"Disclosure Day": The Religious Longings Behind Spielberg's Belief in ETI Visitations

 

                                                  

                                               The Final Official Trailer for Disclosure Day

                          Steven Spielberg's Extended Interview with CBS Sunday Morning

                                                       Steven Spielberg's AP Interview

                                  The Trailer for The Age of Disclosure (2025) Documentary

                                  Three Declassified Videos of UFOs Released by the Pentagon

Stephen Spielberg's new movie, Disclosure Day, has had its first weekend in the theatres.  Spielberg directed and produced the movie.  He also wrote the story that was turned into a screenplay by David Koepp.  The music is by John Williams.

This is the fourth of Spielberg's science fiction movies on extraterrestrial intelligences (ETI) visiting the Earth.  It was preceded by Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), ET, the Extraterrestrial (1982), and The War of the Worlds (2005).  So this theme has stretched across Spielberg's entire movie-making career.

Disclosure Day has two sides to it--action and contemplation.  The New York Times reviewer--Manohla Dargis--describes the action side as "a feature-length chase involving some likable, enigmatically connected people who are racing toward a shared destiny while evading powerful forces."  But she also sees the contemplative side of the movie--"sober interludes that touch on belief, reason, trauma, self-governance, the common good, and higher powers."

This shows the cinematic genius of Spielberg in combining thrilling action that appeals to a popular audience and contemplative moments that appeal to those who like pondering the big questions of human life in the universe.  Dargis conveyed the popular excitement in the movie when she reports that she scribbled in her notebook I am having so much fun.  But she also saw in the movie that Spielberg "has something to say about the world and our place in it."

These two sides are presented in the final trailer, which moves between fast-paced action scenes from the movie and clips of Spielberg speaking about how the disclosure of ETI visitations to the Earth could deepen our understanding of the cosmic meaning of life in the universe.

Here I'll begin by saying something about the active and contemplative sides of this movie.  Then I'll raise four questions suggested by the movie.

ACTION

Spoiler alert: I'm recounting the plot here.

The movie begins in the middle of the chase that will stretch throughout the movie.  Cybersecurity specialist Daniel Kellner (played by Josh O'Connor) has been chased down by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), the head of the Wardex corporation, who is leading his Wardex agents in trying to capture Daniel.  Daniel escapes and goes into hiding at a convent with his girlfriend Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson).  

Later, we learn that Daniel has stolen a piece of extraterrestrial technology and extensive files of photos and videos of human-alien contact collected by the Pentagon dating back to 1947.  The Wardex Corporation is a secret arm of the U.S. government charged with holding these files and making sure they are never revealed to the public, because it is believed that if they were ever made public, this would create a mass panic reaction around the world that would undermine all social order.

From the beginning of the movie, we hear news reports in the background of military and political movements around the world that are leading to a nuclear World War III provoked by North Korea.  We see mobs of people at gas stations and grocery stores stocking up supplies in preparation for a global nuclear holocaust.

In Kansas City, television meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) is preparing for work when a cardinal flies into her home, briefly observes her, and then flies away.  This stirs up her latent psychic abilities for intuitively understanding the thoughts and experiences of others and for speaking in languages she has never learned.  During a live weather broadcast, she begins speaking in an unknown language.  Footage of the broadcast goes viral.  People at Wardex identify the language as extraterrestrial, and so Wardex agents quickly go to Kansas City to chase down Margaret.  After she is hospitalized by people who fear she has had some kind of mental breakdown, Margaret is almost captured by Wardex agents, but she intuitively understands that the agents are out to kill her, and she escapes and goes into hiding.

Daniel reveals the stolen files to Jane.  He explains that Wardex has been experimenting on captive aliens to understand their mental and biological powers, and they have also been reverse engineering their technology so that humans can use it.  

And indeed, Noah Scanlon has learned how to use an alien device to give himself telepathic powers.  He uses this to get into the mind of Jane (Daniel's girlfriend) to discover that they are hiding in a motel.  Jane escapes with another alien device.  But Daniel is captured.

Margaret has visions of Daniel and follows him to the secret site where the Wardex agents are holding him.  Margaret and Daniel escape when Margaret uses her empathetically telepathic powers to persuade the agents to stand back and let them leave.  But one of the agents has not been controlled by Margaret.  He chases down Margaret and Daniel and rams his car into theirs, so that their car is lodged into the side of a passing train.  Daniel pulls Margaret out of the car just in time for them to climb onto the train and make their getaway.

Margaret and Daniel are rescued by a team of Wardex employees who have decided to become whistleblowers under the leadership of Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who has been working with Daniel.  Hugo has brought Margaret and Daniel into a secret warehouse.  There's a reconstruction of Margaret's childhood home in the warehouse.  Hugo tells her that to understand what has been happening to her, she will have to go into the house and recover her suppressed memories of how the ETIs contacted her as a child.  Inside the house, Margaret remembers that she and Daniel were abducted by ETIs as children and subjected to experiments that gave them their supernormal powers.  She also learns that the unusual animals that have appeared to them throughout their lives are ETIs who assumed animal form so that they could observe them without scaring them.

Margaret also remembers that as a child she and Daniel entered a Gingerbread House, as if they were Hansel and Gretel of the Grimms' fairy tale.  My wife and I were confused by this scene when we saw it because it didn't seem to fit into the story.  But now I think it evokes a lot of themes in Spielberg's movies.  Children are open to the magic of fairy tales in a way that adults are not.  And for that reason, they are more open to empathetic contact with ETIs than are adults.  Remember that in Spielberg's ET, it's the children who befriend ET, and they save ET from the adults from the government officers who want to capture and exploit ET.  Moreover, the story of Hansel and Gretel, like many of the Grimm fairy tales, is indeed a very grim story of how children are vulnerable to being betrayed by adults--parents who abandon them in a forest to starve and witches who want to eat them--and therefore children must be clever and resilient in helping one another to escape the harm from adults.  

We also know from Spielberg's The Fabelmans that he suffered from his parents' divorce and his mother's betrayal of his father by having an affair with his father's best friend.  We also know from that movie that Spielberg became a "fable-man" through making movies as a way of working through some of his childhood problems.  He waited until his parents died to make The Fabelmans.

But let's get back to the ending of Disclosure Day.  Margaret and Daniel, along with the whistleblowers, break into Margaret's television studio in Kansas City to make a public broadcast of "Disclosure Day"--dumping all the photographic and video files that Daniel has stolen into a broadcast that can be sent out to news broadcast outlets around the world.  Noah Scanlon and his agents try to blow up the power grid for the television studio.  But Jane arrives and gives her special extraterrestrial device to Margaret, who uses it to restore the power.  Noah feels defeated, and he decides to stand back and watch.

