Do genes matter? The hereditarian left wants you to act as if they do

The ‘hereditarian left’ is having a moment. I first wrote about this - still largely hypothetical - political tendency two-and-a-half years ago in the aftermath of the Sam Harris-Ezra Klein affair. That blog remains to this day one of the most viewed items on my page, largely I think because so few writers employ the terminology. That appears set to change, somewhat, with the publication of - and largely positive critical reaction to - “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA matters for social equality” by Dr Paige Harden. Harden was on the side of the angels during the Sam Harris affair but as a fascinating profile in the New Yorker makes clear, she wants her new book to persuade those on the left ‘who insist that genes don’t matter’ of the error of their ways. As the New Yorker accurately notes,

“Harden is not alone . . . Last year, Fredrik deBoer published “The Cult of Smart,” which argues that the education-reform movement has been trammeled by its willful ignorance of genetic variation. Views associated with the “hereditarian left” have also been articulated by the psychiatrist and essayist Scott Alexander and the philosopher Peter Singer. Singer told me, of Harden, “Her ethical arguments are ones that I have held for quite a long time. If you ignore these things that contribute to inequality, or pretend they don’t exist, you make it more difficult to achieve the kind of society that you value.” [Emphasis added]

Indeed, both DeBoer and Pinker have separately been crowing at the positive reception Harden’s latest has received. From the outset, I want to be clear that I’ve not yet read The Genetic Lottery, or DeBoer’s Cult of Smart for that matter. So this is not a book review. But I am familiar with both their work - I’ve cited Harden in the past - and despite his talents as a writer I’ve criticised DeBoer over his insistence that genetic variability in humans provides “the strongest possible argument for socialism”. I have no particular axe to grind with Harden and I trust, on the basis of other reviews I’ve read, that her new book is fair-minded summary of the science written by a world-renowned expert in the field and leavened with some standard social democratic politics. What I do take issue with is with the framing of the New Yorker piece - and Harden’s and DeBoer’s general thesis - that progressives need to be convinced that ‘genes matter’ and alter their political programs accordingly. But as we shall see, the real question is: what does it mean for something to ‘matter’?

Put simply, the argument of the handful of writers who make up the ‘hereditarian left’ is not dissimilar from that of the sex essentialists and evopsych gurus who argue for misogyny or against trans rights, or the ‘race realists’ of the like of Charles Murray and his many acolytes, or much of the heterodox thinking of the IDW [I’m not claiming they’re morally equivalent, just similarly fallacious]. All of these social movements and groups - containing an overrepresentation of aggrieved or wannabe scientists - argue passionately and at length that some observable trait (‘x’) in humans exists (or ‘is real’, or ‘matters’), which therefore [waves hands] justifies their [often reactionary] politics. When the left says we don’t care whether trait x is real, or that trait x ‘doesn’t matter’ to our politics, our lack of interest is caricatured with some snarl word like ‘blank slatists’ (Pinker’s idiotic term), science denialists or ‘cognitive creationists’. Whereas what’s actually happening is that the supposed heterodox thinkers are committing the most basic of errors - that of deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ - of trying to justify and legitimise their preferred policy positions on the basis of supposed natural facts.

Genes influence behaviour, obviously, but whether that ‘matters’ depends on your frame of reference

The intransitive verb ‘to matter’ is one of those English words that sounds significant but whose meaning is vague and imprecise. Dictionaries tell us its a synonym for ‘important’, or something we care about. If x is some trait or observation, then x ‘matters’ or is relevant only if there is some relationship or function f(x) that produces a desirable goal or output. However, the essence of political disagreement is that humans rarely agree on what goals are ‘good’ or desirable, and whether the methods used to get there are legitimate. In other words, two people can only agree to normative (‘should’) statements when they implicitly or explicitly share the same objectives. For example, we can agree you should exercise but if and only if we first agree that fitness or health is our common goal.

