I agree with the Wikipedia quote on what EP is, and I agree that basing a field on those premises is tricky at best. (Buller gives some reasons, for example.)

But I disagree that your examples show why EP, as defined by Wikipedia, is problematic.

Your examples show that EP as defined by you is problematic. Your definition doesn't match Wikipedia. It also doesn't match the reference you gave when I asked for your definition. Your definition arguably does match a good deal of the actual practice of evolutionary psychology.

But this is the whole issue.

Debunking homeopathy is not about debunking the actual practice of homeopathy. There is no possible way for it to work. There is no evidence it works. The entire thing is a sham (save for it being an accepted way to induce the placebo effect). It's not that homeopaths are failing to apply the principles they themselves espouse, it's that the whole thing is a fantasy.

But you're not doing that.

You changed the definition of EP to be more restrictive even than what Buller terms "Pop EP". You didn't announce that you were doing this in your article; you just said that what you were talking about was EP (admittedly with the caveat that it was your understanding): "You can’t just generalize the priorities and social dynamics of the past couple thousand years to all the rest of human history because it doesn’t compute. [...] As far as I can tell, evolutionary psychology looks at the past 5 or 6 thousand years and one particular type of social organization and determines that it is a template for the rest of humanity."

So, yes, you did a very good job of debunking one instance of that, and made a reasonably strong case that this endeavor--your personal definition of EP based on observations of what tends to happen in practice--is bunk.

The problem is, it was only ever your definition.

There's a very big difference between "do better" and "this whole endeavor can only be bunk".

To debunk your flavor of EP, you accepted the validity of the methods needed for broader EP to work. You argue against certain assumptions by taking results from cultural anthropology, comparative biology, and so on, to argue that actually the we know that the historical situation is like this not like that. But if you can do that successfully...that's...exactly what EP requires to work. So while debunking "EP", you were also apparently endorsing the potential validity of Wikipedia-EP.

My primary point--really my only point--is that you weren't doing what you said you were. There's a reason why Buller chose terms carefully: it's because someone like me would have been on his case, entirely correctly, if he hadn't.

I still don't understand why this wasn't obvious the first time around, to either you or your husband (though I appreciate the effort taken to get a second opinion--that's a valuable input). Maybe it isn't even obvious now!

But I hope it is.