The television transmission spreads around the world's broadcasting systems.  We see people in all countries stunned by the images of extraterrestrial contact with humans and the work of governments in covering this up.  We also see news that as an effect of this broadcast, political and military leaders are pulling back from nuclear war.

The whistleblowers roll into the television studio a cage that has one of the extraterrestrials, who is freed from the cage.  He is a humanoid figure--a large head on a thin bodily frame with two arms and two feet and walking bipedally.  He whispers something to Daniel, who passes it on to Margaret.  Margaret prepares to broadcast the message to the world by saying, "Listen."

CONTEMPLATION

That's the end of the movie--leaving us wondering what the message from the extraterrestrial could be.  But I'm sure many audience members were like me in picking up the hints in the movie that the extraterrestrials have been empathetically watching humanity become ever more divided by conflict and now moving towards nuclear war.  Presumably, the message from the extraterrestrials to the world would be the message that Spielberg himself has intimated--that the discovery that the universe is filled with extraterrestrial intelligent life that feels empathy for all of humanity should move us to extend that circle of empathy to make peace rather than war on the Earth.

Spielberg suggests this message in what he has said about this movie in the final trailer and in various broadcast interviews over the past few weeks.  In the trailer, he says:

I am much more inclined now than when I made Close Encounters to believe that we are not the only intelligent civilization in the universe.  How will this change us?  I think for the better.  It will remind us of the capacity for empathy and that there is something bigger out there than just ourselves.  I used to say to myself wouldn't it be wonderful if all of this turned out to be true?  Wouldn't it be wonderful for people to know all of this is true?

In his recent interviews, Spielberg has said that his sense of wonder about the universe--about what there is "out there"--began in his childhood.  He tells the story of sleeping in his bed in his New Jersey home when he was somewhere around 6-7 years old.  His father woke him up and told him he had to go somewhere in the middle of the night.  He was confused by this.  His father took him to a park where people had spread out blankets so that they could lay down and look up at the Perseus meteor shower.  Spielberg remembers this wonderful sky show of falling stars.

He also remembers his father's collection of science fiction magazines of the 1950s like Analog, which started his interest in science fiction.

Then, after his parents moved to Arizona, he had a telescope in his back yard where he could study the stars and the planets in the night sky.

Spielberg has said that what convinced him that eyewitness sightings of UFOs were conclusive evidence for ETI visitations of the Earth were the series of articles in The New York Times beginning in 2017 about how the Defense Department was hiding the evidence from the public, which led to testimony by military officers to Congress in 2023 about a secret government program to cover up this evidence (Cooper, Blumenthal, and Kean 2017).

Spielberg is silent, however, about the fact that in response to a congressional mandate, the Pentagon issued a 63-page report in 2024 that investigated all of the government programs for studying UFOs from 1945 to the present and concluded that these UFO sightings provided no clear evidence for ETI visitations of the Earth (Barnes 2024).  Now, of course, Spielberg might say that this report is part of the government's continuing cover-up of the truth.  But to substantiate that charge, he would have to show that there really is conclusive evidence for ETI visitations.

EVIDENCE?

Do you see a triangle here?  If you do, your brain is filling in the gaps in information to "see" a triangle where none exists.  This is the famous "Kanizsa illusion," named after the Italian artist and psychologist Gaetano Kanizsa.  This could explain some of the triangular-shaped UFO sightings that Spielberg takes as evidence for ETI visitations.  (Here my thinking has been influenced by Michael Shermer's new book Think [2026: 198-226].)

Leslie Kean was one of the co-authors of the 2017 New York Times article that so impressed Spielberg.  She is a journalist who has been one of the leading advocates for UFO sightings as evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence visiting the Earth.  In 2010, she surveyed this evidence in her best-selling book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record.  Remarkably, she began the book by admitting that roughly 90 to 95 percent of UFO sightings can be explained:

Examples of phenomena sometimes mistaken for UFOs are weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, the planet Venus or Mars, meteors or meteorites, space junk, satellites, sundogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light off clouds, lights on the ground or lights reflected on a cockpit window, temperature inversions, hole-punch clouds, and the list goes on!  Yes, the vast majority of reports can usually be explained by one of the above, but of course it's only the ones that can't that we're interested in (12).

So she has to point to the few cases that cannot be explained in one of these ways as demonstrative evidence for UFOs of extraterrestrial origin.

She begins her survey of the evidence "on very solid ground" with "one of the most vivid and well-documented UFO cases ever"--a two-year wave of UFO sightings in Belgium that began on November 29, 1989.  Over two-thousand cases were reported.  Belgian Colonel Wilfried De Brouwer described the first night of the wave: "Hundreds of people saw a majestic triangular craft with a span of approximately a hundred and twenty feet and powerful beaming spotlights, moving very slowly without making any significant noise but, in several cases, accelerating to very high speeds" (17).

As Shermer suggests, there might have been three sources of light in the sky (such as small planes) that appeared triangular to people on the ground as their minds filled in the space between the lights, as happens in the Kanizsa illusion.  Kean does not consider this possibility.

Moreover, it's strange that with thousands of people reporting these eyewitness sightings, almost no one took a photograph of what they saw, even though film cameras were widely available to Belgians at that time.

Kean does report, however, that on April 4, 1990, at 10:00 p.m. in the town of Petit-Rechain, one person with a camera did take a photograph, which was published in a French magazine.  Kean reproduces that photograph in her book.  Here it is:

Kean reports that experts carefully studied the original color slide, and their major findings were:

• No effect of infrared radiation.
• No indication of any tampering with the slide.
• The camera was stable, but the craft was moving slowly and had approximately a 45-degree bank when the picture was taken.
• The rotation of the spotlights did not occur around one central point.
• The middle light is very different from the three other lights.
• The lights are positioned symmetrically with respect to the structure of the craft.

She also reports that the experts concluded that the picture could not have been faked (30).  This became one of the most famous pieces of evidence for extraterrestrial UFOs.

But then in 2011, one year after the publication of Kean's book, a man by the name of Patrick Marechal explained in an interview for a Belgian TV channel how he had created the photo as a hoax: he cut a piece of styrofoam into a triangle, painted it black, embedded flashlights in each corner, hung it from a string, and then photographed it. 

HAPLESS ALIENS?

In many of Disclosure Day videos of ETIs, we see ETI corpses being recovered from spaceship crash sites.  If the ETIs are so superior in their intelligence and their technology, why are they so often crashing into the ground?  It doesn't make sense.