I’ve written before that perhaps the single largest philosophical challenge of contemporary liberalism is the ‘problem of inequality’. To paraphrase Rousseau, man is born equal, but is everywhere unequal. Once liberal societies granted formal, legal equality to all citizens, the question became what degree of social, cultural and economic inequality could be tolerated before the narrative fiction that all human beings are alike in dignity could no longer be defended. The various liberal theodicies which have sprung up in response to this question give structure and context to the vast majority of contemporary political movements. On the progressive side - which includes both the anti-capitalist left and various types of left-liberals - our view is that when people are unequal we should change society somewhat to improve their conditions. Conservatives - including mainstream centre-right liberals and reactionaries - think that inequality is cool and normal, actually, and that we shouldn’t take any steps that would alter the status quo.

So yes, genes influence behaviour to some degree. Obviously. How we measure that influence, it’s mechanisms of action, and how it interacts with other sources of variability including socialisation, environment and pure dumb luck, are questions we can debate. But the influence is ‘real’, in the sense that it is observable, measurable, and falsifiable. In much the same way, sex traits and sexed differences are ‘real’ and group differences in behaviour are ‘real’ - but there is a difference between a fact being real (or provable) and a fact ‘mattering’. Your chromosomes and genitals simply don’t matter to the social performance of gender, for example. Your skin colour shouldn’t matter for your access to civil and political rights. Many observable human traits are simply irrelevant to both politics and political philosophy. A fact is only relevant if it changes how you pursue your goals – and progressives and conservatives have fundamentally different political goals. Which suggests that the same things may not matter in the same way to different people.

I’m just spitting science, bro

Harden was a graduate student and protégé of Eric Turkheimer, a behavioural geneticist whose views on this subject I respect immensely. In 1997, Turkheimer wrote an essay in which he argued that:

“A psychometric left would recognize that human ability, individual differences in human ability, measures of human ability, and genetic influences on human ability are all real but profoundly complex, too complex for the imposition of biogenetic or political schemata. It would assert that the most important difference between the races is racism, with its origins in the horrific institution of slavery only a very few generations ago. Opposition to determinism, reductionism and racism, in their extreme or moderate forms, need not depend on blanket rejection of undeniable if easily misinterpreted facts like heritability, or useful if easily misapplied tools like factor analysis. Indeed it had better not, because if it does the eventual victory of the psychometric right is assured.”

So he, too, I think would agree that progressive engagement with the science is important in order to rebut right-wing attempts to naturalise inequality - but the science cannot then form the basis of a just ‘political schemata’. So, a brief overview of the science of behavioural genetics - at least as I understand it from Turkheimer’s work - seems warranted. The origins of the field lie in so-called twin studies (DeBoer, I think fairly, calls these kinship studies as their basic unit of analysis is family relationships). If two siblings with a known degree of genetic relatedness (r) are raised, by circumstance, apart - and then their life outcomes are subsequently measured - it is in theory possible to calculate the effective contribution of genes vis-a-vis other facts such as upbringing, environment and random chance. Heritability, then, is an estimate of the contribution of biology to outcomes - in other words, if you had a large number of clones of an individual, to what degree their behaviour would vary as a result of non-genetic causes.

Twin studies are notoriously difficult to design - human lives are complex, and the potential confounding factors are many. More importantly, however, because of their limited number of available subjects twin studies tell you very little about the genetic variation within the broader population and next-to-nothing about genetic variation between populations. A twin study cannot tell you which genes are influencing outcomes or by what mechanism they are acting - only that biological similarity plays some role. The second stage of behavioural genetics - which took place largely in the 1990s and early 2000s - was premised on the idea that advances in scientific knowledge, in particular the completion of the Human Genome Project, would allow the identification of the ‘genes for’ particular traits. This turned out to be a disappointment. DNA is rarely so simple, and with the exception of some single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with particular diseases, it turned out most genetic influence was pleiotropic - many genes influence many traits, through complex interactions and subtle influences that are often poorly understood. The challenge increases exponentially when we try to measure genetic influence over complex behaviours such as learning, sociability and sexuality.

Which brings us to the third and contemporary moment - that of the genome-wide association study (or ‘GWAS’). Readers may be vaguely familiar with the concept of factor analysis - which among other things is used in the psychological literature to generate measurement constructs such as g (for general intelligence). By combining the results of multiple tests (e.g. for language, spatial awareness, mathematical ability and problem solving), one can mathematically construct a single variable which best explains performance across multiple domains. A polygenic score is similar to this, but more complex by several orders of magnitude. Very sophisticated computer programs construct thousands or even millions of models combining the tiny influences of hundreds or even thousands of SNPs on an observed trait, settling on a model that offers the best statistical fit to the data. A polygenic score then sums up in a single variable the effect of all those genes - even if the specific identity of those genes or their mechanism of action remains unknown. Once again, these scores can produce quite good evidence of a genetic influence in diseases - the evidence, so far, for behavioural influence remains much weaker.

