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David_Gerard comments on Open thread, August 5-11, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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It's absolutely the case that everything we are, evolved. But there's a certain gap between the hypothetical healthy field of evolutionary psychology and the one we actually have.
This sort of thing is why people make fun of ev psych. That's the 2008 study that claimed to find biological reasons for girls to like pink.
Of course, one bad study doesn't condemn a field - "peer reviewed" does not mean "settled science", it means "not-obviously-wrong request for comment." But this isn't a lone, outlier, rogue study - this shit's gathered 46 citations. (Compare citation averages for other fields.) (Edit: No, not all of the cites are positive.)
As it happens, we have full documentation that "girls=pink" dates back to the ... 1940s.
I think it deserves more fairness. The abstract only claims to have measured a "cross-cultural sex difference in color preference", making no claims about the sex difference's origin. They do speculate a bit about ev-psych in the body of the paper, but they begin this speculation with the words "We speculate" and then in the conclusion they say "Yet while these differences may be innate, they may also be modulated by cultural context or individual experience."
This, of course, isn't how it was reported in the mainstream media.
(By the way, thanks for actually linking to the paper you mentioned, it makes it a whole lot easier when people do this.)
The problem with that kind of phrasing is that we already know that cultural context can easily change the gender codes of blue and pink, because it already happened. If one doesn't assert that something evolutionarily significant happened at around the time of the cultural shift, then linking color preference to an inherent property of gender or sex is privileging the hypothesis.