And why is it so easy for the humans to capture them alive, hold them in captivity, and torture them through brutal experimentation?  The ETI at the end of the movie is brought into the TV studio in a cage.  If he's so smart and so powerful, why did he allow this?  Why didn't he kill the humans holding him captive?

This meek submission of the ETIs to their human captors in this movie is especially strange because of the contrast to Spielberg's War of the Worlds, in which the ETIs are aggressive in conquering and killing the humans.

In his recent interviews, Spielberg has said that he's changed his mind--that he no longer accepts H. G. Wells' depiction of extraterrestrials as bellicose enemies of humanity.  But he is vague in explaining why he changed his mind.  He does invoke his theme of empathy.  But he doesn't explain why we should assume that extraterrestrial intelligences will be empathetic in their caring for human beings--particularly, when they're so badly mistreated by human beings.

A THREAT TO RELIGIOUS FAITH?

Disclosure Day also raises the question of whether the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligent life coming from distant planets beyond the Solar System would threaten religious faith, and particularly Christianity.  I have written about this question in previous posts.

The question is whether the plurality of worlds in the universe can be reconciled with the central doctrines of Christianity--particularly, the Story of Creation and the Story of Salvation.

The Genesis account of Creation says nothing about extraterrestrial life in the universe, although it does of course speak of divinities and spiritual beings (such as angels) as living in the heavens.  The Earth is identified as the only planet in the universe.  And the Moon is the only moon in the universe.  The stars do not have any planets orbiting around them.  Moreover, Genesis seems to present a geocentric cosmology with Earth at the center.  That's why Galileo got into so much trouble with the Church in defending the Copernican heliocentric universe.

But then we could say that God gave us the Bible not as a science textbook but as a book to tell us what we need to know about salvation.  Or, as Galieo put it, the Bible tells us "not how the heavens go," but "how to get to heaven."

In Disclosure Day, Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel), the Abbess of the Monastery of St. Clare of the Dawn, is asked about whether the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence would contradict the Creation Story.  She responds by asking why God would "make such a vast universe, yet save it only for us," which seems to be speaking for Spielberg.  At the end of the movie, when the "Disclosure" is broadcast around the globe, we see Sister Maura watching the broadcast, and she smiles in an expression of wonder at God's creation.

And yet, many Christians--such as the creationists affiliated with Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis--will argue that the Bible clearly implies that the Earth is unique in the universe--that it was made for humans to inhabit and call home--and that God did not create alien life on any other planet (Faulkner 2015).

There is another theological question here that never comes up in Disclosure Day--whether the existence of alien life would be compatible with the Story of Salvation.  This is the story of how Adam's sin put a curse on all humans, how Jesus was incarnated to become the Savior, and how His resurrection creates the promise of redemptive salvation for all of humanity.  If Christians discovered that there really were extraterrestrial intelligences on distant planets, wouldn't they have to wonder how they could be saved?  Did Jesus go to those planets to save them?  Or is it possible that they don't need to be saved because Adam's curse did not affect them?

A SURROGATE FOR RELIGIOUS FAITH?

Rather than being a threat to religious faith, belief in extraterrestrial intelligences can be understood as a form of religious faith.  Disclosure Day suggests that in many ways.  For example, Margaret shows many of the traits of the Christian mystic--such as speaking in languages that she does not know.  On the Day of Pentecost, Christians filled by the Holy Spirit spoke in foreign languages that they did not know.  Margaret can do this because she is filled by the ETI Spirit.

If there is a natural desire for religious transcendence--as I have argued--then we should expect that even many atheists will long for some kind of religious experience--or what I have called atheistic religiosity.  This has been manifested in recent years in some surveys of religious belief where a growing number of people identify themselves as "spiritual but not religious."  They don't belong to any traditional religious institutions, and they don't believe in traditional religious doctrines.  But they still long for some kind of spirituality.  On Rebecca Goldstein's "mattering map," these people belong to the continent of the "transcenders": they believe that they matter because they matter to some transcendent intelligence in the cosmos.  For traditional religious believers, that transcendent intelligence is God or some kind of divinity.  For the believers in UFOs, that transcendent intelligence is the extraterrestrial intelligence that comes from a distant planet.

Clay Routledge is a psychologist who has studied the belief in extraterrestrial intelligence as an expression of the "religious mind" (Routledge 2017; Routledge et al. 2017).  Routledge argues that many studies have shown that traditional religious belief satisfies our natural longing for meaning or significance in the universe.  When we think about how small and unimportant we seem in the grand scheme of things, we look for some way to give our lives some cosmic significance.  Religious belief satisfies that longing by giving us stories about how supernatural beings are watching over us, and how they will rescue us from death and extinction. 

Studies have shown that traditional religious believers are less inclined to believe in extraterrestrial intelligence than are atheists and agnostics.  The likely explanation for this is that since atheists and agnostics lack the religious faith that gives their lives some cosmic significance, many of them will choose to believe in UFOs and alien visitors, because then they can say that "we are not alone" in the universe, and there are superintelligent beings out there who are watching over us, who feel empathy for us, and who will save us from extinction by delivering their message to all of us from a TV studio in Kansas City.

That would explain the revelatory way Spielberg speaks about Disclosure Day: "Wouldn't it be wonderful for people to know all of this is true?"

REFERENCES

Barnes, Julian E. 2024. "Pentagon Review Finds No Evidence of Alien Cover-Up." New York Times, March 8.

Cooper, Helene, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean. 2017. "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious UFO Program." New York Times, December 16.

Dargis, Manohla. 2026. "'Disclosure Day' Review: Spielberg Plays His Greatest Cosmic Hits." New York Times, June 11.

Department of Defense. 2024. "The Department of Defense All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office: Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP)."  Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense.

Faulkner, Danny. 2015. UFOs and ETs: A Biblical and Cultural Exploration of Aliens. Petersburg, KY: Answers in Genesis.

Kean, Leslie. 2010. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Routledge, Clay. 2017. "Don't Believe in God? Maybe You'll Try UFOs." New York Times, July 21.

Routledge, Clay, Andrew A. Abeyta, and Christina Roylance. 2017. "We Are Not Alone: The Meaning Motive, Religiosity, and Belief in Extraterrestrial Intelligence." Motivation and Emotion 41:135-146.

Shermer, Michael. 2026. Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

The Liberal Conservatism of Darwinian Social Order: A Response to Nicholas Wade

"Evolution has embedded four major structural elements of society in the human genome," Nicholas Wade claims in his book The Origin of Politics.  "These are the family, the specialized roles of the two sexes, social institutions [such as religion, commerce, politics, and war], and the tribe with its successor institution the nation-state" (60, 205).  