Turkheimer remains a vocal critic of the GWAS approach. Apart from the significant problem that a polygenic score is a statistical construct divorced from any investigation of the physical mechanism of action, the use of large data sets and machine learning to construct models means the field is doing something akin to ‘p-hacking’ - combing through data until an algorithm finds a result of statistical significance. The GWAS methodology is similar to the data mining approach used by many tech firms - the sort of analysis that predicts that consumers who wear red shoes on Thursdays are x% more likely to buy your product - and shares a similar problem in terms of model selection and validity. The most serious problem with polygenic scores, according to Turkheimer, is that the confidence intervals are rarely reported. A polygenic score may give you an estimate of the influence of your genes on, say, academic performance, but within a fairly wide band. So the predictive validity of a polygenic score for any given individual may be low - these are first and foremost population statistics. Large groups of people with particular scores may on average display the predicted traits, but the likelihood that any one individual will develop it is low. They are - like racial stereotypes or gender norms - poor predictors of individual behaviour and unsuitable for use in public policy formation.

As the New Yorker piece makes clear, Harden has moved away from her mentor’s scepticism in recent years - by all accounts, The Genetic Lottery is optimistic about the potential of the GWAS approach. There are hints in the piece at Harden’s evolving views - as a southerner with an evangelical background, a political ‘pragmatist’, and a successful white woman unaccustomed to receiving pushback from her left Harden is trying to identify the middle ground of these arguments. She highlights the importance of the genetic influence on behaviour while disavowing the dark policy prescriptions of the likes of Charles Murray and the race science crowd. But I - and most others on the left - would be sceptical that this is a line that can be walked, and definitely reject DeBoer’s thesis that it must be walked in order for the left to achieve its goals.

We just love debating tactics, don’t we?

The default progressive position is that we should remedy all social and economic inequalities regardless of cause. It’s not that genes don’t matter, is that no source of inequality matters. If your standard of living is below the poverty line we should fix that immediately without making moral or scientific inquiries as to why that circumstance has arisen. The real debate, if there is to be one, between the hereditarian left and other progressives is ultimately one of tactics (and oh boy, does the left love debating tactics!). To quote Harden from the New Yorker: “If you want to help people, you have to know what’s most effective, so you need the science.” In other words, is the left making our job of social reform harder by ignoring the science, as Peter Singer believes? Harden’s - and particular DeBoer’s - central contention is that in a realistic political environment, with limited space for progressives to pursue their priorities and the need to persuade others, the genetic influence on behaviour is a relevant source of inequality that should be factored into policy-making. Most socialists, for their part, argue that the dominant source of inequality is social structures and that until those social structures are changed, other interventions are likely to fail.

So DeBoer argues that education reforms have historically failed because they failed to take the genetic influence on cognition seriously. But perhaps a more parsimonious socialist critique would be that centrist plans that heavily focused on punishing teachers as part of an ideological project to undermine public schools were poorly conceived from the start. Until we begin to make serious structural changes to the allocation of resources in society, we simply cannot say that the material environment is not a significant factor shaping life outcomes for individuals. DeBoer and Harden would likely respond that kind of political and social revolution is impossible, and that the better political tactic would be to argue on the basis of luck-egalitarianism that the genetically disadvantaged are not to blame for their poor life outcomes, and that the state has a role to play in compensating for such undeserved inequality. Maybe, in the short term, they’re right. Luck egalitarianism is a respectable liberal philosophical position. But as the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has written, any liberalism that is predicated on the unlucky demonstrating their inferiority in order to receive aid from their social superiors undermines the promise of equal dignity at the heart of the liberal system. And given the innate human concern for relative social status, we’ve repeatedly seen that subaltern groups know and despise when elites treat them with pity - which in turn gives succour to reactionary forces.

