When the Numbers Don’t Tell the Whole Story: Why Evolutionary Psychology Terrifies the Academy

I sat down with Marc Defant, a volcanologist turned evolutionary psychology researcher, expecting a collision. I’ve been writing about masculinity, gender dynamics, and cultural narratives for over a decade. I knew what was coming. Marc wanted hard numbers. Clean data. The kind of evidence you’d use to predict a volcanic eruption. The problem? He was applying those standards to feminism, gender studies, and the humanities. I told him before we even started recording: the numbers and the humanities probably wouldn’t get along. His experience in hard science would leave him disappointed. I was right. But the conversation revealed something more interesting than I expected.

The Gap Between Narrative and Reality

Here’s what I’ve learned after years of doing The Cameron Journal: there’s always a delta between the reality of a situation and how we talk about it, in other words, the narrative. As I always say, I like to exist in the gap between the reality of the thing and how we talk about the thing. Marc’s frustration with feminist scholarship comes from that gap. He sees claims that don’t match the data. Theories built on ideology rather than empirical evidence. A refusal to engage with biological realities that might complicate the preferred story. He’s not entirely wrong. But he’s also missing something crucial about how knowledge works outside the hard sciences.

The Academic Resistance Is Real

Evolutionary psychology faces measurable hostility in certain academic circles. This isn’t just perception or paranoia. A 2016 study examined how 111 academics evaluated evolutionary psychology compared to its parent fields. The researchers found that evolutionary psychology suffered “the worst selective skepticism” relative to general psychology and evolutionary biology. The same academics who accepted research methods in psychology or biology suddenly became hyper-critical when those methods were applied to evolutionary psychology. That’s not scientific rigor. That’s differential treatment based on something other than the quality of the research.

Why Feminist Scholars Reject Evolutionary Psychology

The resistance has clear ideological roots. This is where Marc’s frustration makes sense. The objection isn’t empirical. It’s ideological. This is why I knew he would be dissatisfied with the data coming out of many feminist depatments. As I said in the show, “it’s all vibes over there.” It’s true in political science too, the whole humanities is guilty of it. Evolutionary psychology gives is reasons why men and women are different or might fulfill different roles. I don’t quite sign onto that whole idea, I do think there are differences between the sexes but I think that those are positive and deserve to be celebrated, not denigrated. Society needs both to function but that is not the current cultural zeitgeist and has not been for decades despite the fact that evolutionary psychology offers an answer that could be true but doesn’t fit the narrative.

The Blank Slate Problem

Much of the resistance traces back to what Steven Pinker called the “blank slate” theory in his book of the same name. The blank slate argues that human behavior isn’t significantly shaped by evolved psychological traits. Everything meaningful comes from social construction and environmental influence. This isn’t just an academic theory. It has real-world consequences.

Pinker documented how belief in the blank slate enabled totalitarian social engineering. If minds are blank slates, you can create perfect minds by ruthlessly controlling the environment. The blank slate also leads to inappropriate blame of parents for children’s outcomes and dangerous decisions about releasing violent offenders who are deemed “cured” by intervention.

But here’s the thing: the blank slate serves a political goal. If everything is socially constructed, everything can be fixed through social intervention. That’s an attractive worldview if you’re trying to build a more equitable society. The problem is when ideology overrides evidence; that mistake is what eventually killed the Soviet Union.

The Coalition Maintenance Problem

Researchers studying this resistance identified something fascinating: humans didn’t evolve for dispassionate scientific inquiry. We evolved for social persuasion, prestige maintenance, and forming in-group coalitions. A study on psychological barriers to evolutionary psychology found four interlocking factors: the ideological orientation of most social psychologists (heavily left-leaning), adoption of a blank slate view believed most conducive to that ideology, rejection of theories that contravene that view, and evolved psychological adaptations that actively impede understanding. In other words, we’re wired to protect our tribes, not pursue uncomfortable truths. The irony is thick. Evolutionary psychology explains why people resist evolutionary psychology.

Where Marc Gets It Wrong

During our interview, I pushed back on Marc’s approach. The numbers don’t always tell the whole story. Take the gender pay gap, for example. Marc would point to data showing that most of the gap disappears when you account for career choices. Women disproportionately choose helping professions like teaching and social work. These fields pay less than underwater welding or power line work, which men disproportionately choose.