It is confusing, however, for Wade to identify "social institutions" as one of the four major elements of social order.  Because Wade defines "institutions" broadly as "socially agreed ways of accomplishing the tasks required for a society's survival" (59), and therefore all of the structural elements of society are "social institutions."  The family, for example, is a social institution because it is a socially agreed way of pair-bonding a man and a woman for the purposes of sexual mating and producing and rearing children.

Wade thinks that while conservatives tend to support the authority of these evolutionary pillars of social order, liberals tend to scorn that authority as a threat to individual liberty.  And he sees this political polarization as rooted in the genetic divergence of political orientations, in that some people are genetically predisposed to conservative attitudes, and others are genetically predisposed to liberal attitudes.

As I have already suggested in previous posts, I find his argument for the genetic polarization of conservatives and liberals implausible for three reasons.  First, Wade admits that no one have ever found the genes for conservative or liberal predispositions because it's so difficult to identify the genes for social behavior (144-146, 153-158, 165-166, 212).

Second, even if we could identify those genes, we would see that the genetic influence on human attitudes and behavior is always very indirect and dependent upon a complex interaction of many factors in a specific context.  Genes influence but do not specify behavior, because genes interact with other genes, with other biological factors, and with the physical and social environment.

Third, Wade's assumption that all political ideology must ultimately be bifurcated into left and right, liberal and conservative, ignores the multidimensional character of political ideology that includes ideologies like libertarianism and classical liberalism that show a fusion of liberal and conservative principles.

Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, the political theory that would be compatible with Wade's evolutionary theory of politics would have to be a Darwinian liberal conservatism that would fuse liberalism, conservatism, and Darwinism (Darwinian Conservatism [Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2009]; "The Evolution of Darwinian Liberalism," Journal of Bioeconomics 17 [2015]: 3-15).

Consider how a Darwinian liberal conservatism can account for what Wade presents as the major evolutionary pillars of social order:  social institutions, the family, the social roles of the two sexes, religion, commerce, political coalitions, war, and the nation-state.

SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Liberal conservatives agree with John Locke that human beings create social institutions by consenting to them.  As Locke said, human beings have created not only government, but also language, families, morality, religion, and money by consenting to their existence.  For example, Locke explains language as a socially created institution in which certain sounds are given symbolic meaning by a "tacit consent" among the speakers of the language.  Language can then be used as the primary instrument by which people create all other institutions by agreeing to their existence.  Thus, all institutions arise from a Lockean social contract.  

Wade implicitly recognizes this when he quotes Michael Tomasello as saying that "the ultimate outcome of social norms in human groups is the creation of social institutions whose existence is constituted by the collective agreement of all group members that things should be done in a particular way" (61).  "Collective agreement" is what Locke called "consent."

Liberal conservatives agree with Adam Smith that the Lockean consenting to institutions shows the evolution of largely unintended (spontaneous) social orders.  That the evolution of unintended order is the unifying theme of all of Smith's writing has been well stated by James Otteson (Adam Smith's Marketplace of Life [Cambridge University Press, 2002]).   He argues that Smith applies a "market model" to explain the origin, development, and maintenance of all extended human institutions as unintended orders, which includes language, economics, morality, and law.  What Otteson calls "unintended order" is what Michael Polanyi and Friedich Hayek called "spontaneous order" and what Vernon Smith and others call "emergent order."  Otteson defines "unintended order" as "a self-enforcing, orderly institution created unintentionally by the free exchanges of individuals who desire to satisfy their own individual wants" (270). 

An unintended order is contrasted with an intended order that has been rationally designed by some mind or group of minds for a deliberately planned purpose.  The contrast between these two kinds of order underlies a fundamental debate in social theory between the constructivists and the evolutionists: between the constructivists who think that a good social order must be deliberately and rationally designed for some foreseeable end-state and the evolutionists who think a good social order arises through an evolutionary process of free exchanges between individuals acting for individual ends with no overall end in mind.  Since the success of unintended order depends on individual liberty constrained only by rules of justice protecting life, liberty, and property, the idea of unintended order is the fundamental idea of classical liberalism in the Smithian tradition.

Darwinian liberal conservatives agree with Charles Darwin that consenting to institutions that emerge as unintended orders like language, morality, and religion is uniquely human because it arises through the human capacity for symbolic thought and culture.  The symbolic inheritance system is uniquely human because it shows the qualitative leap that defines our humanity as based on our capacity for symbolic thought and communication. Other animals can communicate through signs. But only human beings can communicate through symbols. The evolution of human language was probably crucial for the evolution of symbolism. Symbolic systems allow us to think about abstractions that have little to do with concrete, immediate experiences. Symbolic systems allow human beings to construct a shared imagined reality. These symbolic constructions are often fictional and future-oriented. Art, religion, science, and philosophy are all manifestations of human symbolic evolution. 

THE FAMILY AND THE TWO SEXES

The family is a symbolic construction--an institution created by our consent--because it exists through our collective agreement on the social meaning of husband, wife, father, mother, and child.  In Darwinian Conservatism, I argued that Darwinism supports the conservative view of sexual differences, family life, and parental care as fundamental for the social order of a free society.  A Darwinian account of the natural desires for sexual identity, sexual mating, and parental care confirms the conservative commitment to the traditional social order of sex, marriage, and the monogamous nuclear family.  While those on the extreme left tend to see sexual differences, family life, and parental care as social constructions that can be changed, and perhaps even abolished, by social engineering, Darwinian biology sustains the conservative understanding of sexual conduct and familial bonding as innate propensities of human nature.

Wade agrees that the pair-bonding of husband and wife in the family for the production and rearing of children is deeply rooted in evolved human nature, and therefore it is not merely an arbitrary cultural construction.  But he worries that the far-left cultural assault on the two-parent family is destroying the family and promoting declining female fertility rates, which is producing social disorder and a collapsing birth rate that will bring the extinction of the human population. 

His forecast is apocalyptic:

This modernist subversion of the nuclear family conflicts with human nature just as the kibbutz experiment did.  But its damage, wreaked through a set of interacting effects, is less reversible.  Fewer people are getting married.  Fewer children are enjoying the benefit of being brought up in two-parent homes.  And fewer babies are being born.  The declining fertility rate in the United States and most other advanced economies is no mere curiosity but rather the first step on a road that leads to extinction.  With the birth rate less than the replacement level, populations will steadily decline (126).

