Is American Politics Anti-Human? (Part 1)
How does human evolution illuminate contemporary politics?
I’ve been down and out with covid for the past week, and my voice is still froggy, at best. So instead of ranting about the constant crisis of American politics on the podcast (and thus subjecting you to my croaking), I thought I’d do a series on how the current political scene looks to me, when illuminated (distorted?) by my take on 300k years of human social evolution.
The way politics is currently practiced in the US may seem like a distillation of its essential elements: zero-sum struggle for dominance, dirty tricks used to undermine and humiliate the opponent, “flooding the zone” with lies so no particular lie stands out, etc. But within the broader context of human evolution, this cut-throat approach to power distribution seems more to be a convolution of characteristic human behavior, rather than a crystalline expression of it.
The input into we’ve been getting from culture has been anything but arbitrary over the past 300,000 years or so, since the emergence of anatomically modern humans. In the context of trying to survive by foraging, social groups that valued and practiced egalitarianism, cooperation, and open sharing of resources have been far more successful than groups that didn’t value these pro-social behaviors. The conditions of hunter-gatherer life—conditions shared by all our foraging ancestors—demanded these qualities. Because they formed an important part of our ancestors’ social ecology for so long, these pro-social behaviors are deeply embedded in the DNA of our species.
As evolutionary theorist David Sloan Wilson and others have argued, cohesive, smoothly-functioning social groups were central to the success of Homo sapiens. Many contemporary evolutionary theorists are quick to pooh-pooh any discussion of so-called “group selection”—presumably because it smacks of socialism and undermines cherished fantasies of man being wolf to man, and so on. Yet Charles Darwin himself argued that group selection would logically proceed from natural selection because it offered clear adaptive advantages to cooperative societies: “A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection.”1
Primatologist Frans de Waal has noted that “Even though the process of natural selection is inherently competitive, it has produced all sorts of tendencies and configurations in nature, including socially positive and cooperative ones. The lethal territoriality of the male tiger is as much a product of natural selection as the death-defying solidarity among dolphins.” Of course, we are closely related to the highly-social, deeply sexual, big brained dolphins, but quite distant from solitary tigers.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Tangentially Speaking with Chris Ryan to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.