Not just tactics - strategy

One of the most important political lessons I’ve learned - from the comms specialist Anat Shenkar Osorio - is that tactically sound decisions can be counterproductive in the long-term if they cede the framing of an issue to the right. Even if the hereditarian left was offering tactically sound advice - that interventions based on genetic influence on behaviour were more effective and more persuasive in moving people to support them - it would be strategically unsound. Because conservatives simply do not care about remedying social and economic inequalities. So when the hereditarian left argues that genes matter, they inevitably provide significant succour and support to the right, who can say “Yes, we agree, genes do matter, because they mean that some degree of hierarchy and inequality is natural and inevitable.” Which tends to put an end to movements for social reform.

I strongly suspect that the reason so much of the literature on genes and behaviour is focused on intelligence and academic performance is to, in some sense, legitimise and justify the liberal meritocratic ideal. Academic and journalistic elites - such as Harden, Pinker and DeBoer - are products of an education system that has granted them access to outsized social standing and influence. As the French economist Thomas Piketty has described, the Brahmin left values educational competition because they see their own achievements in that field as legitimising their social position. But if universities are just printing degrees for middle- and upper-class children whose parents paid their way through adolescence, then the Brahmin left’s social position - and the liberal meritocracy they promote - is in some sense illegitimate. For Pinker and the classical [right] liberal IDW crowd in particular, if academic achievement is sorting on the basis of something ‘real’ and unchangeable (i.e. genes), then the meritocratic hierarchy - Jordan Peterson’s hierarchy of talent - is legitimate and defensible.

Conservatives are simply uninterested in changing the status quo to remedy inequality. Whatever Harden and DeBoer may think, the right are not looking to be persuaded on this point, or to persuade others to implement egalitarian social policies. What they are looking for is evidence that legitimises and naturalises inequality and hierarchy, which in turn makes their job of resisting change and persuading others to resist change easier. So when the ‘hereditarian left’ argue that seeking change to social structures won’t be effective in eliminating inequality, or that certain inequalities are fixed and unalterable, they are doing the right’s work for them. So politically speaking, the genetic influence on behaviour doesn’t matter for the left because, in the first instance, we probably can’t make use of it, and in the second, doing so would actively aid our ideological opponents. Plenty of leftists can be and are interested in the science - myself included - and relish the intellectual opportunity to debate its merits. But it simply has no bearing on our politics other than being able to argue against the genetic essentialists and race realists. And that’s where Harden, Singer, DeBoer and their fellow travelers are gravely wrong. The hereditarian left is a dangerous, dead end.

On the use and abuse of Social Darwinism: Sam Ashworth-Hayes in Quillette

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’.

Book Release Announcement: "Evolutionary Politics: Socialism for Social Species"

Hello everyone,

I’m very pleased and excited to announce that my second book, “Evolutionary Politics: Socialism for Social Species”, will be published worldwide in late November 2020. The ebook version is already available for pre-order via Amazon and Apple Books - and the paperback will be available soon as well.

So what’s the book about?

The foundational myth of contemporary capitalism – the individual alone, in a state of nature – is just that: a myth. Both Darwin and early anarchists like Piotr Kropotkin understood that mutual aid lay at the heart of nature’s conquest of the earth. A rich tradition of evolutionary socialism and left-wing Darwinism has been forgotten and disparaged.

"Evolutionary Politics: Socialism for Social Species" applies the new science of cultural evolution to the modern world, showing that the rise of fascism, political extremism and tribalism can be best understood through an evolutionary lens. By demonstrating that humans are adapted for group life in symbolic communities, we can show how the myth of the rational actor has led economists, political scientists and policymakers to fundamentally misunderstand the human social world.

As we become ever more fractured and isolated from one another, "Evolutionary Politics: Socialism for Social Species" argues that not only is a better, more solidaristic world possible – it’s necessary if we are to survive as a species.

Contact me!

If you work in media, as a book reviewer, or if you’re an academic or activist working with game theory or cultural evolution, please reach out to me on Twitter at @ASkews2000 and I’d be happy to provide you a review copy in advance of the formal release.

And if you read the book and like it, why not drop a review on Amazon or on the book’s page on Goodreads? Every bit of feedback helps!

