“Similar censorship of in-house controversies marks episodes five and six, which deal with the role of sex and the evolution of mind. These episodes rely primarily on interviews with proponents of a controversial new field called "evolutionary psychology." But Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, has written that "evolutionary psychologists routinely confuse theory and speculation"—forget about evidence! Coyne compares evolutionary psychology to now-discredited Freudian psychology: "By judicious manipulation, every possible observation of human behavior could be (and was) fitted into a Freudian framework. The same trick is now being perpetrated by the evolutionary psychologists. They, too, deal with their own dogmas, and not in propositions of science." (Executive Summary, page 3-4)

The Discovery Institute is up to its old tricks. Given the complete absence of evidence for their own theory of "intelligent design"--a theory that has produced not a single scientific paper in a peer-reviewed journal--they instead seek "confirmation" of their views in controversies about evolutionary biology. Their strategy (transparent to all thinking people) is to sow doubt about the fact of evolution simply because scientists do not know every detail about how evolution occurred.

One of these controversies is about evolutionary psychology: the view that much of modern human behavior was molded by natural selection in our distant ancestors. I have been a strong critic of this enterprise, not because I think it is misguided, but because I feel that its practitioners often hold low standards of evidence and because it is difficult to test theories about behaviors that evolved millions of years ago. There are others who disagree with me. This is simply one of many scientific disputes that are hard to resolve because the evidence is scanty.

But does this controversy show that humans did not evolve? Hardly! The fossil evidence for human evolution is overwhelming, and new details of how it occurred are constantly appearing with new fossil finds and contributions from molecular biology. Only those willfully blinded by adherence to religious dogma would deny that we evolved from apelike ancestors. Evidence for how our behavior evolved is more tenuous for only one reason: unlike bones, behavior does not fossilize.

The Discovery Institute is curiously silent about the fact of human evolution, preferring to concentrate instead on the controversy about the evolution of human behavior. They claim that the PBS series is guilty of "effective censorship" in failing to show the controversial nature of evolutionary psychology, and that criticisms like mine have been deliberately expunged from the show.

I have watched the Evolution series and have examined its companion book, and the Discovery Institute's accusation of censorship is flatly wrong. Evolutionary psychology is clearly characterized as "controversial" in the television show, and the companion book goes into great detail about potential problems with evolutionary psychology, quoting at length from a critique written by Andrew Berry and myself. I am in complete agreement with the statements in the companion book (p. 284): "The debate over evolutionary psychology won't be resolved any time soon. . . . . . As hard as it may sometimes get, it's important to stay focused on the science, or the lack thereof, in evolutionary psychology. The weight of the scientific evidence will ultimately determine whether it stands or falls." This is hardly a one-side, "censored" presentation of evolutionary psychology!