I absolutely adore the way SurveyFail is being shot down by academics and generally sensible people both inside and outside of fandom. I'm not really active at all in online fandom (though I so should be because it's an awesome place), but I still count it as one of mine. Same with academia, even though I'm a small tiny noob academic.

But really. I spent three years learning about digging up dead people's leftovers, and even I could tell how badly designed their research was. Never mind offensive. (And I was giving them the benefit of the doubt at first, because I'm just a nice person like that and like to make up my own mind.)

This article is a nice summary, I think:
I’m posting on this mainly because I’m wondering why the researchers have not apologised far more abjectly for having blundered into a community so ill-prepared - and possibly having ignored basic legal requirements and professional ethical standards governing their research. I am wondering if they are simply failing to register how devastating are the critiques being made of their work - perhaps because they are assuming these critiques have arisen defensively, due to strong affective attachments and loyalties within this particular community - or perhaps because they have “othered” this community so much that they aren’t sufficiently open to how badly they are being schooled here.

It's great to realise that there's actually a ton of smart people on the internets, and sometimes they actually manage to smack down the stupid. Even if the stupid in question seems to be too ignorant to actually see what's going on.


Also I've found some cool stuff while doing related link-hopping, like Victorian sex factoids.

Also this article in Newsweek, which is really satisfying.

But evo psych's claims that human behavior is constrained by mental modules that calcified in the Stone Age make sense "only if the environmental challenges remain static enough to sculpt an instinct over evolutionary time," Pigliucci points out. If the environment, including the social environment, is instead dynamic rather than static—which all evidence suggests—then the only kind of mind that makes humans evolutionarily fit is one that is flexible and responsive, able to figure out a way to make trade-offs, survive, thrive and reproduce in whatever social and physical environment it finds itself in.


That's what I've always said. *feels vindicated*


So, thank you, internet. For once your dramu has actually made me like people more, instead of despair completely.
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