I disagree.  If this attack on the nuclear family "conflicts with human nature just as the kibbutz experiment did," then we should expect that human nature will prevail.  If the nuclear family really does satisfy some of the deepest natural desires of human beings, then the family will endure because human beings will always want it.

Now some of the statistics cited by Wade would seem to deny this.  For example, he reports: "Fewer children than ever are growing up in a traditional two-parent family--a mere 15% according to one estimate" (129).  Only 15% of the children in the U.S. are living in a two-parent family?  If that were true, that would be pretty good evidence that the nuclear family has largely disappeared in the U.S.  

But then Wade's reader has to be surprised, after reading the sentence above on page 129, to read this sentence on page 130: "In 1980 some 77% of children lived with married parents, declining to 65% in 2019."  So which is it--15% or 65%?  If the reader checks the endnote to "a mere 15% according to one estimate," he'll see that the reference is Terri Carroll, "State of the American Family," BGSU Magazine, spring 2013.  She's reporting on research conducted by the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University.  She says that the popular ideal of the nuclear family depicted in the old television show "Leave It to Beaver" is no longer true.  In the 1950s, "60 percent of families consisted of a breadwinning father and a stay-at-home mother," but today "only about 15 percent of American children now reside in a traditional breadwinner-homemaker family."  So this 15 percent refers to children living in a two-parent family where the father earns the family's only income, and the mother stays at home and does not earn a second income.

But if we're interested in the prevalence of two-parent families--regardless of whether the mother works outside the home--the statistics look different.  For example, two years ago, The Institute for Family Studies published an article by Nicholas Zill with the title "The Resurgence of the Two-Parent Family" (January 10, 2024).  Reporting U.S. Census data, Zill noted that in 1960, 88% of children under 18 were living with two parents, 9% were living with a single parent, and 3.2% were living with no parent.  In 2005, the statistics were 67% (two parents), 28% (one parent), and 4.5% (no parent).  But by 2023, the numbers were moving slightly back in the direction of 1960--71% (two parents), 25% (one parent), and 3.8% (no parent).  For Zill, this was evidence for "the resurgence of the two-parent family."  This is what we should expect if we really believe that marriage and the two-parent family satisfy our natural human desires for conjugal bonding and parental care.

Moreover, in considering how marriage and the family can satisfy these natural desires, we should not limit ourselves to the traditional heterosexual married couple caring for their biological children.  A married couple caring for adopted children are satisfying their desires for conjugal bonding and parental care.  A married couple with no children is satisfying their desire for conjugal bonding without parental care.

And as I have argued previously, there's a good argument for same-sex marriages as satisfying these natural desires.  Terri Carroll's article begins by describing a lesbian couple caring for their adopted daughter.  Same-sex marriages with children can satisfy the natural desires for conjugal bonding and parental care.  

Some of the gay proponents of gay marriage--such as John Corvino--concede that the ideal environment on average for raising children is a lifelong heterosexual marriage of mother and father jointing caring for the children.  Corvino has said that he is grateful that he was raised in this environment, and that his parents are still married and still tied to their children.

But in defense of same-sex marriage and parenting, Corvino points out that same-sex couples will never kidnap any children from any heterosexual couples who want to keep their children.  Homosexual parents will either produce children through artificial insemination, or they will adopt them.  And it is surely better for the children to be brought into existence than not.  And it is better for the children in foster care to be adopted.  As long as it is true that adoptive homosexual parents are on average as good for children as adoptive heterosexual parents, then same-sex married parenting poses no special harm to children.

But then what about the problem of declining fertility rates in most of the economically advanced nations around the world?  Is Wade justified in predicting that this will bring the extinction of the human population--or at least those populations in those nations with the lowest fertility rates (in North America, Europe, Asian countries like South Korea and Japan, and South Pacific countries like Australia and New Zealand)?

Consider the World Bank's estimates of total fertility rates (the average number of births per woman by the end of her reproductive years).  The global average TFR is about 2.1, which is usually considered the replacement level.  The low income countries tend to have higher TFRs than the high income countries.  The highest TFRs are in Africa.  The TFR for Chad and Somalia is over 6.0.  The average for Sub-Sahara Africa is 4.26.  The average for Europe is 1.55.  The average for East Asia and Pacific is 1.34.  The lowest TFRs are those for Hong Kong (0.84) and South Korea (0.75).

What we see here is the consequence of the "demographic transition" that began sometime in the 19th century: as societies become richer, the birth rate drops because richer people tend to invest heavily in a few children rather than invest a little in many children.  This seems counterintuitive.  Surely, rich people can afford to have lots of children.  But it makes sense in economically advanced societies, where a heavy investment of parental resources (such as expensive education) in their children is required for those children to become successful adults.  There is also a tradeoff here: the more parents invest in their children, the less they have to invest in themselves.  This raises the costs of children, and consequently the demand for children goes down.  But still, the natural desire for parental care is so strong that most human beings will pay that cost.

We can see this demographic transition in the TFR historical statistics for the U.S.  In 1800, the estimated TFR was 7.03.  Then there was a steady decline over the years until the TFR reached 2.06 in 1940.  This was followed by a steady increase up to 3.58 in 1960.  Then there was another steady decline down to 1.62 in 2023, followed by a slight increase to 1.79 in 2025.  So a steady decline can be followed by a steady increase, although the general zigzag pattern seems to be a decline.

Amazingly, however, the U.S. has had a fast growing population.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of the U.S. has grown every year since 1900, except for one year during the Spanish flu epidemic, growing at an average of 0.85% per year since 2000.  As of today, the population of the U.S. is 342,415,867, which makes it the third largest national population in the world, behind only India and China.

What explains the growing population despite the below-replacement TFR is immigration.  Consider these calculations for the U.S. from the U.S. Census Bureau:

One birth every 9 seconds

One death every 10 seconds

One international migrant (net) every 97 seconds

Net gain of one person every 45 seconds

As long as this immigration into the U.S. continues, the U.S. population will continue to increase.  The countries facing the greatest depopulation crisis are those with low TFRs and low immigration.  For example, Japan's population has dropped by over 3 million in only 5 years--from 126.1 million in 2020 to 123 million in 2025.  Japan has a TFR of 1.38, and it also has some of the most restrictive immigration policies of any nation in the world.

Now, of course, if Trump's policies for closing the U.S. borders and deporting immigrants continues, this could reverse America's century-long trend towards increasing population and create the sort of population crisis now faced by Japan.

This supports my argument for open borders and freedom of movement.  But Wade disagrees.  He sees immigration into the U.S. as a threat to America's national identity.   I'll respond to Wade's argument for American nationalism in my next post.