On Human Nature

Pandemic notwithstanding, my second book “Evolutionary Politics” will hopefully be published this year. Tackling the topic of sociobiology - in other words, the natural origins of social behaviour - from a leftist perspective seems likely to generate few sympathetic readings. For right-wing and centrist critics of the left, to talk about ‘human nature’ at all is to reveal the hopelessly naive, hopelessly wrong, or hopelessly authoritarian nature of the left. Perhaps as a response to this, to talk of ‘human nature’ on the left is to be seen as a hopeless cynic, an essentiallist or determinist.

Few interactions in which Marx and human nature are on the table can be productive, in my experience, because of the dominant practice in western thought is the categorization of the essential quality of things. How, after all, are we taught what a thing is? We might begin with anecdotal oberservations of an object, and use inductive reasoning to abstract some essential quality which is shared by all the objects of that category we have observed (most chairs have four legs, for example). Much of pre-modern philosophy was constructed this way. Scientific empiricism does not, in general, deviate much from this approach, supplanting imperfect anecdote with rigorous data collection, statistical methods and probabilistic inference. But the core metaphysical practice is the same - to construct an ideal category of thing (‘chairs’) which explains something useful about the members of that category.

What both many self-described Marxists and their critics fail to recognise is that Marx was first and foremost a philosopher - he only became an economist later in life - and that his work is actually embedded in a different kind of thought process. Marx never talks about a fixed ‘human nature’, but rather of ‘Gattungswesen’ or ‘species-being’. What is to be human therefore, is embedded in human life, activity and interaction: “The whole character of a species, its species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity”. Or, as the sixth thesis on Feuerbach puts it, “The essence of man is . . .an ensemble of social relations’”. Like Hegel, Heraclitus and the process philosophers, Marx inverts the standard Western metaphysics. Rather than defining categories of things and studying the relations between those categories, we define the interactions and study things as the product of their interaction. A ‘chair’, in in other words, is anything used by humans for sitting.

This is something that the panpsychics and other big-brain wannabe physicists repeatedly fail to understand about themselves. One of the most common complaints about the Standard Model of physics is that it doesn’t tell us anything about what the fundamental particles ‘are’. We can describe their interactions in great deal, but for western metaphysicians the point particle is a singularity about which we still know knowing. Contemporary physics describes a gloriously complex universe made of overlapping fields and tensions, forces and probabilities criss-crossing physical space like waves on the ocean. Particles are merely objects defined by the interactions of these fields. Philosophically, or scientifically, there is nothing more we could or should want to know about them than that.

Evolutionary sociology for Marxists

I intensely dislike the work of the Australian philosopher Peter Singer. I am frequently apalled by by lack of restraint on his utilitiarianism; I disagree with the way that he cloaks himself in the banner of animal rights to claim himself a progressive; and believe the outcome of his views are deeply reactionary. Singer’s 1999 pamplet, “A Darwinian Left” is referenced in my forthcoming book, but it stands as a warning of the wrong way to approach sociobiology. Singer argues for an intrinsic human nature which is fundamentally at odds with most of progressive theory and practice. Like Dawkins, the best Singer can find in nature is kin selection, which he argues explains some parochial forms of altruism towards our friends and family while undermining any universalist liberal pretensions. “Evolutionary Politics”, if nothing else, will offer an extended rebuttal of this line of thinking.

Evolutionary biologists do not think, or write, like Peter Singer. Evolutionary systems are characterised by the three processes of generalised Darwinism: variation, selection and (self-)replication. A population displays variation when every otherwise equivalent agent in that population possesses some property (s) which causes measurably (or ‘phenotypically’) different interactions with the agent’s environment. Every fundamental particle, for example, has identical physical properties and will interact with physical forces in an identical manner. Even molecules as large as proteins have consistent and predictable chemical properties. However, complex polymers (including DNA) can have variable properties while remaining chemically similar enough to treat as a population of interacting agents of a single type .

Selection is any process by which an agent in a population with property (s) receives a second property (u() which we call fitness, as a result of an interaction. Fitness can represent any property or payoff, so long as it’s acted upon by the third process (replication). Fitness can be almost any measurable quantity, defined in any direction: it may represent abstract utility, attractiveness, repulsiveness, warmth, chilliness, income, wealth, poverty, proximity to the colour ‘blue’, or degree of aural distinguishability from the sound of a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner. In other words, the variability of the property (s) generates differential fitness (u). Lastly, replication is any process which relates the frequency of agents with the property (s) at time t + 1 to their fitness (u) at time t. While many chemical and nuclear reactions differentially produce output products, only a tiny subset of reactions maintain or increase the population of interacting agents. Auto-catalytic or self-replicating populations that also demonstrate variation constitute the complex system we label ‘life’.

