> I realize evolutionary psychology is exciting but it's also very dubious as science because it isn't predictive or falsifiable in most cases.
All you're doing is dismissing an argument by dismissing an entire field of science. There is no scientific consensus that evolutionary psychology is "very dubious", and EP is widely respected as field in the scientific community precisely because it can be a powerful tool in making deductions about humans where other types of experiments might not be possible. There is no good science in dismissing it, and any argument against it must be won it's merits, not against the very idea of EP.
> This is a lot harder than ret-conning sexism on the Internet
"ret-conning"? Do you mean retroactive continuity? In what way does that apply to anything I wrote? Is that an accusation of sexism on the part of an argument that advocates the possibility of innate gender differences?
> Regarding my point on high-level differences: "high-level" simply means anything using more than a simple circuit
Is that the consensus of "high-level"? How many layers of abstraction exactly is it that qualifies as high-level? In addition, if you are to assert that high level human behavior is based on low-level brain activity, but the brain is "notoriously adaptable" and therefore high level brain functionality is independent of low-level functionality to some degree, you contradict your earlier argument that that type of speculation is unscientific. Scientific knowledge of the relationship between high-level functionality as derived from low-level functionality is paltry.
> (a better tracker is going to trump a muscular lummox every time)
But that's not a controlled comparison. Why compare someone who is smarter and of ambiguous strength with someone who is strong and dumb? All else being equal, more muscular strength is of enormous use when you are either hunting game, building traps, or fishing. And since there is a high cost to maintaining muscle mass in terms of energy needs, there simply must be some advantage and some reason in terms of behavior why men are statistically more muscular than women.
> This Disney history, not anthropology.
I actually expected a response like this. I'm using "males go hunting" and "females tend to the family at home" imagery so it must be a cartoonish simplification, right?. And yet, that is a scientifically common and respected belief about how at least some pre-history humans lived (especially given that there simply aren't many other options.) There are of course other survival blueprints of pre-history humans, such as fishing or lucking out and having more than enough to forage for main sustenance, but the general concept still applies: women's bodies are more adapted to caring for infants or children, and men for physical labor (Assuming intelligence benefits both jobs equally). So whether its hunting, fishing, construction, or even farming, it is unavoidably more efficient for men to do one and women the other. The physical difference between men and women is also a huge clue that men and women have actually been doing these specialized tasks for almost our entire evolutionary history, and that that's why these differences exist in the first place. And of course, males and females can switch roles if it's beneficial, but there's still the general tendency.
> You've reduced your timeframe by an order of magnitude but are still clinging to this hunter/gatherer gender divide which is unsupported by evidence.
The time-frame was not changed. First, our actual timeline of when most humans became agricultural is a bit sketchy. Second, "tens of thousands of years ago" easily includes time periods far back enough that we are at a point where there was still no widespread agricultural activity. As does "hundreds of thousands of years ago". The two overlap. No change of time-frames.
> Finally, remember how MRI works: it tells you where millions of neurons were using oxygen in the recent past. It doesn't tell you why...
Actually, that's really not how it works, what you're describing sounds more like an fMRI. But in any case you are still missing the point. My argument is that brain physiology features common to women but not men necessarily means innate gender differences. Otherwise there would be no consistent selection for those features. If there was no benefit to those features, they either wouldn't exist or wouldn't be common to only one gender. If they are selected for, that ultimately means they have benefit to human survival, and can impact either high-level or low-level behavior (there's no reason why the evolutionary process could select for one but not the other, and after all, that would be ascribing purpose to evolution.)
> Finally: you still ascribe purpose to evolution. If something didn't kill you before you reproduce, there's little pressure to remove it. Arthritis is common but hardly selected for.
There is enormous pressure, it's not like parents don't provide benefits to their children after they are born, or even after their children are grown and have their own children. It's simply a support network. Not that that has anything to do with the accusation that I ascribe purpose to evolution, of which you provided no evidence.