Nicholas Wade's Darwinian Liberal Conservatism

In 1975, the left-wing critics of Ed Wilson's Sociobiology accused him of promoting a genetic determinism and a conservative (or even neo-Nazi) politics that denied the possibility and desirability of the social change through cultural learning that could establish a socialist society.  Nicholas Wade, writing for the journal Science, responded by pointing out that Wilson could not be a strict genetic determinist because he recognized that human social behavior was largely shaped by cultural learning.  The evolution of social behavior works through the interaction of genes and culture, so that genetic evolution both enables and constrains cultural evolution.  

Wade also dismissed the charge that Wilson was supporting Nazi-like eugenics as unfairly inflammatory political rhetoric.  After all, Wade noted, Wilson "describes himself as a liberal."  Wilson himself had said that human sociobiology could explain the human resistance to oppressive despotism as an expression of those human rights that are rooted in human biological nature--"rights that are innate, rooted in the ineradicable drives for survival and self-esteem."  So it seemed that if Wilson's sociobiology promoted conservatism, it must be a liberal conservatism--conservative in the sense of conserving those genetically evolved behaviors and traditions that have worked in the past, but liberal in the sense of being open to the cultural evolution of the liberal institutions that secure human liberty.

In his new book The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations, Wade elaborates both of these themes--the gene-culture coevolution of human social behavior and the need for both liberal and conservative attitudes to sustain a free, flourishing, and enduring social order.  He also adds a third theme--the evolution of the modern nation-state--that supports an illiberal nationalism that seems to contradict his liberal conservatism.

THE GENE-CULTURE COEVOLUTION OF POLITICS

Many of the leftist critics of sociobiology worried that any conception of a genetic human nature as a constraint on cultural change would deny the possibility of creating a socialist society.  Wade confirms that fear by arguing that the history of socialis utopias--particularly, the socialist kibbutzim in Israel-- shows that any attempt to conquer human nature in establishing socialism must ultimately fail.

The kibbutzim were collective farms established in Israel in the early 20th century.  To achieve complete equality, they abolished the family, abolished the traditional division of labor between men and women, abolished private property, and abolished differential compensation for workers.

The kibbutzim practiced a pure socialism that came as close to absolute equality as any human community has ever achieved.  The members rotated jobs.  They took all of their meals in a common dining hall.  They had no private property.  They did not even own the clothing they wore, which was provided for them by the community.  When children were born, they were sent to a children's house to be cared for and educated by the community.  Children were allowed to visit their parents only a few hours in the afternoon.  This was understood as necessary for the sexual equality of men and women, because women were free from the burden of caring for their children. All decisions about the organization of the community were made by consensus in a general assembly, usually held weekly, where every member participated equally.  The kibbutzniks saw themselves as putting into practice the Marxist principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."  They also seemed to be following Plato's recommendation in The Republic that the Guardians in the just city should not have private property or private families, because they should care for the common good of the whole community rather than their selfish private interests.

But then, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, young mothers began to complain that they did not have enough time with their children.  They wanted at least to be able to put their children to sleep at night.  As the children matured to adulthood, many of them left the kibbutz because they didn't like the communal childrearing.  Beginning in the 1970s, many of the kibbutzim decided to allow family sleeping rather than collective sleeping.  Socialists complained that allowing children to live with their parents would lead to the privatization of other things and inequality.

The kibbutzniks wanted not only private families but also private property.  Some of them returning from serving in the British army in World War Two came back with teakettles.  Allowing some people to own private teakettles, and to drink tea privately in their homes rather than in the communal dining room, violated socialist equality.  Then some people wanted to own their own clothes and to select their clothing.  They also wanted to own their homes.

The kibbutzim had to abandon job rotation to keep skilled people in their specialized jobs.  The most skilled workers wanted extra pay for their work, and they complained about those people who didn't work hard but received equal pay.  By the end of the 1990s, many kibbutzim were assigning wages according to skill level.

So socialism was successful for the founding generation of the kibbutzniks because of their ideological commitment to the project.  But it ultimately failed because the second and third generations rejected it as frustrating their natural human desires for familial bonding, private property, and earnings according to merit.  The socialist culture of the kibbutzim failed to abolish evolved human nature.

But even if cultural learning cannot abolish human nature, Wade observes, human nature is flexible enough that it can be bent in certain directions by cultural learning.  His two examples of this happening are the rise of monogamy and the fall of tribalism in human history.

Although monogamous pair-bonding is deeply rooted in human evolutionary history, there is also an evolutionary logic for men to compete with one another for sexual access to many women.  Since women can bear only a few children in their lifetimes, but men can father many, a man who mates with many women increases his Darwinian fitness.  But only men with power, status, and wealth can provide multiple women with the resources they need for bearing and rearing children.  So it was only after the development of agriculture, which allowed a few men to accumulate great wealth and power, that high status men were able to have many wives.  For example, Wade notes that the Moroccan ruler Moulay Ismail was reputed to have had over 500 concubines and to have fathered over 1,000 children by the time of his death in 1727.  Since the emergence of agriculture, most societies have allowed polygamy.  Actually, this means polygyny (multiple women mated with one man), because polyandry (multiple men mated with one woman) is extremely rare.

But then in ancient Greece and Rome, there arose a cultural rule forbidding anyone from marrying more than one person at a time.  The Christian Church then strictly enforced this cultural rule of monogamy across the Roman Empire and then across the European states.

Rich men are worse off from this cultural rule because it limits their male desire to leave as many (legitimate) offspring as possible.  But it benefits poor men in a way that benefits society at large.

In a polygamous society, the highest status men will have many wives.  Some middle status men will have one wife each.  Consequently, the lowest status men will have little chance of finding a wife.  These young wifeless men will become resentful and violent and thus disruptive to the social order.  

Monogamy evenly distributes the women as mates for the men, and then every man has a stake in the existing order, which strengthens social cohesion.  For that reason, monogamous societies will tend to be more stable and enduring than polygamous societies.

This cultural evolution of monogamy illustrates how a cultural rule can bend but not break a natural human propensity.  In a monogamous society, rich and powerful men (such as politicians) will enjoy sexual access to many women, but these adulterous affairs will not be socially or legally legitimized.

