“For the most part, yes. Socio-economics (all social behaviors, including economic) are psychological in origin. ”

No they are not “in origin.” Economics springs from environmental conditions – does the soil support crops? is the weather good? are there useful metals in the ground? Can the local fauna be domesticated?

The behaviors – and psychology – originate in the human biological response to these realities.

In the most simple terms – if you don’t get enough nutrients – which is an environmental factor first, and a social factor second – you could end up with brain damage which will most certainly impact your psychology.

Everything can be said to be biological because we are biological creatures. But the outrageous claims made by evolutionary psychologists based on bad reasoning and even worse empirics invents a whole other world, completely independent of the actual environmental conditions and bio-psychological constants that reign on THIS planet.

But then we know what planet evolutionary psychologists thinke we are from – men are from Mars and women are from Venus. And other such simplistic fairy tales.

Socio-economic conditions that developed in a less-than-evolutionary time-frame led to women becoming “peacocks” not some mysterious evolved genetic condition – the evidence of which neither you nor any evolutionary psychologist has EVER demonstrated. Because your standards of evidence are “it makes sense” and case closed.

It’s astounding that anybody with an education beyond the eight grade gives any credence to evolutionary psychology twaddle.

But it’s such a typical evolutionary psychology attitude – once you identify a human behavior – the mere ACT OF IDENTIFYING IT PROVES it’s innate, evolved and biological as far as you’re concerned.”

For the most part, yes. Socio-economics (all social behaviors, including economic) are psychological in origin. Our tendencies, actions, and reactions are the results of our psychology. Which is of an organic nature, and is part of our biology. If it’s something that humans do, it has a root in human biology. We have much more refined minds than other animals, but that doesn’t free us from being products of our evolution, any more than other animals, with their own tendencies, are products of their own. We are what we do. I’m not saying that in a presciptive sense that certain behaviors aren’t repugnant, but descriptively, everything that humans do is part of our heritage, things we’ve evolved the ability and to certain degrees a tendency to do.

But it’s such a typical evolutionary psychology attitude – once you identify a human behavior – the mere ACT OF IDENTIFYING IT PROVES it’s innate, evolved and biological as far as you’re concerned.

That’s why evolutionary psychology is so often accused of “just-so” stories – you see a human behavior and then you invent a biological reason for it, completely ignoring every other possible explanation – economics, tradition, habitat, chance, etc. etc.

And as far as that “women prefer different mates” study – if it hasn’t been debunked yet, it’s just a matter of time before it will be, just like another study so beloved of evolutionary psychologists, the “symmetrical men” study, which is looking more and more like so much overwrought EP imagination:

“In the three years following, there were ten independent tests of the role of fluctuating asymmetry in sexual selection, and nine of them found a relationship between symmetry and male reproductive success. It didn’t matter if scientists were looking at the hairs on fruit flies or replicating the swallow studies—females seemed to prefer males with mirrored halves. Before long, the theory was applied to humans. Researchers found, for instance, that women preferred the smell of symmetrical men, but only during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle. Other studies claimed that females had more orgasms when their partners were symmetrical, while a paper by anthropologists at Rutgers analyzed forty Jamaican dance routines and discovered that symmetrical men were consistently rated as better dancers.

Then the theory started to fall apart. In 1994, there were fourteen published tests of symmetry and sexual selection, and only eight found a correlation. In 1995, there were eight papers on the subject, and only four got a positive result. By 1998, when there were twelve additional investigations of fluctuating asymmetry, only a third of them confirmed the theory. Worse still, even the studies that yielded some positive result showed a steadily declining effect size. Between 1992 and 1997, the average effect size shrank by eighty per cent.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer#ixzz1D1VoGhSp

And as far as this:

“Makes sense as a reproductive strategy, finding genes for sons that will have the most luck passing their genes, while keeping providers around to increase the odds of survival of herself and her children.
”

No, it doesn’t make sense, since humans live in groups, and it is NEVER as simple as mating with a “manly” man at certain times in a cycle.

But of course the fact that evolutionary psychology theories are so extremely simplistic is exactly why they are so popular. Very little actual knowledge or analysis of the way that actual humans lived at various times is needed – you just assume they lived like the Flintstones – because it “makes sense” to you based on your own cultural mores.

Again, we can make moral judgments, but from a naturalistic, evolutionary standpoint, the behaviors of neither sex are better or worse than rampant duck rape or mantis post-coital cannibalism.

