Social Engineering Doesn’t Work? Blame the Genes

The science shows that human nature is largely fixed, much to the chagrin of both left and right.

It’s possible for humans to change. In recent centuries we’ve lived as hunter-gatherers, as farmers, as factory workers, and as screen-absorbed technology drones—among much else. Different cultures do things in radically different ways even with the same technology. Specific individuals, too, change over the course of their lives and act differently in different environments.

And yet there are limits. Radical efforts at social engineering have resulted in starvation and mass killings. While we don’t like to think about it, some people seem naturally capable of things that others simply are not. As a result, one of the biggest questions in politics is how greatly we can reorganize and equalize society without bashing our heads into the limits of nature.

Two new books lay out the current science on human nature and human variation. In The Ape That Understood the Universe, psychology professor Steve Stewart-Williams explains the evolutionary roots that underlie many of our most fundamental instincts and behaviors. And in Blueprint, behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin lays out the wealth of evidence we have that differences among individuals often boil down to differences in their DNA. Together, they challenge major strains of liberal and conservative thought alike.

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The Ape that Understoo... Steve Stewart-Williams Best Price: $15.02 Buy New $16.57 (as of 10:55 UTC - Details) Stewart-Williams begins with the very basics of evolution, paying special attention to the “selfish gene” theory most famously articulated by Richard Dawkins. Essentially, genes exist to replicate themselves, and those that do so most efficiently are the ones that spread. They do this primarily by helping their host—living things—survive, reproduce, and help their relatives reproduce, by any means necessary. The life around us is the result of this process playing out over millions of years, with changes introduced through random genetic mutations and shaped by natural selection in each unique environment.

That’s the part that annoys some conservatives. Here’s the part of Stewart-Williams’s thinking that offends the Left: our brains, no less than our arms and our legs, are the result of evolutionary processes. We are programmed with a suite of instincts and urges that impel us to behave in ways that have been successful for humans in the past. This includes not just the basic drives like hunger, but also a lot of preferences and behavioral patterns that many would prefer to see as mere outgrowths of culture, malleable as clothing styles. Perhaps most controversially, it includes biological differences between the sexes.

Stewart-Williams’s field, evolutionary psychology, has its share of critics—those who point out that one can come up with an evolutionary “just-so story” to explain just about anything humans do. But as Stewart-Williams shows, the essential findings of evolutionary psychology have far stronger support than mere conjecture.

How could we possibly know if a behavior is part of our very nature, instead of springing from culture? One powerful indicator is whether it is a human universal; if, in all the world, there is no society where something is different, that suggests it may be hardwired. (This is especially true if it persists despite cultural efforts against it.) Another is whether our behaviors echo those found in other species facing similar situations. And yet another is whether they have a clear connection to evolutionary fitness—in other words, whether it’s the kind of thing that would evolve.

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