Another example of a cultural curbing of a natural propensity that was necessary for the emergence of modern state societies is the repression of tribalism.  With the appearance of the first horticulturalists about 10,000 years ago--small-scale cultivators of plants--people lived in small villages organized into clans and tribes.  A clan is a social group consisting of families who claim a common ancestor.  The informal leadership of a clan is usually elders or a chief.  A tribe is composed of multiple clans claiming common ancestry and shared culture, language, territory, and traditions.  The tribe is governed by chiefs or councils, but they have nothing like a formal government or bureaucratic state.  John Locke understood the American Indian tribes (particularly, the Huron tribes described by Gabriel Sagard) as living in the state of nature with informal governance but no formal political institutions.

For thousands of years, tribalism was the predominant social organization for most human beings around the world.  History's largest land empire--the Mongol Empire--was tribally organized, and by 1279 AD it stretched from the Pacific Ocean to Eastern Europe.

In Europe, Wade observes, tribalism was undermined by the Catholic Church.  Tribes depend on a network of marriages between people who are closely related to preserve male lineages and inheritance of property in the male line.  Because of the short life spans in premodern times, families often had no male heir.  To keep wealth within the family or tribe, men were required to marry their brother's widow, or a widowed man was required to marry his sister-in-law.  Or a family could resort to adoption.  The Church used its power over marriage rules to forbid these practices under the pretext of preventing incest.  Then, when people on their deathbeds had no male descendants, they could be persuaded by a priest to give their property to the Church as a way of assuring their heavenly salvation.  Consequently, so much of the wealth of the tribes was transferred to the Church that tribal structures were dissolved.

Wade argues that what we see here is the coevolution of genetic instincts and cultural traditions, so that cultural norms can curb genetic instincts like polygamy and tribalism, but those instincts can never be totally extinguished.  Rich and powerful men will always be tempted by the polygamous instinct for extramarital sex.  And people will always have a tribalistic instinct to favor their relatives.

THE EVOLUTION OF LIBERAL CONSERVATISM

The cultural suppression of polygamy and tribalism, allowed for the emergence of the monogamous nuclear family in Europe as the normative institution for organizing marriage and kinship.  The monogamous nuclear family—a couple and their dependent children living together—has historically been linked to the rise of individualism in Western societies. This arises from its role in shaping personal identity, property rights, and social roles.

But people were still under the authoritarian religious and political authority of the ruling elites who controlled the church and the state.  Securing the social, economic, and political freedoms enjoyed by people in a modern liberal democracy, Wade explains, required the cultural evolution of the liberal constitutionalism that first emerged fully in England in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

The Stuart monarchs claimed to rule by divine right, and thus they could not be under the law, since the King was the Law--Lex Rex.  Their opponents in Parliament argued that the king must be subject to the law.  By the late 17th century, there were two political factions in this debate.  The Tories defended the divine right authority of the King.  The Whigs argued for parliamentary supremacy and the rule of law over the King.  This debate was settled when the last of the Stuarts, James II, was forced into exile and replaced in 1689 by William III of the Dutch House of Orange.  This established that the king was subject to the law and Parliament and that governments could rule only with the consent of the people.  Most Tories then accepted constitutional monarchy and gave up the idea of divine-right monarchy.

Wade sees here the cultural evolution of the three components of the modern liberal democratic order.

First, the state was strong enough to defend itself and prevent unrest within its borders.  Second, such conditions allowed the emergence of the rule of law and respect for property rights.  Third, because of the existence and legitimacy of the law, Parliament was able to challenge the king's absolute power and make him subject to the will of elected government (94-95).

For Wade, this allowed for "institutions such as property rights, free markets, and an unbiased legal system . . . open and impersonal institutions, or 'inclusive institutions'" that "stand in contrast to 'extractive institutions' that are designed to sequester a society's resources for the benefit of a small elite" (98-99).  This cultural evolution from "extractive institutions" to "inclusive institutions" corresponds to what Stephen Balch would call the move from a Takers regime to a Makers regime (Naturalizing History: A Biocultural Theory of Human Progress [Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2026).  The Makers are those who produce wealth.  The Takers are those who expropriate the wealth produced by others.

David Hume saw the conflict between the Tories as the party of authority and obedience to rulers and the Whigs as the party of liberty and resistance to tyranny as a political battle in which the partisans of each faction refused to see the partial truth in each side: good government requires a tense balance between authority and liberty, so that each side moderates the other.  Extreme authoritarianism creates tyranny.  Extreme libertarianism creates anarchy.  Hume thought the task of a philosopher is not to become a partisan for one side over the other but to mediate between the two extremes and promote compromise and accommodation.

Although Wade is not completely clear on this point, he seems to agree with Hume in suggesting that the genetic and cultural evolution of political order requires a balance or accommodation between conservative political attitudes (expressed by the Tories) and liberal political attitudes (expressed by the Whigs), which I have called "liberal conservatism."  

Wade agrees with those political scientists--John Hibbing, Peter Hatemi, and their colleagues--who argue that twin studies have shown that political attitudes are to a significant degree genetically influenced (see John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith, and John R. Alford, The Left, The Right, and the Biology of Political Differences, second edition [New York: Routledge, 2024].  In some studies, questionnaires are given to identical twins, who have 100% of their genome in common, and to fraternal twins, who share on average 50% of their genes.  When the responses from the identical twin pairs are more similar than those from the fraternal twin pairs, a genetic influence can be inferred.  The twins can be asked to answer yes or no to a series of questions about political issues such as the death penalty, gay rights, immigration, and abortion.  In one study, researchers constructed an index of conservatism based on typically conservative answers to the questions and then estimated the heritability of conservatism--the extent to which the variability in the population is influenced by genetics--as 43%.  Studies of identical twins reared apart show that if you know that one of the twins is politically conservative, you can predict that the other twin is likely to be politically conservative.  So it seems that there is some genetic influence on whether one is politically conservative or liberal.

In some previous posts, I have criticized this "genopolitics" research of Hibbing and his colleagues.  One of my main criticisms has been that Hibbing's group gives us an implausibly simplistic model that cannot account for the complex diversity of evolved political ideology.  Isn't it hard to see how the complexity of political thought and behavior could be reduced to two categories at opposite ends of one dimension--the political left or the political right--or perhaps three categories if we include the political center?  At the very least, we need to recognize libertarianism or classical liberalism as a position that is neither purely liberal nor purely conservative, a position that is ignored by Hibbing's group.

The insistence of Hibbing's group that everyone is either liberal or conservative, left or right, requires that everyone be forced to make dichotomous choices about the "bedrock issues of social organization."  They have done this by using a "Society Works Best Instrument" (Kevin Smith et al., "Linking Genetics and Political Attitudes: Reconceptualizing Political Ideology," Political Psychology 32 [2011]: 390-91).  People are given a series of 14 binary choices about how "Society works best when . . ."  Amazingly, they ask about how "society" works best, but they ask nothing about "government" or "the state"; and so they make it impossible to distinguish between the natural and voluntary associations in civil society and the coercive power of government.

