Can Evolution Explain Our Politics? Nicholas Wade Thinks So

28:49So this has been a test of the major civilizations, each of which, as Fukuyama describes, have found different very creative ways to suppress the tribes and tribal organization. civilization so so our societies no longer work tribally if you ask americans what tribe they belong to they wouldn't they'd have no idea what you mean um tribes have just vanished as a ongoing political concept in modern societies but of course you can't you can't completely change human nature and there's still very strong tide of nepotism and uh and density to favor one's family so i think all you can say is that the is that the instinct towards kinship are still there it's just they're very heavily regulated by our culture and by our laws and by and large you can't get away with favoring your children if it's not in the public interest

29:54Coleman Hughes:have we replaced classic old school tribalism with political tribalism? In other words, if you asked an American, what tribe do you belong to? They might assume you're talking about Democrats versus Republicans. I agree with you. They probably might not know what you're talking about because we're not members of tribes or clans anymore, but they might actually assume you mean you're asking about my politics. And not only that, there's a lot of good research on affective polarization, which shows that Democrats really tend to feel negative emotions about someone once they learn they're Republican.

30:36Coleman Hughes:And Republicans tend to feel the same way about Democrats more than was the case 30 and 40 years ago. So has the instinct to form tribes, instead of being fully tamped down, has it simply been replaced by political tribes? Well, I think what has been placed by most, obviously, is by the nation-state. So nation-states are sort of, everyone belongs to the same honorary tribe. So although people are no longer held together by ties of direct kinship, which is the case with tribes, they're held together by lots of other markers of kinship, like a common language, common religion, usually a common ethnicity.

31:21but that said people are still very groupish and so people want to you know belong to a group and when they do they will feel hostile feelings maybe to people in the opposing group so that's the kind of a grouping which I think you get on a political level in my mind that the the the tribe itself has disappeared as a political entity and to be replaced by the nation state. And when we say, when we talk about politics as tribal, we're using it more in a metaphorical sense.

32:00Coleman Hughes:I wonder if we have gone too far in the direction of breaking apart kinship ties because we often hear talk about the atomization of society, the fact that people feel isolated. People live in cities. They don't know who their neighbors are. They don't live near their parents. When they have kids, normally the grandparents are nature's babysitters, but the grandparents may live a thousand miles away. and arguably this has something to do with you know why people don't want to have kids anymore you know especially among liberals and liberal women you see astonishing rates of mental illness and depression and a lot of worrisome trends is is there a case to be made that we've gone too far Our modern political culture has gone too far in poo-pooing the idea of family ties.

33:09Yes, I think that's definitely right. I mean, evolution has designed us to live in small family groups that are closely connected to each other, that don't move geographically, and in a word for a completely different way of life. So our modern societies are far more productive, and they're far freer, and they're better in many definable ways. But it's just that there are severe downsides, such as the ones you described. Now, whether or not this is connected with our declining fertility rates, I'm not sure. I think the breakup of the family and the declining rates of marriage probably have a lot to do with this.

33:58Plus the fact that women have been sort of liberated from their evolutionary traditional task of looking after children and have gone into the workplace in large numbers. So all that is great. It's just that it puts stresses on the system as it was designed to operate.

34:24Coleman Hughes:I want to tell you about a podcast I think you're going to appreciate. It's called Unpacking Israeli History. If you follow the news about Israel, you're just getting headlines. But headlines are just a tiny slice of a long, complicated, and genuinely fascinating story. One of the things I care about on this show is engaging seriously with complexity rather than flattening it. That's exactly what host Dr. Noam Weissman does on Unpacking Israeli History. He dives deep into the events, the people, and the moments that shaped Israel past and present. with genuine empathy and a willingness to explore multiple perspectives.

35:00Coleman Hughes:And when he brings in guests like philosopher Micah Goodman or journalist Haviv Retig-Gor, they add real depth to the conversation. It's deeply researched storytelling for people who want to understand Israel rather than just confirm what they already think. In today's climate, that's rare, and it matters. Find Unpacking Israeli History on your favorite podcast app or YouTube and subscribe today. Hey, it's Kelly Rowland. You may not know this, but I have eczema, so I get how it can steal your time. But why let eczema take over when you can talk to your doctor about ebglis? Ebglis, lubricizumab LBKZ, a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies.

35:56Coleman Hughes:EBCLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you are allergic to EBCLIS. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBCLIS. Before starting EBCLIS, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Paid partnership with Lilly. Respect your time. Ask your doctor about EBCLIS and visit eplist.com or call 1-800-LILLY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. So if I accept your thesis that human nature constrains the space of functional political systems, in an American context, should that push me more to the left or to the right, or is that the wrong way to think about it?