The correct leftist understanding of sociobiology is therefore simple. ‘Human nature’ is simply any social behaviour which is generated from a natural, evolutionary process. Humans, as a species, evolved through natural (and cultural) selection, and therefore our ‘essence’ or species-being is as things adapted through that evolutionary process. As my second book will explain, that means both that the idea of a fixed human nature is untenable - what is adaptive in any given context will depend on the composition of a species’ population and its environment - but also that the potential for both cooperation and competition must be seen as part of what it means to be human. This is because both competitive and cooperative strategies can be evolutionary stable under the conditions of natural selection. Progressives are not, as Steven Pinker likes to claim, ‘blank slatists’. We merely reject the idea that empirical observation of human behaviour, no matter how rigorous, can tell us what it means to be human without an understanding of the complex causes (in Niko Tinbergen’s sense) that led to that behaviour.

The Marxist ‘New Man’

Over the decades following his death, Marx’s adage that human nature was determined by the totality of his [sic] social relations, morphed into the the ideal of the ‘New Soviet Man’, which continues to figure largely in the popular caricature of leftism. Many leftist thinkers, including most notably Gramsci, described convincingly how human social relations were produced by their need to support a society’s mode of economic production, and that the entirety of social relations were configured around the needs of capital. The leftist sociological critique of capitalism is perhaps, its greatest and most enduring intellectual contribution. But the idea that changing the mode of production by giving more control to workers would produce a ‘New Soviet Man’ of superior moral character is a bastardization of that theory. The ‘New Man’ is one consequence of changes in the social base, not the goal in and of itself.

Marxism is not a theory of individual morality. Leftists are not trying to produce better people; and any self-described communist who claims that as their aim is not a leftist. We do not believe that moral actions are a consequence of innate virtue, rather, moral actions are a consequence of moral social structures. The desire to discipline individuals is reactionary and conservative, not progressive. Confusing this distinction leads to Stalinist authoritarianism, and the critique of it from liberals. Human behaviour is a product of social relations and that as those relations change human behaviour will change without state interference. The desire to create of moral individuals is utopianism, and modern leftists should want no part in it.

Yet it is a vast oversimplification to reduce the Marxist contribution to a question of economic determinism. There is more to being human than mode of production - Marx and Engels were deeply, if passingly, also interested in the question of social reproduction. In this way, we can see how leftism and sociobiology are fundamentally compatible, rather than antagonistic, social theories. Social behaviour is in part the product of a species which has been subject to the forces of evolution. And it is also the product of economic relations, which vary from place to place and time to time but which share some transhistorial and transcultural commonalities. These two sets of relations define the broad contours of human nature. The force that bridges the gap between nature and economics is culture, which evolves in its own right and as a superstructure on top of a society’s economic base.

A new way forward

The same perspectice can be applied to any aspect of human behaviour. Thinking in terms of processes, and not categories, we recognise that it would be wrong to define ‘man’ or ‘woman’ in terms of some essential category, or catalogue those traits - good or bad - which we imagine to be possessed by some ethnic groups and not others. Instead, gender can only be understood as a relationship - an interaction which defines genders in terms of relations of oppression and subordination - which we label patriarchy. By the same token, we cannot understand ‘whiteness’ until we realise that it is defined in terms of its relationship with the ‘Other’. Ollie from Philosophy Tube has recently addressed precisely this point.

Similarly, we cannot and should not imagine that ‘rascism’, ‘misogyny’, ‘homophobia’ or ‘transphobia’ are innate, fixed traits. Generally, every member in good standing of a liberal society possesses a mental model of a person who is a ‘rascist’ or ‘sexist’ etc. We construct these categories on the basis of the observation of common traits - often traits that are communicated via the media rather than through direct observation. So a rascist is a person who uses certain taboo words or phrases, for examples, or a sexist is a person who sexually harassess and belittles women, and a homophobe is a person who engages in violence against sexual minorities. But when progressives talk about rascism, misogyny or homophobia we are talking about systems of interaction - no person ‘is’ a rascist, essentially; rather, we note that their behaviour reproduces a pattern of interaction between dominant and subaltern groups that affirms and reproduces those relations. The good news, as with evolutionary sociology and historial materialism, is that none of these traits are fixed and will adapt themselves to changing patterns of social relations, which we can influence through other means.