It’s been illegal to pay women less for the same job since the 1970s. The gap isn’t about discrimination in pay for identical work. But here’s what Marc’s numbers miss: the gap reveals how society values work done primarily by women. We don’t value child care or social work. That’s not a numbers problem. That’s a values problem and a societal priorities problem. You can’t graph that. You can’t run a regression analysis on whether we should pay teachers more.

The Humanities Have a Point

This is where the humanities matter. I’ve spent some time saying why the humanities are bad but this is where the humanities become helpful again. Lived experience, values, and societal priorities don’t always fit in a spreadsheet. Much of what feminist scholars study involves understanding how women navigate a world that wasn’t built for them.

How do you quantify sexual repression? How do you assign a number to being left financially destitute by divorce? How do you measure the cumulative weight of being talked over in meetings for 30 years? You can’t, at least not really but you can talk to people and find common traits and compliants. You can survey people and find out how they think their experience alignts with different theories. The humanities talk to people; they gather narratives. They look for patterns in how people make sense of their experiences. That’s legitimate knowledge work, even if it doesn’t meet the standards of volcanology.

The Real Problem

The actual issue isn’t that evolutionary psychology is wrong or that feminist scholars are right. The problem is when either side refuses to engage honestly with the other. Evolutionary psychology has documented real patterns in human behavior that have biological roots. Pretending those don’t exist because they’re politically inconvenient is bad scholarship. But reducing all human experience to evolutionary adaptation misses the complexity of how culture, context, and individual choice shape our lives. As is so often the case, both things can be true.

What Gets Lost in the Fight

When academia becomes a battleground for ideological purity, we lose the ability to solve actual problems. Women are unhappy with available partners. Men feel left behind. The dating market is a disaster. Marriage rates are dropping. Birth rates are collapsing. These are real problems affecting millions of people. But we can’t have productive conversations about solutions when one side insists biology doesn’t matter and the other side reduces everything to evolutionary imperatives. The truth lives in the messy middle.

Where I Land

I’m liberal but not woke. I’ve spent over a decade trying to build something less outrage-based in a media environment that rewards rage. I don’t fit neatly in boxes. I think immigration is a problem worth solving and open borders are a mistake. That puts me at odds with much of the Left and most of the democratic party. I also think racial inequalities and the struggles of marginalized groups are real and deserve serious attention. That puts me at odds with much of the Right, especially when it comes to migrants and asylum seekers. On gender issues, I’ve watched both sides become increasingly unwilling to acknowledge inconvenient realities.

Men and women are different in measurable ways. Evolution shaped our psychology and denying that doesn’t help anyone. I also have no problem with trans people at all and they have passed in and out of my life throughout my adult life and if I caught anyone saying anything against them or their choices I would speak out in their favor and defend them with my words and my body if necessary.

But those differences between the sexes don’t determine individual capability or justify discrimination. Culture matters. Context matters. Individual variation matters.

The Conversation We Need

I didn’t convince Marc during our interview. I’m not sure I expected to. But the conversation mattered anyway. We need more spaces where people can argue about these things without performing for their tribes. Where you can acknowledge that evolutionary psychology has valid insights without signing up for biological determinism. Where you can care about women’s equality without pretending sex differences don’t exist. That’s the space between narrative and reality where actual insight lives. It’s uncomfortable territory and neither side wants to claim it for what it is but it’s where the truth usually hides.

Final Thoughts

The resistance to evolutionary psychology in feminist studies isn’t going away. The ideological stakes are too high. The tribal affiliations are too strong. Marc will keep pushing for harder evidence and cleaner data. Feminist scholars will keep insisting that lived experience and values matter more than his graphs. Both sides have something to offer.

The tragedy is that institutional barriers, funding decisions, publishing practices, and hiring committees have created an environment where pursuing certain lines of research is career suicide.

Young researchers learn quickly which questions are safe to ask and which ones will get them ostracized. That’s not how science is supposed to work. But humans didn’t evolve for dispassionate inquiry. We evolved to protect our coalitions and maintain our status. Understanding that might be the first step toward building something better. Either way, the conversation continues. I’ll keep talking about it on The Cameron Journal, trying to explain things in a way that’s helpful but not condescending, navigating the gap between how we talk about gender and what the evidence actually shows. It’s the purpose of my life, apparently. Even if most people don’t care what I have to say about it.