I came across this apt headline at Slate:
Evolutionary “scientists” are in a frenzy over whether the persistence of the gene EDAR in East Asians was because natural selection favored more sweat glands or smaller breasts.
:-/
Read the details of this breaking science news at the link, if you have the stomach for it. This garbage is what passes for science in much of evolutionary biology today. All Darwinian storytelling is like this. The reason that sexual selection and evolutionary psychology are such obvious nonsense, and other storytelling in evolutionary biology is not such obvious nonsense, it that many theories in evolutionary biology speculate about esoterica about which the average reader knows nothing.
We laugh at speculation about natural selection for sweat glands or smaller breasts, but most of us don’t understand speculation that is just as ridiculous about remingtonocetids, ambulocetids, and protocetids (putative links in whale evolution). All Darwinian “theory” is banality and tautology, without a shred of explanatory power. It’s all the same logic. Stuff happens and survivors survive.
Most of evolutionary junk science is cloaked in jargon and esoterica that make it opaque to the kind of comedic interpretation to which evolutionary psychology and sexual selection lend themselves so naturally.