The joke is that there are adaptation extremists who will put down any trait to a supposed adaptive process, and only *then* go further to the conclusion that this implies that the trait is a good thing to have around Whereas the person Simon is (again rightly) mocking is conflating the two streams of thought, and getting Simon’s point wrong, which point is that adaptation extremists simultaneously disavow the idea that every thing which is adaptive is good, whilst also avowing that every individual putative adaptation is - due its being adaptive - good. Meanwhile, our replier in that thread is trying to hammer the idea that adaptation extremists don’t make value judgements, whilst defending those exact extremists who do draw a value judgement as mocked in the original tweet by evopsychgoogle (and of course, they do exist) The original joke, by the way, is an exaggerated by making things explicit parody of those adaptation extremists who draw value judgements from their own *already* extreme views about the nature of adaptation, much like the people I was mocking about a week (two weeks?) ago on /r/TheMotte who immediately leapt to the conclusion that genes must be in play when attempting to explain the difference in coronavirus rates between German-speaking and Italian-speaking Swiss people. Of course, apparently unbeknownst to those commentators, the Occam’s Razor explanation for this difference was a social - rather than genetic - one, in that despite the border closure Italy’s and Switzerland’s govt. did in fact permit people with jobs inside Switzerland to cross the border between the two countries from Italy to continue working, and such people are very likely to be Italian-speakers, and therefore to transmit the virus over the border into the Italian-speaking community in Switzerland. The joke is therefore that first, adaptation extremists have a habit of attributing every social issue they can find to adaptation, and second, that *some of them* then ascribe a value judgement to such adaptations - both of these are very amusing to people who know what they’re talking about re: adaptation in biology. (As an aside, I am definitely more familiar with the Swiss-Italian border than your average American on /r/TheMotte, because I’ve been there multiple times in multiple different crossing points, so I can understand why somebody less familiar with it than i am would have this epistemological problem. What I can’t conscience is people not considering that they might have an epistemological problem on this issue. Practicing a certain scepticism would probably be a good cure for the adaptational extremist disease)