There was an article published on 17 November in Quillette by UK-based writer Sam Ashworth-Hayes that highlights once again the ways that a little evolutionary knowledge can be dangerous. For the record, and being extremely charitable, Quillette is a Social Darwinist newsletter that publishes Social Darwinist articles by Social Darwinist writers. And I’m not familiar with Sam’s broader output but I have serious questions about his seemingly obsessive focus on Western fertility and whether a “culture which combines high migration alongside low integration and fertility will be replaced”.

That caveat made, however, I’ve elected to wade in because Sam’s writing combines familiarity with the key concepts of cultural evolution with a blatant and ignorant portrayal of both how it works and how political progressives might make use of it. To do a little shameless self-promotion, my second book, “Evolutionary Politics: Socialism for Social Species” [which will be available worldwide November 30th!] aims to dispel once and for all the notion that there is no left-wing theory of human nature that is compatible with Darwin. And it makes the point that darwinian socialism is a venerable left-wing tradition - with roots going back to Bakunin, Engels and Kropotkin - which is not only embedded in a dialectical understanding of human societies but is ‘more scientific’ than the mainstream rational-actor model.

Use and Abuse

To begin, Sam’s reading of how evolution works is too teleological. Like Spencer, Huxley and the other Victorian scientists who interpreted Darwin, he’s wrong to portray cultural selection as an engine of inevitable progress, rather than a quasi-random walk though history, with side-branches, dead-ends and backsliding aplenty.

“From a Darwinian perspective, the point of a culture is to replicate itself. From this, all else follows. The rules and rites that govern a society fall into shape as systems for maximising the fitness of a culture for surviving its environment”.

Cultures of course, do not have a ‘point’. Cultures may act as if they were maximising fitness, but this is only because cultures which failed to be competitive no longer survive. But Sam is broadly correct when he paraphrases that tradition embodies “a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems”.

As I explain in Chapters 16 & 17 of my new book, conservative writers and thinkers are often prone to a naturalistic fallacy, where they presume that any behaviour or tradition which presently exists must do so because it is adaptive. And that traditions or behaviours which are adaptive must, in naturalistic ethics, be therefore considered good. Sam has done his reading, and does not fall easily into this trap. In fact, his summary of this is quite accurate:

“Not all behaviours are adaptive; some are vestigial, remnants of a tradition previously of great importance. Some are not harmful enough to be shed, inefficiencies in a world full of such things, or covered for by other habits. Some were useful and are rendered obsolete by changes in technology, or the capability of society to organise itself. Some are maladaptive, and in the process of being selected against, or sustained in a bad equilibrium.”

But here’s where things start to go off the rails a little bit. It’s of course an extremely difficult question to determine which social behaviours are adaptive and which are not. Sam’s list of adaptive traditions, focused primarily on sexual behaviour, is questionable. Taboos on sexual promiscuity and abortion, as well as social valuation of monogamy, are all debatable points. I would suspect Sam has been reading a bit too much of the evopsych literature, which is heavily focused on these questions of gender relations. I would note for example, that fear of disease becomes of less adaptive relevance in societies with modern medicine and good quality healthcare. And that social and religious attitudes towards abortion have varied widely across different time periods and cultures. I think both Silvia Federici and Jo Henrich might agree that the Western anxiety over abortion has as much to do with the relationship between the family and capital as it has to do with fertility. Indeed, the very debate over the ‘personhood’ of a fetus relies on the modern, liberal ontological framework that grants rights only to philosophical ‘persons’.

Bad philosophy, bad science

I won’t take too much issue with Sam’s characterisation of liberalism. Chapters 13 & 18 my book discuss a couple of ways in which liberalism, as an evolving cultural complex, is uniquely vulnerable. But I’m more appreciative of just how successful and sustainable liberalism has been, since it first emerged as a distinct set of cultural strategies in 17ths and 18th-century Europe. In that time period, it has spread to become the default philosophical position in Westernised nations, converted hundreds of millions of other people to its way of seeing the world, fought off multiple challenger ideologies (including during multiple periods of total war) and delivered astounding advances in material and social progress. Like Marx, I’m an admirer of liberalism, but as socialist, I recognise that it “points beyond itself”.

Sam’s advocacy of higher fertility ultimately fails because he does not understand how cultural replication works - a fault of most Social Darwinists, and incidentially a point on which many sociologists and constructivists have useful things to say. Any evolutionary system is defined by three key processes - variation, selection and replication. Because many Social Darwinists are genetic essentialists, they assume wrongly that the only way a behaviour can be transmitted is through descent. i.e. that liberal cultures reproduces themselves by having more children, who are somehow biologically predisposed to being more liberal. Sam, to his credit, recognises that liberalism may spread through the ‘conversion’ of others, and hey, he’s completely right on that. Culture spreads through teaching and imitation and comparatively little of the behaviour of modern humans is encoded genetically - a much greater proportion of our strategies are learned in childhood, either from our parents or absorbed from our teachers, peers and other members of our culture.

John Maynard-Smith, the biologist and mathematician who laid much of the groundwork for evolutionary game theory, originally rejected the concept of group selection precisely because genetic inheritance was a poor mechanism to maintain inter-group differences. When breeding-age individuals migrate between groups, they contribute half of their DNA to any offspring. Very quickly, this extinguishes the genetic diversity between groups that is mathematically necessary for group selection to function - and humans are certainly a migratory and promiscuous species! But when humans migrate between social groups they also inherit behaviours culturally and tend to more-or-less conform to the culture of their new home. A human who left their home tribe to migrate to a new one might contribute half their DNA to their offspring, but much less of their cultural complex. As a result, cultural evolution maintains sufficient intra-group cohesion for group selection to operate.

Sam writes that “those raised by parents of other cultures may not always turn out to be liberals.” This is of course, true. A small minority may in fact violently reject their new culture. But in the vast, vast majority of cases migrants successfully accommodate themselves to the culture of their new home, especially ones that ask relatively little of them in return. It’s a tired cliché, but by the third generation migrant communities are often largely culturally indistinguishable from other inhabitants of a place.

In defense of liberalism

But of course the question of migration is only relevant insofar as Sam defines the terms of the debate in terms of liberalism’s consequences for population size and fertility. I hate to be the one to tell the readers of Quillette this, but smaller family sizes are both a consequence of and a contributor to higher levels of parental and societal investment in children, such that individuals in liberal societies are astoundingly more productive than their forebears who had more children. I would note that many of the countries with the lowest fertility in the world - South Korea, Singapore, Japan - have only a recent historical association with liberalism, and those in Europe with the lowest fertility - Spain, Italy, Portugal - are largely Catholic and only recently democracies. Sam also ignores the extensive sociological and economic literature that correlates below-replacement birth rates with economic inequality and low social mobility, as well as the strong leftist support for ‘pro-natalist’ policy proposals such as universal childcare and worker control over their terms of their labour.

I’m uninterested in having a debate with any writer for Quillette of their critique of ‘progressivism’, which is childish and irrelevant. But I will engage with alt-centrist writers who argue their critique in terms of evolutionary science. The debate between Social Darwinism and darwinian socialism has been going on now for more than 150 years. It would be fair to say that for much of the twentieth century the Social Darwinists won that debate. There is an ongoing and serious risk that racial supremacist arguments are being repackaged and recycled in terms of cultural supremacy. By understanding how genes and culture co-evolve, and work together to generate complex social behaviour, progressives can make a stronger case that social change and experimentation has been, is and will continue to be both ‘adaptive’ and ‘good’.