The Watchmaker: my fav argument

[Belacqua]

I'll accept it as good when I see it do a better job with psychology and neuroscience. Until then, it is just a tool that has overextended it's use. I'll look into biologos with an open mind. Thanks.

I agree with you that people have tended to overextend the use of evolution by natural selection as an explanation. 

Early on people used it to talk about "social darwinism," as if they could justify social class, and economic winners and losers, through the theory. Ayn Rand thought she was strictly following the science. More recently, evolutionary psychology has been on a roll, but I have read more strict evolutionary biologists criticize it severely for misapplying the idea of evolution in ways that science can't justify. 

So the answer doesn't seem in doubt to me: evolution by natural selection does a great job of explaining the particular range of things it is appropriate to explain. With the proviso, as always, that scientific theories are always open to adjustment. And serious scientists (i.e. not ideologues) are willing to listen to concerns or criticism. 

But sometimes it is seen as some kind of theory of everything, which answers all questions. If someone proposes that evolution is a sufficient explanation for something, when in fact there is reason to doubt that, then critics shouldn't be put in the same boat as young-earthers.

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That said, I would argue that "evolution" plays a role similar to "fMRI" in current psychological research. Which is to say, people use it to make their research "appear" more scientific, more alluring, and more likely to get published, meanwhile, it contributes very little to the issue.

I used to make a lot of money by sitting with a group of Japanese brain researchers and helping them to read and write fMRI papers in English. One thing they were clear on: careful professional use of fMRI is narrow and tentative and small-scaled, while publicly-reported conclusions from fMRI are often exaggerated wildly. 

They were publishing papers on how patients with a history of severe depression performed, on average, a few fractions of a second slower on decision-making tasks carried out while they were in a confining noisy tube. Meanwhile The Guardian was writing that fMRI had proved that people love their cel phones as much as their girlfriends. It was attention-getting science fiction for the gullible masses.