36:44No, that's a perfect question. So when you're looking at things from an evolutionary perspective, lots of findings will seem to lean to the conservative side, but that's simply because evolution can only look backward, and so it's built on what worked in the past. And so it inevitably overlaps with conservatism, which also favours retaining past values. but the other side of that is that a society cannot stay the same it has to innovate as its environment changes so you need to have every society needs to have both kinds of politics conservative politics that favors staying the same and being cautious when that is appropriate and and liberal innovative politics that favors changing or adapting to new circumstances or exploration of new territory.

37:40And I think we do have both those tendencies built into our genome because, surprisingly, political tendencies have a genetic component. About 40 % of the variation in political attitudes has a genetic basis, which is very hard to figure out why that should be so given that in the environment in which we evolved, there are obviously no political parties. I think the best explanation is that societies to survive needed to have inherent in them both these tendencies, the tendency to conserve and the tendency to innovate.

38:26Coleman Hughes:What traits define a conservative and what traits define a liberal in terms of genetics?

38:36Well, at a genetic level, it probably doesn't work that way. I mean, we don't know exactly how it does work. I mean, there's certainly no gene that says you shall be a conservative. there will be a whole large cluster of genes that affect, that nudge various behaviors in different directions. For example, one person could have a higher sort of fear response, a fear of strangers, say, than another. And this might incline them just a little to be more anti-immigration and therefore more conservative. So if you had a whole lot of these little nudges, then that sort of makes up a sort of constellation of a political attitude.

39:20That is probably how it works, but we don't know in detail because we haven't defined the relevant genes.

39:28Coleman Hughes:In Israel, we've seen that it's one of the few modern democracies where the birth rate is above replacement. But within Israeli society, there is a huge divide between the ultra-Orthodox who tend to have many, many kids, sometimes five or six kids a family, and much more than two on average for a couple, and the rest of Israeli society, which is more secular and has maybe two or three kids on average. And as a result of this, you've seen that since the birth of Israel, now to the present, the ultra-Orthodox population has grown. It was basically non-existent, negligible political force in the 1940s and 50s.

40:17Coleman Hughes:Now it's something like a third of Israelis under the age of 18 are ultra-Orthodox. It's a massive political force that's moved their politics to the right. In some way, is the rest of the Western world, is Israel the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the world? Because in America, the Amish have very high birth rates. Obviously, the ultra-Orthodox communities here too. We have certain pockets of our American population that have lots of kids, and they're people that the rest of Americans don't think about very often. Is there a plausible long-run future where those populations form a massive, maybe even a majority of the societies in these countries?

41:13Of the fast-breeding populations? You mean will the Amish take over America? Yes. I think no one knows the answer to this very severe problem we have of declining fertility rates. So I don't think this is going to help us that the Amish produce a lot of children. It's not going to help us that we have a much higher volume of immigration than other countries. the overall numbers are just so bad that we have to sort of look at things deep in the structure of our society if we hope to change this. And the problem begins with women because they are, after all, the ones who bear children. So you can ask, well, if a society is in peril, men are expected to give up their lives in defense of it.

42:03so if a society is imperiled for this unusual region of infertility should we expect women to shoulder the responsibility and step up and have more children even though they don't want them i don't know the answer to that question i also i think in a way it's wrongly framed because the problem is not women in themselves it's families so families are the things that generate children. So somehow or other, we need to have more, we need to have a higher rate of marriage because married couples have more children. We need to somehow do something about the structure of women's careers in that many women, for obvious understandable reasons, postpone having children so as to get a start in their careers.

42:54And yet the longer you postpone having children, the less fertile you are. So we need to sort of set up some system, I don't know how it would work, that would encourage women, A, to get married more, even though it's increasingly hard for women who are now more educated in general than men to find an educated man to get married more, to have children younger or do something to privilege children more over their careers. But you only have to sort of state that as the problem to see how severe it is. I mean, how do you persuade women that, no, they can't go out into the exciting wide world for which they have been so well educated.

43:42They have to stay at home and change diapers. I mean, no country has succeeded in constructing a set of incentives that change that calculus. And South Korea has been trying for decades to combat its falling birth rate with longer parental leave, bonuses for extra children. Anything you can think of, they've done, and it hasn't worked. So we need some kind of revolution in our thinking that goes profoundly to the nature of the family and to the nature of men and women's roles and their respective careers if we are to get out of this hole that we're digging for ourselves.

