"But it is the kind of stuff that modern PUA or TFL guys latch on to and build their obnoxious philosophies around."
Im certain they do not understand and are only vaguely aware of to what they are referring.
The whole point of evo psych (or whatever you call it) is to start to turn psychology into a *real* science, as opposed to the load of made up shit that it was during the 20th century.
Media people + idiots of various stripes on the internet will grossly misinterpret pretty much *all* science based on their massively incomplete understanding of the area.
Yeah, evolutionary psychology has its place and I think there's probably a certain validity to some of the pure research but even the ostensibly academic stuff I've read that takes evopsych at face value all seems entirely credulous of too many things that I personally find lacking for me to tak it at face value.
It just seems to me that we're swapping "the load of made up shit that it was during the 20th century" for "the load of made up shit that it is during the 21st century" (biological determinism, computational theory of mind, rebranded Social Darwinsism, functionalism, almost entirely speculative ideas about prehistoric societies, and in the worst cases economic models of human behavior). It just raises way to many "theory that is popular because it gives a veneer of scientific legitimacy to the current status quo" red flags for me to approach it without a huge amount of skepticism.