Evolution as a Catch-All

More on evolution in the service of ideology. Not convincing.

Now [Randy Thornhill] is looking at the evolutionary roots of political preference. In particular, he is asking if there is a Darwinian explanation for why some people are liberals and some conservatives. Curiously, his answer also casts light on the ideas of another 19th-century scientist, Sigmund Freud.

Psychologists have long known that conservatives and liberals differ in more than whether they vote Tory or Labour, Republican or Democrat. Indeed, the perverse mixtures of policies on offer from these parties, conflating social conservatism with economic liberalism and vice versa, mean that voting preferences are often an unreliable guide. But bundles of personality traits do tend to cluster together in people. Some are sceptical of tradition, open to new experiences, rebellious, pleasure-seeking, egalitarian and risk-prone. Others value tradition, duty, close family relationships and security.

I think that it's fairly obvious that the creationism fringe is really a fringe: evolution has become so much the reigning paradigm that its workings are applied to everything. It's not merely that we won't understand biology without evolution -- we won't be able to describe anything.

Conservatives, the authors suggest, are likely to do best in stable societies—say, a village where there is plenty to eat and no marauding enemy, and the biggest danger to stability might come from dissatisfaction within the community. The traits associated with liberalism, on the other hand, might be most effective when there is a lot of stress on a population. If food is scarce and other people are pressing in, then a liberal's willingness to challenge traditional ways of doing things, and his greater willingness to embrace outsiders (often literally; liberals tend to have more sexual encounters than conservatives) might come in handy. Evolution has thus fixed it so that appropriate patterns of personality are activated in response to the environment in which they are most likely to cause an individual to thrive.

This last sentence is a no-brainer, and has application far beyond personality traits. It's what evolution's all about.

My major problem with this, aside from the fact that it's a gloss of the article in a newspaper, never the best way to get your science, is that the labels are, particularly now, more and more arbitrary. "The traits associated with liberalism" by whom? Michelle Malkin or Al Gore? "Conservative" by whose criteria? Rush Limbaugh or Andrew Sullivan? And how do you explain the vast middle?

There are, unfortunately, no links to Thornhill's article. Evolution and Human Behavior is online, but it's a members-only site. The whole question of evolution and behavior is iffy, as far as I can see. Certainly, some behaviors, or the propensity toward certain behaviors, have evolutionary value if we remember the other key element of evolution: population genetics. If it benefits the group and has a genetic basis, it will probably be retained. The links get a lot more tenuous when you start getting into questions of "conservative" versus "liberal." It is much to easy for conclusions to be ideology driven.

And why would anyone care, anyway?

Which is all fine and dandy—except that last year a group of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, came to exactly the opposite conclusion. Their study found that insecure and fearful children were more likely to grow up into conservatives, and that confident kids were more likely to become liberal. Clearly, as scientists are so fond of saying, more research is needed.

To be sure.