Finally, we would be remiss if we did not apply the same way of thinking to ourselves. No activist, no politician, ‘is’ a progressive merely by some feature of their essential identity (I’m looking at you Elizabeth Warren, Anthony Albanese etc). Rather, progressive is as progressive does - a left-wing activist or politician challenges, critiques and reforms systems of power. Any politician who does not behave in this way - who through their actons reifies inequality and unjustified hierarchies, is not a progressive, regardless of how they may think of themselves, or be measured in academic journals. In the all-too-common reduction of progressive politics to the collection of essential identity categories - a gay mayor! a black president! a female CEO! - we witness the end of the left as a dynamic historical force.

Book Review: "Darwin's Unfinished Symphony" by Kevin Laland

Biologist Kevin Laland has a gift for clear, evocative writing and clever titles. An "unfinished symphony" is a powerful metaphor, hinting at the lost works of departed geniuses. Perhaps no post-Enlightenment figure has had as profound impact on how humanity sees itself than Charles Darwin, and the chance to extend the modern evolutionary synthesis to incorporate an account of the origins of human culture and intelligence creates possibilities that will be euphoric for some readers and terrifying for others. Laland's book contributes to an emerging corpus of recent literature aiming to close the enormous gap that has opened up between the biological and social sciences.

Laland is not a historian, and those looking for a compelling account of Darwin's research on the origins of humanity should look elsewhere. "On the Origin of the Species" is famously silent on the question of human origins, and Darwin's later works on the subject ("The Descent of Man" and "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals") are less well known and more heavily weighed upon by the passage of time. For Laland, Darwin's 'unfinished symphony' was the task of explaining humanity's unique mental, cultural and moral capabilities in light of evolution, and the subtitle of his book ("How Culture Made the Human Mind") gives the game away in terms of where Laland suggests the answers will be found. This is also the story of a thirty year effort by Laland and his team to find those answers: an ode to grad students and published research most of the public have never heard of. 

The boundary between biological and social evolution is fiercely patrolled on both sides, with many biologists stressing that evolution only applies to genetically-encoded behaviours (c.f. Dawkins) and many sociologists epistemologically wedded to the unnatural uniqueness of human culture. We can perhaps refer, as Laland does, to cultural evolutionary studies pioneered by Boyd & Richerson among others, which has been a remarkably successful effort to apply evolutionary tools to the study of culture. Laland, however, goes beyond that to write a book focused on gene-culture coevolution. That is, a study of how genes have influenced culture and culture, in turn, has influenced our genes. Evolutionary psychologists and behavioural economists have made strides (often flawed) into measuring biological influences on human behaviour, in the process contributing to a resurgence of naturalist ethical ideologies. Laland's position is more nuanced: our biological intuitions and mental capabilities have developed in a feedback loop to meet the needs of humanity's complex learning behaviours. 

Innovating and Copying

As a mechanism which develops and spreads new traits through a population, culture relies on the innovation of new behaviours (beyond what is encoded in a creature's genes) and the copying of that behaviour by others (which allows it to spread faster than biological transmission alone would allow). Social learning is innate and ubiquitous among humans and - it turns out - not entirely unknown amongst animals. Crucially, Laland is able to demonstrate through both mathematical models and empirical studies that what matters to the cultural capacity to accumulate fitness-enhancing improvements over time is not just copying but copying efficiently, faithfully and strategically. Learning heuristics such as imitating successful individuals or conforming with the behaviour of the majority ensure that useful information is retained over generations, and it's this capacity for strategic or contingent learning that Laland argues lies at the root of the divergence between humanity and other animals. 

