I already answer this in the article:

It’s particularly embarrassing because the emotion of jealousy is not even specific to sexual (much less, as they aver, “paternity”) interests. Men (and women) express jealousy over the distribution of affection (and even material resources) among siblings, parents, friends, and coworkers. So the EvoPsych model doesn’t even explain the actual activation of the emotion in practice. In fact, intensity of jealousy-response tends to correspond to previously honed and considered worldview assumptions, and thus appears to be a cognitive product of reasoning: men are taught to be jealous, depending on how much their culture tells them they need to save face with their peers, how much it tells them women are their property, how much it tells them they need to secure a woman’s sole affection and attention (and labor). This is why jealousy responses vary so much across cultures and subcultures, and so readily change with reflection and worldview shift (more on that later).

They think citing a bunch of studies that find sex differences in jealousy-response in similar modern cultures (yet never studying any cultures that are relevantly different on this dimension) proves their biological hypothesis. And they cite this as an example of EvoPsych withstanding verification. But that is pseudoscientific thinking. Publishing a thousand papers that are incapable of verifying your hypothesis cannot verify your hypothesis.

And continuing from there.

On jealousy by itself, my thoughts are more complicated. But in short, science does a poor job of disaggregating what jealousy even is, creating problems in most studies. Jealousy might not exist as a distinct emotion (the science does not actually support it as-such), but what we call jealousy does exist as a congeries of at least three other emotions, which can coincide or not and in varying degrees: envy, possessiveness, and insecurity, which are not the same things, and are not sex-specific emotions, and there is no evidence of any special connection between them and sex or love or relationships (which is why the ethnographic record is rife with nonmonogamy as standard; Westerners are WEIRD).

See, for example, Ramachandran 2017, Conley et al. 2012, Tang 2023, and Faraji et al. 2022.

LOL. You are assuming your premise in your conclusion. And then ignoring all the data. Just to get the result you want to save face.

What does “incapable” mean? physically or logically? too improbable to credit or probability formally of zero? — you cannot assume to know except by reference to usage, so quoting a dictionary proves nothing as to you point, since none of those entries answer the question.

And then (conveniently) you ignore nearly a hundred contrary examples in the dataset, the very evidence of usage you have to reference to interpret the dictionary entries, yet those scores of examples show even your circularly presumed premise is false: people routinely use “incapable” and all like words to mean too improbable to credit and not to refer to logical impossibilities, and countless examples in the dataset make this clear. Again, without your circular presumption that nearly everything everyone says using these words is false, which would indicate your failure to comprehend usage. Which at this point has to be deliberate.

You clearly are therefore a disingenuous troll. No honest intellect would attempt such a lame argument as this.

Oh do stop digging this hole. Impossible, even in the “universal English idiom”, means the opposite of “possible”.

Two minutes googling:

Merriam-Webster
incapable of being or of occurring

The Free Dictionary
Incapable of having existence or of occurring.

Cambridge
If an action or event is impossible, it cannot happen or be achieved

Collins
Something that is impossible cannot be done or cannot happen.

Dictionary.com
not possible; unable to be, exist, happen, etc.

There are, of course, other uses, including “insufferable”. 🙁

Um. This isn’t new. I never mean impossible as logically impossible, anywhere in my writings or lectures or conversations about anything, unless I specifically say so—as with almost all other speakers of English.

When humans mean specifically the narrow subset of logically impossible, they say so. Anyone competent in English ought to know this. You can confirm the fact by Googling “impossible” and checking the first one hundred entries and seeing if any of them that don’t say specifically that they mean a logical impossibility, likely actually mean anything other than “too improbable to credit.”

If you go around assuming otherwise, you will be incapable of comprehending most human speech. Which is a folly much to be pitied.

I tend to assume someone who fails to grasp basic universal English idioms is not actually incompetent but is only being a disingenuous troll. But if incompetence is the mantle you’d rather claim, I’ll grant it.

That’s fine then. All my queries are answered: you find it too improbable to believe, which you express as “impossible”.

And that’s not at all too improbable to believe.

“Richard, is it possible that monkeys might evolve gendered responses to cooking pots or police cars in their absence?”

Funny how people alter reality. My response was that I have already presented the reasons why this is impossible (as in: too improbable to believe), and that your attempts to invent a just-so story has no evidence in its support and contradicts the evidence that exists, and therefore is pseudoscience. I have yet to see any reply. Playing with equivocation fallacies over what the word “impossible” means does not a reply make. Scientific impossibilities are not logical impossibilities. And you ought to know that. So ought any competent person.

@Pepe Lopez, thanks for that support.
I was surprised to see a notification in my email, as this all had a nice neat line drawn under it nearly two years ago. We were, apparently, “done”.

It was, in the final analysis, a very minor issue. I expected it to be dealt with by a response something like, “OK, maybe I overstated that,” or “Yes, I didn’t think that through completely.”

The contested (negative) claim ought to be quite obviously flawed, but Richard either cannot see it or pretends he cannot (I suspect the latter). Repeating that I do not address “all the evidence” is irrelevant, and dismissing discussion of the “impossible” proposition as pseudoscience is both evasive, ignorant and insulting. I can think of several scientific hypotheses now given high confidence that would never have been discovered if scientists hadn’t got beyond the critics’ claim, “it’s impossible!”

If I reduced the point to a simple question – “Richard, is it possible that monkeys might evolve gendered responses to cooking pots or police cars in their absence?” – I doubt any clear answer would be forthcoming (when a yes or no are the only options).

I’m not sure how he’d respond to, “Richard, is it reasonable to claim a negative as certain, and thus dismiss its positive hypothesis as ‘pseudoscience’?”

He might point out that he used the phrase, “…to assume so…”, which would be technically correct, but this would also require that the theorist who proposed the possibility is “assuming” it to be true rather than merely discussing hypothetical propositions, as scientists generally do.

An opportunity was missed, because it’s a fascinating idea. It seems likely (to my mind) that virtually no evolutionary response could evolve unless novel objects were first recognised as like something else, to which a response has already been established. Most natural objects are heterogeneous anyway, requiring classification according to certain characteristics, so this mental process must already be functioning.

Perhaps there is good research on this already. In the modern era, it would be trivial to place animals in situations they could never have experienced, with completely novel objects, and test whether they respond in this way, ‘classifying’ an experience according to similarities to those they habitually encounter.

But no, judgement has been passed. This is “impossible” and to suggest it is “pseudoscience”.

What a trivial – almost merely editorial – error for a ‘critical-thinker’ to be blatantly obviously irrationally dogmatic over!

LOL. I did not evade anything. I correctly pointed out that all he did was make a bunch of stuff up with no evidence. And that is what you find convincing. That’s now the story of you.

The rest of us act rationally and expect science to be empirical. We don’t cater to making shit up to force facts to fit a pet theory. Especially when that ignores the actual data.