Men's Group

Most economic "theory" for example, is hard to test because you can't manipulate anything. That does not mean the ideas stemming from economics have no value at all but its very limited, ultimately economists make educated guesses. If you think about it economic theory should be part of social psych but is isn't because its nearly impossible to apply the scientific method.

The biggest issue in climate research is rate of change and there is a great deal of variability in rates for exactly the reason that it can't be tested. The best they can do is make simple comparisons of rates of greenhouse gas levels through the millenia and extrapolate from that.

Standard evolutionary theory is also nearly impossibe to test using experimentation. A lot of key ideas like natural selection cannot be proven, but ideas like Directed Mutation can be tested and, not surprisingly, is completely changing the way scientists think about standard evo theory.

Evopsych is very limited in that they can develop questionaires and that's about it. In the research biz self report data (from questionaires) is considered about the weakest DV data one can obtain. There is also the problem of what is exactly being tested (construct validity) imo this is a huge problem that cannot be overcome.

There is no question that humans have instinctive behaviors but there is a huge jump from that to saying for example that men are naturally polygamous. Maybe they are but it can't be proved or disproved using current research techniques.

Experimentation today often does not use the "control group" type of effects testing. The big thing today is Structural Equation Modeling, which does not use control groups.