[api]

When I'm skeptical of evo psych, I am not arguing that gender or sex hormones have no effect on the brain. That would be silly... there's abundant evidence that they do.

What I'm being skeptical about is that we can take that all the way out to surface characteristics and then make blanket statements, or that we can concoct untestable fables based in current evolutionary models and then use those to justify those blanket statements.

There certainly is gender dimorphism (the right term) in humans, but it's also very hard to separate genes/development, environment, and culture. It's also very hard to go from the cellular and hormonal level all the way up to, say, how people tend to behave in job interviews.

The reason I get so skeptical in these areas is that history teaches us that human beings will rationalize their prejudices using whatever system of belief they find around them. Historically that's usually been religion, hence it use to rationalize gender and racial stereotypes. Now we live in a scientific age (supposedly), so we should be on guard for pseudoscientific attempts to do the same with scientific-sounding language. Indeed the "social Darwinists" were on that beat a century ago already. So whenever I smell an attempt to explain or justify a social prejudice or a class system, my skeptic hat goes on.

That was rambling... need coffee..