Beyond essentialist fallacies: Fine-tuning ideology critique of appeals to biological sex differences

A recurring claim made by evolutionary psychologists is that their opponents neglect biological explanations as such for ideological reasons. I argue in this paper that this is a self-immunizing strategy that avoids serious engagement with existing critique by exploiting the long history of essentialist fallacies and anti-essentialist debunking arguments. To argue for this claim, I reconstruct the general form of the essentialist fallacy as well as the history of anti-essentialist debunking arguments and suggest that they play a central role in the persistence of the ideological dimension of the nature-nurture debate. Discussing recent work from evolutionary psychology on how hormones influence female behavior, I show how self-immunizing strategies are used to avoid engagement with existing critique, while reproducing sexist stereotypes at the same time.