evolutionary psychology makes my skin crawl

Maybe it's an unjustified bias, but I find arguments claiming that the way people act now is all a result of the evolutionary pressures on early humans incredibly annoying. Supposedly, there hasn't been enough time for humans to evolve entirely new behaviour, so everything we do can be explained by the effect it would've had on early human reproductive success. Human civilisations have changed an awful lot since humans diverged from the apes, though, and it seems obvious to me that the evolutionary success of humankind is largely due to a highly developed ability to adapt. I'm not convinced that behaviour is determined by anything as fixed as genetics, anyway, so it should be easier for behaviour to change over a much shorter time frame than would be required for physical characteristics.
I'll admit that this is a pretty uninformed opinion, based almost entirely on media representations of the field, which is hardly giving it a fair chance. Today, however, I actually read the original research article and it didn't make me feel any better.

This is the story that sparked my hatred anew. Particularly this sentence: "We have shown that beautiful parents have more daughters than ugly parents because physical attractiveness is heritable and because daughters benefit from this more than sons."
I'm probably being unreasonably picky about word choice (particularly for a (presumably) non-native English speaker), but you can't use the word "because" when talking about humans! That's pretty much my whole problem with evolutionary psychology: the way-too-strong claims about causation. It's impossible to show causation when you can't have proper controls (find a society where everything's the same except for daughters benefitting more from physical attractiveness and beautiful parents don't have more daughters, and I might be satisfied).

Anyway, usually, I'm left seething with frustration and unable to pinpoint why I find the study so objectionable, but this paper makes claims about biology, rather than just behaviour. I know at least a little about the biology of sex determination and the idea that the attractiveness of the parents could influence an essentially random event doesn't make sense to me. For starters, it's only the father who has any effect on sex determination. As far as I could tell, the study looked at children of all respondents, male and female, from a study of adolescent health. I'm willing to entertain the possibility that some characteristic of the father might somehow influence the proportion of sperm carrying an X or Y chromosome (although that still seems unlikely), but how is the mother supposed to influence which sperm fertilises an egg? Actually, maybe there could be some difference in cell surface marker/receptor expression. I'm still very dubious, but I suppose my problem here is that there is no mention of any biological mechanism by which this could be happening. It seems like they just came up with a neat idea and started looking for evidence that it's real without figuring out if it's even possible. It seems kind of like phlogiston or ether (maybe that means there's hope that evolutionary psychology will become more like a real science as more is known), except at least those theories started with observation, instead of the other way around.

I have problems with some of the observation in this study, too. The respondents were rated in terms of attractiveness by an interviewer. This seems pretty subjective to me. The results showed a significant difference between those classed as "highly attractive" compared to the rest, but there was no difference for those who were merely "attractive", which seems reasonable, since "highly attractive" is conceivably less subjective than "attractive". Overall, there were a lot more attractive women than men, but surely some of that is due to societal influences? Aren't women more likely than men to perceive attractiveness in people of both sexes? They don't say whether the interviewer (or interviewers?) was male or female. In any case, it seems a bit of a leap to then claim that this is a new development, resulting from the increased likelihood that beautiful parents will have daughters. Why isn't it just as likely that women were always more attractive, on average, since being attractive is apparently so important for fitness? Or just that women in general make more of an effort to appear attractive?

Maybe I shouldn't have gone off on such a rant about this paper when I know nothing about social science research. Please tell me if I'm operating under some misconception and I'll accept that my annoyance is irrational and shut up about it.

Why can't I put this much energy into critiquing a paper that's actually relevant to what I study?