- Anonymous Conservative [Michael Trust].
The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics.
Macclenny, FL: Federalist Publications, [2012, 2014] 2017.
ISBN 978-0-9829479-3-7.
-
One of the puzzles noted by observers of the contemporary
political and cultural scene is the division of the population
into two factions, (called in the sloppy terminology of the
United States) “liberal” and “conservative”,
and that if you pick a member from either faction by
observing his or her position on one of the divisive issues
of the time, you can, with a high probability of accuracy,
predict their preferences on all of a long list of other issues
which do not, on the face of it, seem to have very much to do
with one another. For example, here is a list of present-day
hot-button issues, presented in no particular order.
- Health care, socialised medicine
- Climate change, renewable energy
- School choice
- Gun control
- Higher education subsidies, debt relief
- Free speech (hate speech laws, Internet censorship)
- Deficit spending, debt, and entitlement reform
- Immigration
- Tax policy, redistribution
- Abortion
- Foreign interventions, military spending
What a motley collection of topics! About the only thing they
have in common is that the omnipresent administrative
super-state has become involved in them in one way or another,
and therefore partisans of policies affecting them view it
important to influence the state's action in their regard. And
yet, pick any one, tell me what policies you favour, and I'll
bet I can guess at where you come down on at least eight of the
other ten. What's going on?
Might there be some deeper, common thread or cause which
explains this otherwise curious clustering of opinions? Maybe
there's something rooted in biology, possibly even heritable,
which predisposes people to choose the same option on disparate
questions? Let's take a brief excursion into ecological
modelling and see if there's something of interest there.
As with all modelling, we start with a simplified, almost
cartoon abstraction of the gnarly complexity of the real world.
Consider a closed territory (say, an island) with abundant
edible vegetation and no animals. Now introduce a species, such
as rabbits, which can eat the vegetation and turn it into more
rabbits. We start with a small number, P, of rabbits.
Now, once they get busy with bunny business, the population will
expand at a rate r which is essentially constant over a
large population. If r is larger than 1 (which for
rabbits it will be, with litter sizes between 4 and 10 depending on
the breed, and gestation time around a month) the population
will increase. Since the rate of increase is constant and the
total increase is proportional to the size of the existing
population, this growth will be exponential. Ask any
Australian.
Now, what will eventually happen? Will the island disappear under
a towering pile of rabbits inexorably climbing to the top of
the atmosphere? No—eventually the number of rabbits will
increase to the point where they are eating all the
vegetation the territory can produce. This number, K,
is called the “carrying capacity” of the environment,
and it is an absolute number for a given species and environment. This
can be expressed as a differential equation called the
Verhulst
model, as follows:
It's a maxim among popular science writers that every equation
you include cuts your readership by a factor of two, so among
the hardy half who remain, let's see how this works. It's really
very simple (and indeed, far simpler than actual population
dynamics in a real environment). The left side,
“dP/dt” simply means “the rate of growth
of the population P with respect to time, t”.
On the right hand side, “rP” accounts for the
increase (or decrease, if r is less than 0) in population,
proportional to the current population. The population is limited
by the carrying capacity of the habitat, K, which is
modelled by the factor “(1 − P/K)”.
Now think about how this works: when the population is very small,
P/K will be close to zero and, subtracted from one,
will yield a number very close to one. This, then, multiplied by
the increase due to rP will have little effect and the
growth will be largely unconstrained. As the population P
grows and begins to approach K, however, P/K
will approach unity and the factor will fall to zero, meaning that
growth has completely stopped due to the population reaching
the carrying capacity of the environment—it simply doesn't
produce enough vegetation to feed any more rabbits. If the rabbit
population overshoots, this factor will go negative and there will
be a die-off which eventually brings the population P
below the carrying capacity K. (Sorry if this seems
tedious; one of the great things about learning even a very little
about differential equations is that all of this is apparent at a
glance from the equation once you get over the speed bump of
understanding the notation and algebra involved.)
This is grossly over-simplified. In fact, real populations are
prone to oscillations and even chaotic dynamics, but we don't
need to get into any of that for what follows, so I won't.
Let's complicate things in our bunny paradise by introducing a
population of wolves. The wolves can't eat the vegetation, since
their digestive systems cannot extract nutrients from it, so
their only source of food is the rabbits. Each wolf eats many
rabbits every year, so a large rabbit population is required to
support a modest number of wolves. Now if we go back and look
at the equation for wolves, K represents the number of
wolves the rabbit population can sustain, in the steady state,
where the number of rabbits eaten by the wolves just balances
the rabbits' rate of reproduction. This will often result in
a rabbit population smaller than the carrying capacity
of the environment, since their population is now constrained
by wolf predation and not K.