Laland combines agent-based computational models of social learning with empirical studies of social learning in animals, most amusingly fish. Throughout the early chapters of the book, he builds a compelling case for why social learning is not ubiquitous in nature, noting that vulnerability to predation and the demands of reproduction make some species (and some individuals within species) more reliant on social learning than others. In Laland's observations, it's often lower-status individuals, females and children that benefit most from openness to new experiences and social learning. A certain conservative Canadian psychologist has recently invited derision by looking for the origins of social hierarchies amongst lobsters. Laland's fish studies are different because his team has gone to the effort of first proving that social learning is a mathematical solution to a general category of problem: humans are 'like fish', in this sense, because both evolved similar strategies to solve analogous problems, not because we share some biochemistry. A more sophisticated version of Jordan Peterson might be able to do the modelling to show that hierarchies are a valid solution to the problem of cooperation - but unlike Laland, Peterson simply hasn't done his homework. 

More than just the evolution of intelligence

Unlike other pop science authors, Laland's descriptions of his statistical methods and techniques are always clear and precise - we always know how much confidence we should have in Laland's conclusions and how they're derived. Where that raised an eyebrow, however, was when Laland moved away from discussing social learning to the evolution of intelligence. Laland relies on a variant of factor analysis to argue for the existence of what he calls the "primate g", a measure of the general intelligence of primates which he argues has increased alongside the demands for increasing social learning. In this way, Laland aligns himself with the view that intelligence is an all-purpose tool that has continually improved throughout human evolution, rather than an agglomeration of modules and capabilities which arose at different points in our species' history in response to different environmental and social requirements. 

Ultimately, Laland's efforts to downplay the 'social brain' hypothesis are unconvincing and I would recommend Robin Dunbar on these topics. Is a 3cm long fish that finds a novel solution to a food maze really 'innovating', or it merely following instincts that drive hungry individuals to take greater risks? It's likely that general intelligence is a poor tool for solving most social games among humans, at least,  (cf. the ultimatum game) and IQ is a poorer predictor of social status than modular personality traits. The role of emotion and motivated action is missing from Laland's account, an omission that's curious given that Darwin himself intuited that the evolutionary function of emotions was crucial to understanding the origins of man. If culture made the human mind, as Laland argues, then perhaps we should also explore the role of emotions, biases and irrationality in cultural evolution - and not just intelligence. 

In later chapters of the book, Laland offers some unsupported hypotheses in an effort to bridge the gap between primate intelligence and human symbolic expression. In his otherwise friendly review of the book, cultural evolutionary scholar Joe Henrich worries that Laland overplays the role of teaching and language in the co-evolution of culture. Laland argues that teaching is the only explanation that can account for not only the increasing fidelity of cultural transmission in humans but also the (somewhat self-imposed) requirement that proto-languages evolved transmit information faithfully and without deception. We'd have to do the modelling to find out which account is more plausible, but given the robust evidence from behavioural economics that deception and public self-justification plays a crucial role in social games the 'social brain' hypothesis remains for me the persuasive position. 

What really disappointed me about these later chapters is Laland's seeming lack of engagement with the paleoanthropological record: he never specifies where in the human family tree he thinks these capabilities first evolved; he doesn't engage with the robust debate on the physiological limitations on the language capabilities of our near-relatives; nor with the fact that symbolic culture and exponential cultural progress has only really been a feature of our species on the timescale of tens of thousands of years or so. Teaching, language, rationality and the arts are all highly important to modern human societies, but an account of how these capabilities evolved needs to bootstrap them on to other functions that plausibly existed in earlier members of our lineage that definitively lacked them. 

Enter the debate

"Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind" is exactly the sort of book we should embrace as part of a second wave of pop science explainers of gene-culture evolution. Laland takes the extended evolutionary synthesis and cultural evolution as a given, and uses those theories to motivate and explain his own perspectives on debates within the field. Like Darwin himself, Laland may ultimately be proven right on some points and wrong on others: what's important is that readers are exposed to these issues in ways that normalise the language and perspectives of gene-culture coevolution. Laland's earlier work focused on the phenomenon of niche construction, in which a species influences its environment and thereby changes the selection pressures acting upon it. As a social species, the social environment is undoubtedly the niche that humans have created for our own evolution - and it's that control over our own environment that frees us from biological determinism like that espoused by Peterson, Dawkins and Pinker. It opens minds to the possibility that we - as a species - are not done with our social evolution just yet.