Look beyond your local circle of colleagues.

It is a dated essay but an interesting read.  From Twelve Lessons (Most of Which I Learned the Hard Way) for Evolutionary Psychologists by Daniel M.T. Fessler, 2011.  

 Lesson 1: Look beyond your local circle of colleagues. 

Lesson 2: Express your ideas in the manner most likely to be both understood and attended to by your audience – don’t hobble the impact of your work by turning off your audience.  

Lesson 3: Science demands a mixture of arrogance and humility. 

Lesson 4: Science is advanced by a community of disputatious scholars, hence each investigator must contribute to the debate.

Lesson 5: Understanding human diversity is vital to generating and testing hypotheses about the mind.  

Lesson 6: Facultative adjustment is a neglected feature of many evolutionary hypotheses; one likely reason for this is that acquiring relevant data often requires working with less accessible populations.

Lesson 7: The least-explored aspect of evolutionary psychology, that of adaptations for culture, is arguably the most important.

Lesson 8: The current overemphasis on mating-related phenomena in evolutionary psychology probably reflects a tendency to begin with the easy topics; it is time for more evolutionary psychologists to tackle more difficult and, arguably, more important areas. 

Lesson 9: A rigorous evolutionary psychology requires a thorough familiarity with theories and findings pertaining to many aspects of evolution.

Lesson 10: Attending to the evolutionary history of a psychological adaptation will often shed light on important features of it, including features that limit its optimality. 

Lesson 11: It is important to have a balanced research portfolio composed of a mixture of uncanny and mundane projects. 

Lesson 12: The findings and insights of evolutionary psychology create a moral crisis, but within that crisis lies an opportunity to make the world a better place – it is up to each of us to pursue that opportunity. 

 At least two moral crises it seems to me.  One is that which Fessler discusses.  The second is that it forces a confrontation of a core tenant in the dominant ideology within academic circles, Critical Theory.  Critical Theory requires that group differences be the product of power dynamics.  What evolutionary psychology keeps turning up is that group differences are a product of heritable traits and manifested behaviors shaped by culture.  The two positions are not compatible.