44:28Coleman Hughes:So let me tell you my theory of why birth rates are declining, and you tell me if you disagree. As you said, the birth rate is declining all over the world, in America, in Eastern Europe, in Western Europe, in parts of Asia, in society so different that it's implausible to ascribe it to any specific policy or any country-specific or region-specific set of circumstances. It's a global phenomenon everywhere, basically except Africa. And so I think what this tells us is that whatever's driving it is something fundamentally driving the modern world. And my assumption is that, I don't know if you've heard of, I think it's called the Balmell effect, but this was explained in an economics book that I read where it starts with the question, why is it so expensive to purchase like a string quartet for two hours, right?

45:30Coleman Hughes:Because in theory, capitalism leads to declining prices over time, right? A microwave starts costing$5 ,000 and now it costs a hundred or whatever. Why doesn't this happen for certain things like a string quartet or certain services? And the reason is because the opportunity cost required to get that violin player at Juilliard to not be a coder, you know, as living standards rise, the violin player demands more in order to call him away from the opportunities that the world is creating. And so my assumption is just that with human progress, the baseline amount of fun and enjoyment and pleasure and everything you can get being a human just goes up and up every year.

46:17Coleman Hughes:What it was like to be a single 30-year-old guy in my great grandfather's generation was just like, there was not that much to do. You know? Whereas for me, it's like the world becomes a playground as GDP increases, basically. Yet, similar to a string quartet, the experience of having a family and raising children is not that different than it was 100 years ago. At the end of the day, it's you with your three-year-old playing with a toy, connecting like that. And it's not actually like with technological change and economic growth, it doesn't change that much. And so in relative terms, the appeal of having a family and being a father or a mother has gone down relative to how much fun you can be having as an unattached single person.

47:09Coleman Hughes:So basically, that's my theory of why the birth rate is down because of economic growth. And the only thing capable of combating that force, that tidal wave of progress, is a situation like Israel, where you have a very strong, tight-knit culture that has specific values around having lots of kids. In Israel, it's very important to have lots of kids, whether you're secular or not, because that society was forged in a crucible of everyone around the world seems to want to kill us, we're not going to let ourselves dwindle because we're too lazy to have kids. And we have a duty to our ancestors that survived all of these persecutions.

47:54Coleman Hughes:So that's a very particular, unique culture which is able to use those cultural norms to fight the tide, but the rest of the world just basically isn't. So we're screwed. Well, I think that's a very good theory. and a further point in that effect is that the one European country that has bunked the trend of declining fertility is the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, which is quite religious, and they have a patriarch called Elia II who announced that for every married family that had a third child, he would personally baptize it and be its godfather. And as soon as he made that announcement, the Georgian birth rate took off like a rocket.

48:45Everyone was having a third and fourth and fifth children. So this shows you the power of religion, which after all is a great pro-natalist force in influencing people's decisions. And obviously that is at work, as you say, among the Hasid and among the Amish. So one of our problems is that I think a major problem in the infertility question is the declining force of religion. Americans used to be much more religious than Europeans, but now religion is declining as a cultural force. So we have all the incentive that religion gives you to have more children has almost disappeared from American life.

49:31Hedonism, as you suggest, I think is very important. I mean, for a young woman now, she can get a very interesting job, well-paid job all by herself. She doesn't need the bother of coping with a difficult man, nor the bother of diapers and children. It's a great big chore to have children. So it's something she thinks twice about in a way that no previous generation would have done. so it just i think from every from every uh side uh disincentives to a family and having children are present and it's very hard to see how you can roll them back in one fell swoop unless you are a

50:16Coleman Hughes:religious country like georgia which we are not okay so if i accept your thesis once again that human nature constrains the possible functional political systems that we can have. Should that change any of my beliefs about foreign policy? Should that nudge me in the direction of a more isolationist foreign policy or a more hawkish foreign policy? Or is it irrelevant to foreign policy? Well, the way I see it is that one should not despair of the ability of culture to shift and modulate and restrain human nature. As an example, the fact that most societies used to be polygamous. So the powerful guys in any society, especially early societies, would have a lot more wives than anyone else.

51:14And polygamy essentially has been the standard throughout history in most human societies. societies polygamy has now almost entirely disappeared from the western world because of cultural and legal restraints so when it comes to foreign policy i think one needs to recognize that humans human societies are inherently warlike and bellicos and will do anything to protect their own survival which includes attacking one's neighbor if it seems one's neighbors getting too strong. It always seems better to make a preemptive strike than wait until the comparative disadvantage increases. So any system of states is going to go to war eventually, unless there is some agreed upon system for preserving the peace.

