Trouble in the Monkey House.

When Harvard announced last month that it had found the psychologist Marc Hauser ''solely responsible'' for eight instances of scientific misconduct, the news generated front-page headlines and streams of schadenfreude-laced commentary in the blogosphere. Hauser, an expert on human and animal cognition, is a star of the Harvard faculty and the author of scores of scientific papers, as well as the book ''Moral Minds'' (2006), a popular study of the evolutionary underpinnings of human morality. The irony of that last part -- and of the title of Hauser's book-in-progress, ''Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad'' -- wasn't lost on some observers. Evolutionary psychology itself is in need of a ''morality check,'' The Wall Street Journal declared. The editor of the journal that published one of Hauser's disputed papers said some data seemed to be ''fabricated,'' a sin ''as serious as it gets.'' Meanwhile, the eminent primatologist Frans de Waal called the scientific impact of the affair ''disastrous.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]