What happens as this (oversimplified) system cranks away,
generation after generation, and Darwinian evolution kicks in?
Evolution consists of two processes: variation, which is largely
random, and selection, which is sensitively dependent upon the
environment. The rabbits are unconstrained by K, the
carrying capacity of their environment. If their numbers
increase beyond a population P substantially smaller
than K, the wolves will simply eat more of them and
bring the population back down. The rabbit population, then, is
not at all constrained by K, but rather by r:
the rate at which they can produce new offspring. Population
biologists call this an r-selected species: evolution
will select for individuals who produce the largest number of
progeny in the shortest time, and hence for a life cycle which
minimises parental investment in offspring and against mating
strategies, such as lifetime pair bonding, which would limit
their numbers. Rabbits which produce fewer offspring will lose
a larger fraction of them to predation (which affects all
rabbits, essentially at random), and the genes which they carry
will be selected out of the population. An r-selected
population, sometimes referred to as
r-strategists, will tend to be small, with short
gestation time, high fertility (offspring per litter), rapid
maturation to the point where offspring can reproduce, and broad
distribution of offspring within the environment.
Wolves operate under an entirely different set of constraints.
Their entire food supply is the rabbits, and since it takes a
lot of rabbits to keep a wolf going, there will be fewer wolves
than rabbits. What this means, going back to the Verhulst
equation, is that the 1 − P/K
factor will largely determine their population: the carrying
capacity K of the environment supports a much smaller
population of wolves than their food source, rabbits, and if
their rate of population growth r were to increase, it
would simply mean that more wolves would starve due to
insufficient prey. This results in an entirely different set of
selection criteria driving their evolution: the wolves are said
to be K-selected or K-strategists. A
successful wolf (defined by evolution theory as more likely to
pass its genes on to successive generations) is not one which
can produce more offspring (who would merely starve by hitting
the K limit before reproducing), but rather highly
optimised predators, able to efficiently exploit the limited
supply of rabbits, and to pass their genes on to a small number
of offspring, produced infrequently, which require substantial
investment by their parents to train them to hunt and,
in many cases, acquire social skills to act as part of a group
that hunts together. These K-selected species tend to
be larger, live longer, have fewer offspring, and have parents
who spend much more effort raising them and training them to be
successful predators, either individually or as part of a pack.
“K or r, r or K:
once you've seen it, you can't look away.”
Just as our island of bunnies and wolves was over-simplified,
the dichotomy of r- and K-selection is rarely
precisely observed in nature (although rabbits and wolves are
pretty close to the extremes, which it why I chose them). Many
species fall somewhere in the middle and, more importantly,
are able to shift their strategy on the fly, much faster than
evolution by natural selection, based upon the availability of
resources. These r/K shape-shifters react to
their environment. When resources are abundant, they adopt an
r-strategy, but as their numbers approach the carrying
capacity of their environment, shift to life cycles
you'd expect from K-selection.
What about humans? At a first glance, humans would seem to be
a quintessentially K-selected species. We are
large, have long lifespans (about twice as long as we
“should” based upon the number of heartbeats per
lifetime of other mammals), usually only produce one child (and
occasionally two) per gestation, with around a one year turn-around
between children, and massive investment by parents in
raising infants to the point of minimal autonomy and many
additional years before they become fully functional adults. Humans
are “knowledge workers”, and whether they are
hunter-gatherers, farmers, or denizens of cubicles at The
Company, live largely by their wits, which are a combination
of the innate capability of their hypertrophied brains and
what they've learned in their long apprenticeship through
childhood. Humans are not just predators on what they
eat, but also on one another. They fight, and they fight in
bands, which means that they either develop the social
skills to defend themselves and meet their needs by raiding
other, less competent groups, or get selected out in the
fullness of evolutionary time.
But humans are also highly adaptable. Since modern humans
appeared some time between fifty and two hundred thousand years
ago they have survived, prospered, proliferated, and spread
into almost every habitable region of the Earth. They have
been hunter-gatherers, farmers, warriors, city-builders,
conquerors, explorers, colonisers, traders, inventors,
industrialists, financiers, managers, and, in the
Final Days
of their species, WordPress site administrators.
