Classic HN. Layman comments to tell us why a trained professional knows less than them.
Either way I feel it would have been more productive to rebut the GP on the merits of his arguments. For the record, I agree with him, though I am also not a "trained professional", just an amateur who has spent a lot of time thinking about this subject.
No they haven't. An argument is a persuasive set of evidence and reasoning presented to make a case for a conclusion -- OP merely made a bunch of handwavey, highly debatable statements as if they were fact
Of course it's fair, in a discussion.
> the OP broke down his arguments for why the author was wrong,
No he didn't. There are no "arguments" presented. There's a vague premise (It can all be compared to how most social mammals operate. <--- not an argument in any sense) then some 1 line ramblings that seem thinly related.
Warriors and Worriers - Joyce Bennenson
Sex at Dawn - Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá
Granted, I've only had a cursory look at Bennenson, Ryan, and Jetha, but they're a couple of psychologists and a medical doctor, none of whom seem to have a deep background in cultural anthropology. Unsurprisingly, their works appear to fall back on the usual just-so stories taken from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.
TL;DR: I respectfully disagree with the implication that these sources are strong counterarguments to the article's thesis.
There has been tremendous politicization of science in media in recent years. Basically, if it contradicts a narrative the media is trying to push, actual science is shouted down and castigated. Both the left and the right do this. The right does it with climate science. The left does this with psychology and social sciences.
Basically, this article is nicely full of facts. However, it's presenting them in the classic leftist mode of obscurantism, all to push a politically driven agenda:
These contexts include the history and current reality of specific inequalities that stem from economic, racist, and sexist processes in our society.
As humans are social animals, there is some psychological insight to be gained from studying other social animals, just as there's some physiological insight to be gained by studying the biology of rats and monkeys. Right now, any biological and evolutionary components of human behavior contradict the Marxian, postmodern social constructionist, and far left foundational notion of the human being as blank slate. If any such components are acknowledged, many of their simplistic moralistic calls for reform would have to be questioned. The realistic scientific consensus is a moderate and nuanced one: both nature and nurture matter.