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When Jerry steps out of his role of practicing scientist and into his role of spokesman about evolution for the general public, it's like Clark Kent transforming into Superman. Suddenly he's an authority on every subject and rounding up the criminals who don't agree with him left and right.

  

What happens when a scientist who writes for the general public doesn't do his or her homework on a particular topic? Unlike an academic article, which would be quickly rejected by the peer review process, the piece written for the general public tends to be accepted on the strength of the scientist's general reputation. So-and-so (insert Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Sarah Hrdy, P.Z. Myers, Joan Roughgarden, or myself) is a well-regarded scientist, so they must be telling the truth, or at least the closest that modern science has come to the truth.

  

Actually, not. The scientific process doesn't work that way, and writing about science for the general public won't either. The collection of cultural norms and practices loosely called the scientific method expects the individual scientist to be as conscientious and objective as possible, but also realizes that this is an impossible ideal, similar to the impossible Christian ideal of being as perfect as Jesus. That's why an entire cultural system is required for science to exist, including the peer review system. Even then it's a clunky process, like making laws and sausages, but it's the best method we have for apprehending the real world. And make no mistake--there is a real world that we distort with our beliefs at our own peril.

  

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released analysis of data revealing a major increase in the incidence of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) among children in the United States. The number of children between the ages of five and 17 reported by their parents to "have" ADHD or the non-hyperactive form of the disorder (ADD) had risen from 7 to 9 percent over a decade ending in 2009. Nine percent translates to 4,858,210 children according to 2010 U.S. Census data.
 
 In actuality, the researchers do not know for certain whether these children actually meet criteria for ADHD/ADD. The data is culled from a national telephone survey which asks parents the question, "whether or not a doctor or other health-care provider had ever told them that their child had attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactive disorder, that is, ADD or ADHD.'"

The upward trend continues. Given the current CDC data, one can safely estimate (based on previously detailed distribution curves) that one of six 11-year-old white boys with medical insurance currently take a stimulant drug at least during the school week.

The tuna is a strong, swift fish and an oceanic wanderer like all its tribe.

When tuna are at the surface, as they often are, they are proverbial for their habit of jumping, either singly or in schools;  they may do this when swimming about, or harrying smaller fishes, or less often, when traveling in a definite direction, in  which case all that are jumping do so in the same direction. 

 

Frank Mather, for instance, reports seeing a school of 200-pounders, jumping in unison, 2 or 3 feet clear of the water. When  large tuna jump, they sometimes fall flat, making a great splash, but they reenter the water a little head-first as a rule,  though they do not make as complete and graceful an arc in the air as the various oceanic kinds of porpoises usually do. When  schools, at the surface, are not jumping, they often splash a good deal and they are conspicuous then. We remember, for instance,  sighting a large school so employed, off the Cohasset shore at a distance of about 3 miles, on one occasion. Even if they  are neither jumping nor splashing, as is more commonly the case, the wakes that large ones leave behind them betray their  presence, if the sea is smooth. 

 

So developmental genetics, and evo devo, are fascinating areas that produce a stream of surprising discoveries. But they’ve done nothing to alter the going paradigm of neo-Darwinian evolution

By “evolutionary psychology” the authors are not addressing a field just at the intersection of evolutionary biology and psychology. Rather, they’re speaking to the group of scholars who came to the fore in the 1990s under the leadership of Leda Cosmides and John Toobey as UCSB

From what I can gather evolutionary psychology was very much a response to the sociobiology controversies of the 1970s. On the one hand there was a real scientific distinction. Many of the sociobiologists were fundamentally biologists dabbling in social theory, while evolutionary psychology was more often dominated by social scientists who took biology seriously