Reviewer on the Roof

Many people who have published in peer-reviewed journals have nice little horror stories to tell about the referree reports they get. I remember reading about a two-paragraph report the first sentence of which said that the paper's point was trivial and the second of which said it was wrong. However, I've never come across a story like this:

We had a very interesting experience a few years ago when we came out with a paper about Ashkenazi history and evolution. Reviewers mostly hated it, but the criticisms we got were almost entirely worthless. We had population geneticists telling us we had the history wrong (citing "Fiddler on the Roof"!), historians telling us we didn't understand evolution, lab geneticists telling us that we didn't understand population genetics.

[...]

You know, I suspected that particular reviewer had obtained his deep historical knowledge of the Ashkenazi Jews in the Middle Ages by watching "Fiddler on the Roof." That shows just how cynical I am. And then he confirmed it, when I asked him.

That's from the first installment of 2Blowhards' interview with Gregory Cochran on his and Henry Harpending's new book The 10,000 Year Explosion in which they argue that evolution has sped up during the last 10,000 years or so.

I haven't read the book, but I remember reading earlier that Cochran and Harpending, quite remarkably, argued that evolution was still going on. Not only is this a much more modest claim, but I was wondering then and am wondering still: If you're arguing that evolution has stopped at some point in the past, then aren't you denying the theory of evolution itself?