Highlights include:

One of the authors has been dead for 4 years, and the other one got in the shit last year for publishing an article that rather charmingly suggested that Africans are poor because they’re stupid.

I prefer the dead one, personally.

Anastasia: I’m surprised you can’t recall any academic with an active outside life. Most academics I know have as broad a set of interests as anyone else and are just as likely to hold forth on the weekend’s footy results or the latest movies as they are to talk about their work. Also, the Skinner school of psychology dealt largely with rats and the “black box” model of mind, but it’s not true of psychology in general. I’d point anyone who thinks psychology is an academic wasteland to two of the most important scientific studies ever undertaken: Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram’s studies of authority — both undertaken on human subjects. If the US military had taken the effort to understand these studies, there would have been no Abu Ghraib scandal.

Olivia: IMHO the problem with evolutionary psychology is the ease with which people incorporate shaky hypotheses as self-evident explanations of human behaviour, usually with a large degree of wish fulfilment. I was particularly taken by this exemplary quote from the introduction to Tooby and Cosmides’s 2005 Introduction to Evolutionary Psychology: “The programs comprising the human mind were designed by natural selection … Knowing this allows evolutionary psychologists to approach the study of the mind like an engineer.” Now, it seems to me that the history of psychology has been terribly unkind to people who tried to co-opt engineering principles to the subject, and so has evolutionary theory (imagined engineering is the fallacy at the root of intelligent design). I guess that Tooby and Cosmides want to believe that evolutionary approaches to psychology bring nice reductive tools to the scientist’s kit. They seem to be unaware of the difficulty that evolutionary theorists have in deciding the adaptive qualities of many anatomical and molecular features of simpler creatures than humans. I believe that any given hypothesis in evolutionary psychology, no matter how ingenious and seductive, has an awful lot of uphill trudging to be accepted as an established explanation.

I agree that evolutionary biology is a fascinating field that lends itself to misinterpretation by idiots.

You can replace a lack of training with hard work and good ethics, on a story by story basis.

Get a trustworthy source, check your source, double check your source and then check what you’ve written with your source to make sure you’ve written what they think they’ve said.

And then you need to avoid giving in to temptation to duchess the story to sex it up – well written science stories are interesting to a broader audience anyway, but if you’re lazy and lack ethics it’s an easy thing to cut corners.

(Although, in defence of some of my colleagues who are neither lazy nor unethical, I should also point out that writing good science stories takes time, and some publications simply don’t give their science and medicine journos the resources they need to do a proper job. Having had to say: ‘Fuck it, it’ll have to do’ a couple of times as deadlines loom myself, I know how easy it is to be in that position.)

I think there is a place for magazines and news services that interpret what the research community is doing for the general community – it’s just that Pschology Today appears to be doing a particularly execrable job of it.