> Luke demonstrates two things that drives me nuts about evolutionary
> psychology:
>
> 1. Confident predictions about what life must have been like for humans
> hundreds of thousands of years ago in diverse environments. We have
> absolutely no way of knowing whether or not male infertility was common
> in human prehistory.
A real biologist could probably provide the proof you want. But because I'm not a real biologist, I'll just say that I don't know of a single primate species that suffers from widespread infertility, and mankind's present troubles with infertility appear to stem mainly from man-made pollution. And once again, even if we were to assume present-day rates, the slight increase in reproductive potential yielded by additional sexual partners is vastly outweighed by the potential cost of turning off all prospective providers.
> 2. The naive assumption that there was one period of time (the EEA) in
> which human psychological traits "evolved". Again, this reflects a
> gross misunderstanding of the theory of evolution: all species are
> always under selection pressure; the EEA on this planet has been since
> the first life forms developed to the present day.
Actually, I use EEA in a slightly different sense--I mean pretty much everything that's occurred until modernity (let's arbitarily say when Christ supposedly died). There have changes over the last 2,000 years, to be sure, but nothing too drastic. (However, _it does_ stand to reason that our days as hunter-gatherers played a particularly huge role in our evolution, since the vast majority of humans were hunter-gatherers.)
Anyway, I know you're just trying to fight the good fight against ev-psych "just-so stories," but if I recall correctly, even Stephen Jay Gould conceded the promiscuity battle.
-- Luke