.

Not unlike the #Monomyth, starting with the TL;DR of Darwin's theories is more open-ended than you'd think, and this means it lends itself to being fertilizer for shithead ideologues to make their means to an end palatable. Not all evopsych enthusiasts see themselves as bedfellows with eugenicists, nor successors to the phrenologists before them, but if you *are* for #eugenics, then evopsych is the perfect smokescreen, and you might as well call yourself one to confuse everyone else.*

For example: This article from the July 16th 1993 edition of the Daily Mail, a UK newspaper hawkish for far-right policy and pretends its journalistic standards reflect "what everybody's thinking:"

https://archive.is/86YSW

A story that keeps the nuance of studies is not mutually exclusive with a story that makes your eyes glaze over, but the Mail, suffice it to say, believes it can't be done. Because it *won't* - the framing of this article is consistent with the party line since Lord Rothermere took ownership in the 1920s:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Daily_Mail#Viewpoints

The 'gay gene' palaver was a caricature of a study of genes that were *speculated* to have some small influence on male sexual orientation. This has failed to be replicated in future studies; until it has, the 'gay gene' argument fails the scientific method's most fundamental epistemological test - that what you say can be proven with an experiment that can be repeated.