In many species, the selection of a predominantly r
or K strategy is a mix of genetics and switches
that get set based upon experience in the environment. It is
reasonable to expect that humans, with their large brains and
ability to override inherited instinct, would be
especially sensitive to signals directing them to one or
the other strategy.
Now, finally, we get back to politics. This was a post about
politics. I hope you've been thinking about it as we spent
time in the island of bunnies and wolves, the cruel realities
of natural selection, and the arcana of differential equations.
What does r-selection produce in a human
population? Well, it might, say, be averse to competition
and all means of selection by measures of performance. It would
favour the production of large numbers of offspring at an
early age, by early onset of mating, promiscuity, and
the raising of children by single mothers with minimal
investment by them and little or none by the fathers (leaving
the raising of children to the State). It would welcome
other r-selected people into the community, and
hence favour immigration from heavily r populations.
It would oppose any kind of selection based upon performance,
whether by intelligence tests, academic records, physical
fitness, or job performance. It would strive to create the
ideal r environment of unlimited resources,
where all were provided all their basic needs without having
to do anything but consume. It would oppose and be repelled
by the K component of the population, seeking to
marginalise it as toxic, privileged, or
exploiters of the real people. It might
even welcome conflict with K warriors of adversaries
to reduce their numbers in otherwise pointless foreign adventures.
And K-troop? Once a society in which they initially
predominated creates sufficient wealth to support a burgeoning
r population, they will find themselves outnumbered and
outvoted, especially once the r wave removes the
firebreaks put in place when K was king to guard
against majoritarian rule by an urban underclass. The
K population will continue to do what they do best:
preserving the institutions and infrastructure which sustain
life, defending the society in the military, building and
running businesses, creating the basic science and technologies
to cope with emerging problems and expand the human potential,
and governing an increasingly complex society made up, with
every generation, of a population, and voters, who are
fundamentally unlike them.
Note that the r/K model completely explains
the “crunchy to soggy” evolution of societies
which has been remarked upon since antiquity. Human
societies always start out, as our genetic heritage predisposes
us to, K-selected. We work to better our condition
and turn our large brains to problem-solving and, before
long, the privation our ancestors endured turns into
a pretty good life and then, eventually, abundance. But
abundance is what selects for the r strategy. Those
who would not have reproduced, or have as many children in
the K days of yore, now have babies-a-poppin' as in
the introduction to
Idiocracy,
and before long, not waiting for genetics to do its inexorable
work, but purely by a shift in incentives, the rs outvote
the Ks and the Ks begin to count the days until
their society runs out of the wealth which can be plundered
from them.
But recall that equation. In our simple bunnies and wolves
model, the resources of the island were static. Nothing the
wolves could do would increase K and permit a larger
rabbit and wolf population. This isn't the case for humans.
K humans dramatically increase the carrying capacity of
their environment by inventing new technologies such as
agriculture, selective breeding of plants and animals,
discovering and exploiting new energy sources such as firewood,
coal, and petroleum, and exploring and settling new territories
and environments which may require their discoveries to render
habitable. The rs don't do these things. And as the
rs predominate and take control, this momentum stalls
and begins to recede. Then the hard times ensue. As
Heinlein said many years ago, “This
is known as bad luck.”
And then the
Gods
of the Copybook Headings will, with terror and slaughter return.
And K-selection will, with them, again assert itself.
Is this a complete model, a Rosetta stone for human behaviour? I
think not: there are a number of things it doesn't explain, and
the shifts in behaviour based upon incentives are much too fast
to account for by genetics. Still, when you look at those eleven
issues I listed so many words ago through the r/K
perspective, you can almost immediately see how each strategy maps
onto one side or the other of each one, and they are consistent with
the policy preferences of “liberals” and
“conservatives”. There is also some rather fuzzy
evidence for genetic differences (in particular the
DRD4-7R
allele of the dopamine receptor and size of the right brain
amygdala) which
appear to correlate with ideology.
Still, if you're on one side of the ideological divide and
confronted with somebody on the other and try to argue
from facts and logical inference, you may end up throwing up
your hands (if not your breakfast) and saying, “They
just don't get it!” Perhaps they don't.
Perhaps they can't. Perhaps there's a difference
between you and them as great as that between rabbits and
wolves, which can't be worked out by predator and prey sitting
down and voting on what to have for dinner. This may not be
a hopeful view of the political prospect in the near future,
but hope is not a strategy and to survive and prosper requires
accepting reality as it is and acting accordingly.
December 2019 