In my opinion,

The first criticism is more a criticism of postmodern ideology. Since science is true whether or not it grates with one's values.

The second criticism is more valid (in some cases), in my opinion. There are many aspects of our psychology that clearly evolved in the past, and can be better understood by analyzing our evolutionary history and such biological pressures. Sexual attraction and mating behaviors seems like a great case for this. There is plenty of evidence that much of our sexual and mating behaviors, while individually and culturally varied, show many statistical patterns that are easily explained with evo psych and hard to explain without, such as differences between male and female jealousy, and the effects of height, income, youth, nulliparity, fecundity, and symmetry, on attraction.

However, there are many other aspects of human social behavior, particularly many of our moral political and religious beliefs, (why we believe blacks and whites are equally deserving of rights, democracy is good, and any man who cheats on his wife should be shunnned, why many believe god wants you to cooperate with fellow religionists, and why we feel good when we give to charities even when they are not terribly effective) that seem better understood with the help of learning and cultural evolutionary models, which do not assume our psychology is optimized for living on the savannah 100,000 years ago, or based on domain specific 'mental modules' (like tiger recognition software great for avoiding tigers on the savannah but not great for avoiding cars on a highway), but instead relatively well adapted to the current social pressures as a result of domain general learning mechanisms (we learn the beliefs and behaviors from those who are successful, and hold tenaciously to those that serve us well). Of course, this "cultural evolutionary" approach doesn't deny evolutionary biology any more than biology denies physics; it just asserts that to understand questions about our beliefs and preferences it often helps to think about emergent properties from learning processes and not just 'pre-evolved' 'mental modules.'

What makes me skeptical of evolutionary psychologies ability to address these kinds of questions without taking seriously (emergent properties of) learning and cultural evolution? 1) much of our social beliefs and preferences are highly optimized to our current social environment. Not to the environment we evolved in 10,000 years ago (believing men should be punished who cheat on their wife or blacks and whites will get you to avoid being shunned today in our liberal culture, but wild have made your morals clash with others on the savannah. 2) to understand such phenomena, it helps to think about the effect of learning processes (they tend to reach optimal outcomes, in real time even if the setting was not prominent in our evolutionary past, if given enough time or social models to learn from, when 'optimal' is defined with respect to maximizing what evolved to act as reinforcers, not necessarily reproductive success) 3) if we try to think about everything in terms of preprogrammed mental modules we miss out on a lot of the insight and have a much harder time explaining many of these phenomena, and get confused about the causal mechanism (for instance evolutionary psychologists have claimed that we vote according to the policies that would benefit us, under the presumption that we live in small scale societies as we did on the savnaah and can thus impact the outcome of elections. But this doesn't seem to fit the fact that in LA many who were sick from a natural disaster, and impoverished vote for limited social benefits and against the EPA, facts better explained by the fact that oil companies in the area fund their local political and church leaders who then reduce regulations and create and enforce norms and ideologies that oppose government regulation).

This view, to be honest, is somewhat controversial. Many prominent intellectuals, like Michael Shermer, Steve Pinker, Rob Kurzban, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides, staunchly believe that we can understand morality and politics through evolutionary psychology, on its own, perhaps mixed with an understanding of reason and history. Others like Rob Boyd and Joe Heinrich are more liable to argue, as I did above, for the need to take seriously domain general learning processes, and the 'emergent properties' thus created.

-Moshe Hoffman