Ragdish, do you know much about the debate between punctuated equilibrium and gradualism?  I think the current evo psych/evo bio/evo eco debate is very similar.

If you're not familiar with it, here's the gist.  Steven Jay Gould was a big proponent of punctuated equilibrium and made lots of grand claims that the concept was going to "prove Darwin wrong" and "revolutionize the science of natural selection."  It turns out that it was a lot of bluster over something that wasn't a very big deal.  Gradualism and punctuated equilibrium are not only compatible, they're effectively describing exactly the same thing.  It's just a difference in perspective with just a slight change of emphasis.

The reputable critics of evolutionary psychology have a lot of very valid gripes.  Many of the claims -- most notably "modules" -- are untestable at this time, and are therefore not good science.  I, for one, am not a proponent of the module theory.  It's psychobabble, plain and simple.  However, the more vehement critics, most notably feminists and far left liberals, are throwing the baby out with the bathwater because of what they fear in the implications of many evo psych claims.

In the past decade or so, evo psych journals have become kind of a poor man's way to get peer reviewed and published.  The standards of evidence have not been stringent enough and there have been a lot of overblown claims.  This is not unheard of in a new scientific field, but it's still a problem.  (Remember that 90% of Freud's claims were unfalsifiable, but he was still the father of legitimate scientific psychological research in a lot of ways.)

Here's the bottom line as I see it:  Humans are most definitely products of their genes interacting with their environment, and we are genetically programmed to think and feel and react in certain ways.  This is without question, and most of the critics of Evo Psych agree.  Evo Psych proponents often go off the deep end by proposing things like "rape genes" or the "perfect female figure."  That's so much bullshit.  Human brains are templates with wide ranges of adaptive responses.  As the article pointed out, 0.7 is not the "perfect waist to hip ratio."  It's the waist to hip ratio that Americans have gravitated to in response to their environment.  Human males have a range within which they will develop the "culturally perfect female figure."  I daresay you will never find a culture in which the most attractive women have grossly asymetrical features, lots of gigantic warts, stringy sickly looking hair, bald spots, and a waist to hip ratio of 2:1.  There are limits to our "template."  However, we should be quite surprised if different environments didn't produce different perceptions of the perfect figure.

Where Evo Psych tends to go overboard is in declaring absolutes.  Researchers declare things like "Men are preprogrammed to rape women."  That book, by the way, is a total load of shit and should never have been published.  Men are programmed to have the capacity to be sexually aggressive and to overpower women in some environmental situations.  It's no secret that rapists in all cultures fit a certain profile.  Note that the profile is not the same in all cultures!  However, rape is not a random occurrence.  It is a response to a particular environment and being in a certain place in the social hierarchy.  Within different cultures, the motivators for rape will be different, so we should be quite surprised if there was such a thing as a "rape gene."  Instead, we should expect that in all cultures, there will be a set of culturally unique circumstances in which a man will tend towards rape.  This is basic Game Theory.  A man will be relatively likely to rape if the perceived cost of rape is lower than the benefit.  This isn't because of a gene.  It's because we are all genetically programmed to do primarily unconscious cost-benefit analysys.

So, Evo Psych isn't total hogwash.  It's just too big for its britches in a lot of cases.  As the dust settles, we're going to find out that a lot of the claims we've heard are too focused.  I think we're also going to abandon the module concept.  What we ought to be left with is a more general concept of highly adaptable "templates" within which a wide variety of behaviors are possible.  I think if you go back through a lot of my postings on this subject, you'll find that I'm a firm believer in changing the environment rather than trying to change the person.  Behaviors are reactions to the environment, plain and simple.  Yes, they're filtered through each person's individual genome, but humans do obey the law of averages.  If you take a thousand people and put them in X environment, 500 of them, on average, will do Y action.  If you don't want 500 people doing that, it's silly to just tell them not to.  Instead, you should change the environment so that on average, only 200 people will do Y.

I hope this little diatribe answers your question.  If not, please let me know what you wanted me to specifically address.

Evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience are still lightyears apart. Few have tried to meld the two (eg. Jaak Panksepp's affective neuroscience). This would settle the modularity issue once and for all. A case in point is the following.

An interesting cognitive deficit is prosopagnosia ie. the inability to recognize familiar faces. The damaged regions are the bilateral fusiform gyri ie. the "face areas". No serious neuroscientist would claim that faces are stored in those regions. However, on functional neuroimaging studies those areas certainly light up when presented with a familiar face. And given that these regions light up in infants who see mom, there is strong evidence that these neural networks have indeed been laid down by the genome. It is reasonable to call this neural pattern that evokes facial recognition as a "module" tightly governed by the genome and is the product of natural selection. In fact there is a disorder called congenital prosopagnosia wherein these regions have been damaged in utero resulting in lifelong inability to recognize familiar faces. What is also interesting is that these face recognition regions participate in the recognition of unique items. For example, those areas light up when a surgeon recognizes a particular surgical instrument. This is probably the best example I have seen demonstrating gene-environment interaction without resorting to the silly notion of the blank slate.

I completely agree that there is likely a limited range of body types that which at an innate level results in sexual arousal. That is, there is a human nature tightly governed by the genome that modifies to a limited range of environmental stimuli. To truly answer the question of how much of our horny behavior is socially constructed and how much is hardwired would require the sort of scientific endeavors seen with face recognition.

Why for pete's sake isn't more neuroscientific research done in the case of incest avoidance? Setting incest fantasies aside, the fact is that if Megan fox and I were siblings reared together from infancy, I would likely find having sex with her extremely repulsive. And this is not a purely socially constructed behavior. And yet if she was my long lost sibling who I met later in life (as early as age 10 I believe is the Westermark cut-off), then woohoooooo nelly!!!!!! Why does this happen? There are likely critical periods in our development causing certain genes to switch on and off which don't occur later in life. And both the conservative right and some nutbag liberals show zero sympathy for couples who have genetic sexual attraction. It's like the fundies telling homosexuals to become heterosexual.

I'm so glad we're on the same page with this mediocre at best article.