52:12So in history, we've had various systems that do that. The best known example is the Westphalian system that established peace in medieval Europe after an enormous blood setting religiously based of the 40 Years' War. So under the Westphalian system, the Europeans agreed to stop fighting wars of religion. that whatever religion the prince in a country had, everyone else would have it too. And that system was succeeded by the Congress of Vienna that brought peace to Europe after Napoleon had stirred everything up and was followed by the Pax Britannica, where the British essentially could keep peace in Europe because of their more powerful fleet and could intervene anywhere.

53:10And that was succeeded by the period of American hygienomy, which we are now in, where essentially America supports the international order, which loosely means countries have agreed rules not to invade each other like Putin did with Ukraine and to settle their agreements peacefully and under legal rules. So if you accept that as a basic description of the current situation, then you don't want to be an isolationist because without some restraining system to keep the inherent human hostility in check, we're going to go back to the law of the jungle. So you do need to be an interventionist. You should wish some leading power for which at present America is the only candidate to be the sort of policeman of this system and to try and keep everyone on track.

54:17Because if you don't, the result will be warfare given that this is the default state of humankind.

54:25Coleman Hughes:Can't we all just get along? Well, sure, but clearly we don't. Okay, one more question before I let you go. To what extent is hereditary monarchy a functional system compatible with human nature? Because obviously in America, we love our democracy and we evangelize our democracy and we hope the world follows our lead. But if you take a hard-nosed look at the Middle East, for instance, all the places I would be comfortable spending 10, 15 years in a row in, confident that there would probably be no civil wars or the state wouldn't become a failed state, they're pretty much all monarchies. It's the monarchies.

55:18Coleman Hughes:It's Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, UAE, Qatar, etc. And all the places where if I was dropped in the middle and I would worry about civil war breaking out in the next 10 years and ending up a casualty, many of them are places that have tried democracy or Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, etc. And sometimes the democracies last for five, 10 years without a civil war, but you'd be hard-pressed to find one that has lasted more than 12 years. And so if I'm taking my pro-democracy American hat on and just putting my scientist hat on, I would say hereditary democracy is clearly the best system for any culture that is predominantly Arab or Muslim, or Arab and Muslim, I should say.

56:18Coleman Hughes:And that's just looking at the data. So on the other hand, when we look in Europe, look back on the history of hereditary monarchy, I guess a lot of us think of it as barbaric and quite violent and certainly not an improvement over the democracies that we have or the purely symbolic monarchies that we have today. So what is your view on hereditary monarchy as a political system? Well, I think I would class it just more generally as an autocracy, where you have one guy calling the shots. So autocracy has been the default political organization for most of our history. And it's very successful and very effective, despite all the disadvantages you allude to.

57:08if you want to go to the alternative you need to do a lot of institution building so you need to build up a lot of institutions that take on the role of of governing in many important aspects and it's very hard to build up those institutions so we have learned at great pain and cost that we cannot export american institutions to the middle east to iraq or other places because they need to grow organic. You simply cannot impose them on other people. They're our institutions and we built them through our history in our own way. So for the Arab countries you mentioned, they are setting on their political history from a much recent basis than we are since, you know, until the end of the First World War, they were most under Turkish domination.

58:09So it takes a long time to build institutions, and they have not yet, in my view, had time to build institutions that would successfully carry them away from autocracy.

58:22Coleman Hughes:Is another way of thinking about it that societies that haven't solved the tribalism problem can't then convert to democracies? In other words, in your book, you talk about how China was among the first civilizations to solve the tribalism problem, which is you can't have a coherent state if people are still fundamentally more loyal to their tribe than they are to the state. And if you look at all the societies where America has successfully done state building after destroying those societies in war, for instance, Germany or Japan, those are both societies that had already, before we ever arrived, basically solved the primordial tribalism problem.

59:18Coleman Hughes:And so is that one way of thinking about when state building works and when it doesn't? Yes, I think it is indeed. And most of the Arab countries to which you refer are still largely tribal. Apart from their urban populations, they still haven't gone through that wrenching process of detribalization that the Europeans and the Chinese have done. And I think that's one of the difficulties in building alternative institutions because these institutions need to be non-tribal. Otherwise, you haven't made your escape. You need to trust that an institution will look after you and your family, at least as well as the tribe on which you've relied for so many centuries.

1:00:05Right.

1:00:06Coleman Hughes:Okay, Nicholas Wade, thank you for your time. The book is called The Origin of Politics. I assume it's out now and available everywhere. And if my listeners want to follow more of your work, do you have a Twitter handle or a website that they can look at? No, I don't. But my books are available. Very old school. They're available on Amazon. Okay. Thank you, Nicholas. Thanks so much.