A debate with Amanda Marcotte on evolutionary psychology

Before anyone even thinks about this, they need to read Gender, Nature, and Nurture by Richard Lippa. He creates a hypothetical debate between Nature and Nurture which is very well done. Nurture has a bunch of arguments that sound "reasonable" and will be persuasive to audiences who are either close-minded or unfamiliar with the research literature, yet are actually sophistry. I would recommend having at least some sort of an answer to all of those points.

Defending evolutionary psychology in a debate is going to be very hard, because the playing field is so stacked. It's really easy to get nailed by skeptical sophistry or defeated by a King on the Mountain. In this case, the King would be arguing something like "male-female differences are socially constructed."

Appreciating the argument of evolutionary psychology, like evolution itself, requires thinking holistic and tying a lot of arguments and evidence together. This is difficult in a verbal debate, where a skilled sophist will take your statements and evidence in isolation and ridicule them without giving you a change to link them together into a bigger picture:

The amount of information that the King considers at one time is very small: one statement. He makes one decision at a time. He then moves on to the next attempted refutation, putting all previous decisions behind him. The broad panorama--of mathematical, spatial, and temporal relationships between many facts--that makes up the pro-evolution argument, which need to be viewed all at once to be persuasive, cannot get in, unless someone finds a way to package it as a one-step-at-a-time argument (and the King has patience to hear it). Where his opponent was attempting to communicate just one idea, the King heard many separate ideas to be judged one by one.