“Unlike birds, humans DO exchange goods and services for currency – and for much of human history women were prevented from controlling money and a woman’s survival depended on being married off to a man – it was imperative that she looked as good as possible in order to do so.”

The way that you separate behaviors (like trade and social interaction)) from psychology (a subset of biology) is interesting. As I understand it, one is the product of the other.

“I think it’s reasonable to believe that the socioevolutionary model is borne out empirically.”

Just because you think “it’s reasonable to believe” it is borne out does not prove that it is borne out.

And your reasoning is flawed to boot –

“You yourself make the point that certain behaviors have been prevalent “throughout history”- shouldn’t this tell us something? Biology informs culture; culture does does exist in a vacuum, absent of biology.”

The cultural phenomenon of exchanging goods and services for currency has also existed “throughout history” – that tells us exactly nothing about biology informing culture.

And this is laughable:

“Women just happen to be the peacocks of the species, not the pea hens. Like the pea hen, women possess certain traits which are not developed for optimal individual survival, but which affect the livelihood of genes in the long run. It’s not wrong or right that there’s a difference between peacocks and pea hens; sexual dimorphism (physical and psychological) simply exists, quite apart from any notions of fairness or equality.”

No, women don’t just “happen” to be peacocks.

Unlike birds, humans DO exchange goods and services for currency – and for much of human history women were prevented from controlling money and a woman’s survival depended on being married off to a man – it was imperative that she looked as good as possible in order to do so.

This again, tells us nothing about biology – except the very basics, that men are stronger than women and therefore can hurt women more easily than vice-versa, and that women are also at a disadvantage during pregnancy.

Men have taken their basic physical advantages and ran with them – from developing cultures in which you can kill a woman if she offends her family’s “honor” right up to the development of a feeble “science” of evolutionary psychology that seeks to bolster the belief that male dominance is “natural” – and that female peacocking is a result of nature and not instead the very specific efforts on the part of male dominated culture to force females to strut their stuff in order to get married off to the highest bidder.

The fact that what you believe to be innate – human females being peacocks – is wrong, dead wrong, AND it is proven wrong by the fact that as women come increasingly into economic independence – which we have over the last 20 years, women are increasingly hooking up with younger men – and younger men are spending more time and effort to make themselves look good than ever before.

Women now have the luxury to choose mates based on youth and beauty – the way men always had. Women are striking at the very heart of male privilege by doing so – which is why evolutionary psychology, with its claims that male privilige is bestowed through biology, is so popular among social conservatives.

Of course the old ways are still powerful – it takes time to alter the course of human cultural customs – and females forced to sell themselves in the basis of their appearance is thousands of years old and is still going on in some cultures to this very day – families selling little girls to old men in marriage in order to settle a family debt, for instance.

But it IS changing – and in a time-span that is far less than evolutionary.

And as time goes by, the claims of evolutionary psychology will continue to die a flaming death as a result of such empirical evidence. I’ve already seen it happen – the EPs used to claim that women were more naturally monogamous than men (some still do) but genetic testing demonstrated that so many married women had given birth to children who were biologically unrelated to the their husbands.

And that only represents the times when infidelity resulted in birth, and there was genetic testing. This is only a tip of the female infidelity iceberg – so the best-informed evolutionary psychology promoters have quietly dropped the woman monogamous claim.

But as always, it takes some people a long time to catch up.

Women just happen to be the peacocks of the species, not the pea hens. Like the pea hen, women possess certain traits which are not developed for optimal individual survival, but which affect the livelihood of genes in the long run. It’s not wrong or right that there’s a difference between peacocks and pea hens; sexual dimorphism (physical and psychological) simply exists, quite apart from any notions of fairness or equality.

What you are really saying is that since men have used their physical/social advantages to control female sexuality, leading to great penalties throughout history for any woman who were “seekers” of sex – this justifies the continued privileging of hetero male points of view.

If any faction is about politics – and right-wing politics – it’s the faction that promotes evolutionary psychology fairy tales for the benefit of bolstering patriarchal traditions. Which is exactly what you have just done.

It’s not politically correct to point out that women and men have evolved, adapted (physically and psychologically) to different social and reproductive pressures, but it’s important to remember that equality in everything is an abstract, not a natural truth or occurrence.

Likewise, just as “Lust” is personified as from a male perspective, this strikes me as reasonable since men are more likely lusters. This is far from saying that women don’t lust, but men are much more often the seekers in human reproductive strategy, rather than the sex that more often plays the “withhold and choose” card.