Thank you for explaining your point of view. I agree that if you don't know anything about a person other than that they are talking about evolutionary psychology, that is good evidence that they are a misogynist douchebag who is using it as an excuse to be a misogynist douchebag.
However, reversed stupidity is not intelligence. The fact that there are despicable people using a particular branch of science to justify their behavior is not strong evidence for or against the truth of the results in that branch of science. Lots of people have very silly ideas about quantum mechanics, but that doesn't mean that quantum mechanics is broken.
I think I am not too far off the mark when I say that generally speaking, on LessWrong we aspire to judge ideas based on how right they are and not based on how much we dislike the people who have historically held ideas superficially similar to those ideas.
I wasn't saying I was basing my opinions based on that, but that the context that people are coming from-- being treated like shit by people on the internet who profess to be using evolutionary psychology but are really using pseudoscientific bullshit to defend the fact that they are misogynist and/or racist asswagons-- often is why people have such an emotional reaction to evolutionary psychology when brought up, particularly when it's brought up in discussions of sex, gender, race, and sexuality. It's not something against evolutionary psychology as a wh...
I don't mean to claim that there should be a conflict.
Most likely the conflict arises because of many things, such as 1)Women having been ostracized for much of our society's existence 2)People failing at the is-ought problem, and committing the Naturalistic Fallacy 3)Lots of media articles saying unbelievably naïve evolutionary statements as scientific fact 4)Feminists as a group being defensive 5)Specially defensive when it comes to what is said to be natural. 6) General disregard by people, and politically engaged people (see The Blank Slate, by Steve Pinker) of the existence of a non Tabula Rasa nature. 7) Lack of patience of Evolutionary Psychologists to make peace and explain themselves for the things that journalists, not them, claimed. and others...
But the fact is, the conflict arose. It has only bad consequences as far as I could see, such as people fighting over each other, breaking friendships, and prejudice of great intensity on both sides.
How to avoid this conflict? Should someone write a treatise on Feminist Evolutionary Psychology? Should we get Leda Cosmides to talk about women liberation?
There are obviously no incompatibilities between reality and the moral claims of feminism. So whichever facts about evolutionary psychology are found to be true with the science's development, they should be made compatible. Compatibilism is possible.
But will the scientific community pull it off?
Related: Pinker Versus Spelke - The Science of Gender and Science
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html
David Buss and Cindy Meston - Why do Women Have Sex?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0sqg3EHm8