In an otherwise solid lecture series at my school, they invited one speaker who really gummed up the works. Gad Saad, who I was unaware of, is apparently Professor of Marketing, holder of the Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption. I happened to find a TedX talk that is basically a condensed version of the talk he gave at my school. Almost everything here has major problems, but I'll pick out some of the bullet points that I'm most familiar with.

Wilson's quote -- Genes hold culture on a leash

Wilson actually backed off on this and claimed there were less deterministic "epigenetic rules."

Toy preference and gender

I'm not familiar with the study relating to CAH, but the vervet study is one of the silliest things I've ever seen. I assume he's referring to Alexander and Hines (2002), which I usually cite as a great example of anthropomorphism in primate studies. Firstly, the study did not even find a completely uniform result as he implies:

Although the serial introduction of the toys does not permit a true contrast of the relative preference for “masculine” over “feminine” toys within each sex, a within-sex comparison of contact scores showed that female vervets had greater percent contact with “feminine” over “masculine toys,” P<.01, but males had similar percent contact with “masculine” and “feminine” toys, P=.19.

http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(02)00107-1/fulltext

This is practically nitpicking, though, compared to the real fundamental flaw of this study, which is that vervets have no concept of things like police trucks or cooking pans. To call it a reach to assign gender roles to cooking and driving in vervets would be too generous.

Hoarding and gorging

How these are connected is never really explained. If we're going back to our Pleistocene ancestors, hoarding would probably have been discouraged. Mobile hunter-gatherers can only carry so much and a wealth of material items would be impractical. In many contemporary HG societies, hoarding is looked down upon and hoarders are publicly berated.

High-calorie foods would be advantageous in this environment, though it is highly dependent on their availability. I'm assuming Saad is talking about something along the lines of the thrifty gene hypothesis. Even if this is true, though, you have to admit that the ready availability and low prices of fast food play a role.

Gastronomy

Perfectly true, but I'm not sure how this demonstrates evolved, innate behaviors in any way. It's a way for people to adapt to local environments. People eat soup out of bowls everywhere, but that's simply an affordance of the environment. There's no bowl gene.

Bears, peacocks, cardinals, vervets, etc.

Throughout the talk, Saad seems to be arbitrarily picking species to draw some comparison with. There is no attempt at a systematic analysis or accounting for the vast evolutionary distance between all these species. The closest to humans it gets is the vervets. Odd choices considering that chimps and bonobos would be the most relevant here.

Peacocks and porsches

Porsches can serve as sexual signals in our culture, but cars are not actual biological traits in the way sexually selected peacock's tails are.

Waist-to-hip ratio

WHR has been debunked so many times. See [Marlowe et al 2005]http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(05)00062-0/abstract or Swame and Tovee 2007, for instance.

Cultural products as fossils of the human mind

Minds don't fossilize, true. Saad then makes a bizarre leap by claiming that we can analyze vaguely defined cultural products as "fossils." He then picks romance novels and pop songs, which I think even most EPists would admit are irrelevant to what they call the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA).

Saad completely ignores the paleontological and archaeological records. In fact, the entire talk never goes into deep evolutionary time in any way. Cognitive archaeology is attempting to address similar questions while at the same time staying connected to the material evidence. However, this restricts you to much less sexy topics like the role of working memory in lithic production. This is the reason why Thomas Wynn wrote that EPists have a "cultivated ignorance" of material culture (in deBeaune et al).

I'm tempted to adapt David Hume's dictum. When evaluating EP, consider... Does it contain any references to the paleontological or archaeological record? Does it contain a systematic comparative analysis with other species? Does it contain a comparative ethnographic analysis? Does it contain an analysis of selective pressures using data derived from prehistoric environments such as data from paleoclimatology? If not, then commit it to the flames!

The only positive at the end here is that Saad refrains from including a "criticism" section at the end which entails reading poorly written, typo-ridden, anonymous e-mails and snarking about them as he did when he gave the talk at my school.