Chow's monograph exhibits four prototypical symptoms of psychology's enduring scientific crisis: (a) it equates empirical science with statistical analysis; (b) it settles for qualitative rather than quantitative theories; (c) it ignores the role of ecological validity in the generalizability of theories; and (d) it puts rigid adherence to arbitrary but documentable rules over critical thinking about the meaning of results.

Jackendoff's scenario of the evolution of language is a major contribution towards a more rigorous theory of the origins of language, because it is theoretically constrained by a testable theory of modern language. However, the theoretical constraints from evolutionary theory are not really recognized in his work. We hope that Jackendoff's lead will be followed by intensive cooperation between linguistic theorists and evolutionary modellers.

Polygyny does not necessarily entail sexual selection of men. All factors that affect the operational sex ratio must be considered. Data from contemporary hunter-gatherers indicate higher mortality rates in men than in women, and lost female reproductive time. If sexual selection did occur in ancestral hunter-gatherers, it was probably men selecting women and not women selecting men.

I identify a number of problematic aspects of Christiansen & Chater's (C&C's) contribution. These include their suggestion that subjacency and binding reflect non-domain-specific mechanisms; that proto-language is a “cultural product”; and that non-adaptationism requires overly rich innate structures, and is incompatible with acceptable evolutionary processes. It shows that a fully UG (Universal Grammar)-free version of the authors' neo-adaptationism would be incoherent.

“Challenging the utility of polygenic scores for social science” is a compelling but limited critique. Phenotypic development is sensitive to both initial conditions and all subsequent states – from conception to senescence. Thus, gene-centric analyses are misleading (and often meaningless) because gene products are transformed, and their phenotypic ‘effects' combined and attenuated with successive propagations from molecular and cellular contexts to organismal and social environments.

The view that short-term memory should be conceived of as being a process based on the activation of long-term memory is inconsistent with neuropsychological evidence. Data from brain-damaged patients, showing specific patterns of impairment, are compatible with a vision of memory as a multiple-component system, whose different aspects, in neurologically unimpaired subjects, show a high degree of interaction.

Pessoa (2013) makes an impressive case that emotion, motivation, and cognition are neurally intertwined. Our commentary broadens the discussion to the functional, “mind” level. We argue that philosophical and computational considerations justify some modern “separatist” views. We highlight several psychological phenomena that illustrate independence, including affective and motivational reactions to rudimentary inputs, and the guiding role of such reactions in cognition.

One example of proxy failure is current antisexist and antiracist policies. One of the most popular proxy in them is the number of representatives of marginalized groups – women and nonwhite people – in power structures. Here I show that such measures do not lead to combating sexism and racism, which flourish despite their application.

We applaud Gintis's attempt to provide an evolutionary-based framework for the behavioral sciences, and note a number of similarities with our own recent cultural evolutionary structure for the social sciences. Gintis's proposal would be further strengthened by a greater emphasis on additional methods to evolutionary game theory, clearer empirical predictions, and a broader consideration of cultural transmission.

The authors argue that children prefer fictions with imaginary worlds. But evidence from the developmental literature challenges this claim. Children's choices of stories and story events show that they often prefer realism. Further, work on the imagination's relation to counterfactual reasoning suggests that an attraction to unrealistic fiction would undermine the imagination's role in helping children understand reality.

Within the Hebbian paradigm the mechanism for integrating cell assemblies oscillating with different frequencies remains unclear. We hypothesize that such an integration may occur in cortical “interaction foci” that unite synchronously oscillated assemblies through hard-wired connections, synthesizing the information from various functional systems of the brain.

We agree with Cushman that rationalizations are the product of biological adaptations, but we disagree about their function. The data available do not show that rationalizations allow us to reason better and make better decisions. The data suggest instead that rationalizations serve reputation management goals, and that they affect our behaviors because we are held accountable by our peers.

We support the idea of applying cultural evolution theory to the study of storytelling, and fiction in particular. However, we suggest that a more plausible link between real and imaginary worlds is the feeling of “presence” we can experience in both of them: we feel present when we are able to correctly and intuitively enact our embodied predictions.

Acceptability judgments are no longer acceptable as the holy grail for testing the nature of linguistic representations. Experimental and quantitative methods should be used to test theoretical claims in psycholinguistics. These methods should include not only behavior, but also the more recent possibilities to probe the neural codes for language-relevant representations.

We suggest that the framework proposed by Vigil is useful in laboratory contexts but might come up short for in vivo social interactions. Emotions result from cost-benefits trade-offs but are not solely generated at the individual level to establish emotional social spheres. In organizational contexts, emotion expression can be a constitutive part of a professional activity, and observed sex differences might vanish.