Wahoo! My first downvoted-to-negative-territory post.

(Here I'm attempting to convince my S1 that this is actually good à la "if you don't make mistakes, you're not trying difficult-enough things." S2 is already on board.)

The problem, I think, with making pop evo-psych assertions without a solid foundation of comprehensive and well-explained research does not go away even when the assertions are not outlandish: we don't have a mechanism to judge these ideas other than common sense (or, in the worst case [not shown here], a misleadingly narrow selection of research).

This means that, while evo-psych may provide an interesting framework, it may also reinforce our existing preconceptions and give us false confidence in our conclusions. The outside view says that unsupported evo-psych assertions are likely to be wrong; I think that in many cases in which they are not wrong, they are not wrong for reasons independent of the inclusion of evo-psych itself. Whatever mechanism you used to judge that these particular theories were reasonable was probably sufficient without bringing in evo-psych. I think this post is a useful way of calling attention to certain human tendencies without it.

In general, however, I've really enjoyed your mini sequence and encourage you to keep up the good work.

I clicked +1 because it acknowledged what it is, which is pop evo-psych. It did not claim to be anything more than this.

I've no idea whether any of the evo-psych "explanations" in here are correct, and suspect you haven't really either, but it was fun to read. And (handwave handwave) even a wrong theory can be useful if its consequences resemble those of the nearest correct theory, so even if pop-evo-psych is badly wrong it may be "right enough" to be useful as a hypothesis generator, a mnemonic aid, and an intuition pump ("images of hooting apes") -- provided you bear in mind that for all you know it might in fact be quite wrong.