Yeah the idea that these things can be explained simply by a purposeful guiding force like evolution is an attractive idea not unlike the belief in a higher power. What seems more likely is that many human traits and behaviors are highly complex evolutionary cruft — things accumulated over millions of years that fall into a few categories:

1) evolved "recently" to create a specific advantage for a human population (the author's favored explanation for crying)

2) provided an advantage for a distant ancestral species and stuck around long past the context in which they were advantageous (the human appendix)

3) random interaction between different traits or behaviors initially evolved from 1&2

4) random evolved trait that happened to be part of an evolutionarily successful population (Epicanthic fold)

5) random interaction between evolved traits or behaviors and a novel environment to produce novel behavior (over-eating and obesity caused by an evolutionary preference for high-caloric foods and their now-widespread availability)

I tend to not like the speculative aspects of evopsych like the ones in this post because they don't really account for the amount of randomness, complex interaction, and vestigial weirdness that seems to result from evolution.

I also find his articles annoying but I have no problem with ascribing a scientific or economic purpose/motive behind everything.

The problem is that the explanation has to be solid, based in evidence and experiments. This article is a well written rambling, or to be more clear just an opinion.

For example in:

> We're also the only creatures who sing from the ground, sing and dance together, bury our dead, point declaratively, enjoy spicy foods, blush, and faint [1] (not to mention all of our weird sexual practices).

> [1] human-unique traits. Some of these are contested. [...] And I'm sure there are other examples of similar behaviors enacted by non-human animals. But the basic point stands: We do a lot of things that, if not singularly unique, are nevertheless extremely rare.

He cherrypicks a few behaviors and say that they make us unique, and when there is contradicting evidence he just ignore it. Whales can sing, wolves howl (is that similar enough?) and just ignore birds because they are not intelligent enough. Bonobos have a lot of weird sexual practices that are similar to the human one, and other animals have even weirder sexual practices that are unimaginable in humans. And the list of exceptions go on ...

It's similar to: from https://xkcd.com/775/

> See, that's just the kind of bullshit sexism that discredits evo-psych. Your "evolutionary histories" always seem tuned to produce 1950's gender roles.

But perhaps they are useful for understanding and exploring how things work? As this article was clearly attempting to do.