Here are some examples.  "Society works best when . . . 1. Those who break the rules are punished. 2. Those who break the rules are forgiven.  1. Every member contributes. 2. More fortunate members sacrifice to help others.  1. People are rewarded according to merit.  2. People are rewarded according to need.  1. People take primary responsibility for their welfare. 2. People join together to help others.  1. People are proud they belong to the best society there is.  2. People realize that no society is better than any other."

Every choice of a 1 was given a score of 1, and every choice of a 2 was given a score of -1.  Those whose total score was close to 14 were extreme conservatives.  Those whose total score was close to -14 were extreme liberals.

I assure you I am not making this up.  This is what Hibbing and his group regard as real social science. 

Wouldn't any reasonable person--any liberal or conservative--object that most of these dichotomous choices are ridiculous, because they are false dichotomies?  Would the conservative say that those who break the rules should always be punished and never forgiven?  Or would the liberal say that they should always be forgiven and never punished?  Would the conservative say that people should always be rewarded according to merit and never according to need?  Or would the liberal say that people should always be rewarded according to need and never according to merit?  Would the conservative say that people should always take primary responsibility for their welfare and never help others?  Or would the liberal say that people should always help others and never take primary responsibility for their own welfare?  Surely, the answer to all these questions is no.

If you insist that political ideology consists of a choice between only two alternatives, these are the kind of silly choices that you have to give to people.

Perhaps we need a somewhat wider range of choices.  Hibbing et al. are silent about the proposal by some political scientists--such as William Maddox and Stuart Lilie (in Beyond Liberal and Conservative: Reassessing the Political Spectrum [Cato Institute, 1984])--for using the two dimensions of freedom--economic freedom and personal freedom--to construct a matrix of four or five political ideologies.  American public opinion survey data shows, they contend, that American citizens are not just divided into liberals and conservatives, but also into libertarians and populists.  Some libertarian theorists (such as David Boaz), as well as the Libertarian Party, have adopted this analysis to construct a matrix of political ideologies based on two dimensions--personal liberty and economic liberty:

You can take a short quiz to see where you belong.  If you score high on personal liberty but low on economic liberty, you're a liberal.  If you score low on personal liberty but high on economic liberty, you're a conservative. If you score low on both personal liberty and economic liberty, you're a statist (or an authoritarian).  (Maddox and Lilie would call you a populist.)   If you score high on both personal liberty and economic liberty, you're a libertarian.  If you score towards the middle on both scales, you're a centrist.

Since the libertarian (or classical liberal) agrees with the liberal about the importance of personal liberty and agrees with the conservative about the importance of economic liberty, the libertarian could also be called a liberal conservative.

Wade never explicitly affirms what I am calling "liberal conservatism," but it's implied in much of what he says.  "Evolution has embedded four major structural elements of society in the human genome," Wade claims.  "These are the family, the specialized roles of the two sexes, social institutions [such as religion, commerce, and politics], and the tribe with its successor institution the nation-state" (60, 205).  Wade argues that while conservatives firmly support those evolutionary pillars of social order, liberals--or at least those belonging to the "ultra-left"--undermine those pillars.  But then he insists: "The evolutionary perspective provides no basis for favoring conservative over liberal politics" (211).  On the contrary, "a healthy society needs to maintain in its genetic patrimony the full range of political behavior," combining "its liberal-promoting alleles" and its "conservative alleles," because a healthy society needs to be conservative in preserving its traditional norms but also liberal in making changes in response to a changing environment (158).

Wade seems to be agreeing with Hume that a healthy social order requires a balancing of the Tory party of authority and the Whig party of liberty as expressing two sides of the human nature of social order.  But as I have already suggested, a better position would be to affirm a Darwinian liberal conservatism that recognizes both liberty and authority as grounded in our evolved human nature.

I will say more about this in my next post.

E. O. Wilson and The Darwinian Nationalist Conservatism of Nicholas Wade

WILSON'S SOCIOBIOLOGY

                                                     Edward Wilson in 2003 (Died in 2021)

On May 28, 1975, the front page of the New York Times featured a long article by Boyce Rensberger entitled "Sociobiology: Updating Darwin on Behavior."  It was about Edward O. Wilson's book Sociobiology: A New Synthesis.  Although the book was not to be published by Harvard University Press until the end of June, Rensberger reported that scientists who had heard about the book or who had seen advance copies of it were excited by this new field of study--sociobiology as the study of the biological basis for social behavior in all species, including human beings.  Most exciting was "the revolutionary implication that much of man's behavior toward his fellows, ranging from aggressive impulses to humanitarian inspirations, may be as much a product of evolution as the structure of the hand or the size of the brain."

Over the summer and fall of 1975, the reviews of the book, in newspapers, popular magazines, and science journals, were almost uniformly laudatory.  For example, the reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, proclaimed: "Actually the book may be regarded as an evolutionary event in itself, announcing for all who can hear that we are on the verge of breakthroughs in the effort to understand our place in the scheme of things" (John Pfeiffer, "Sociobiology," July 27, 1975, p. 4).

But then, in November, The New York Review of Books published a passionate denunciation of Wilson's book signed by 15 members of the "Sociobiology Study Group of Science for the People," who were mostly academics in the area of Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Some of them were academic colleagues of Wilson at Harvard--such as Richard Lewontin, Richard Levins, Stephen Gould, and Ruth Hubbard.  They attacked Wilson for being a genetic determinist who provided "a genetic justification of the status quo and of existing privileges for certain groups according to class, race, or sex."  They accused him of reviving the genetically deterministic theories of eugenics and genetic racism that had "provided an important basis for the enactment of sterilization laws and restrictive immigration laws by the United States between 1910 and 1930 and also for the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany" (Elizabeth Allen et al., "Against 'Sociobiology,' November 13, 1975, pp. 182, 184-86).

A few months later, 35 members of the Sociobiology Study Group elaborated their critique of Wilson in the journal Bioscience.  Again, they criticized him for advancing a biological determinism that would justify existing human societies like the United States as rooted in "human nature."  They saw this as manifesting a "deeply conservative politics" that denied the possibility of "social change."  

Determinists assert that the possibility of change in social institutions is limited by the biological constraints on individuals.  But we know of no relevant constraints placed on social processes by human biology.  There is no evidence from ethnography, archaeology, or history that would enable us to circumscribe the limits of possible human social organization.  What history and ethnography do provide us with are the materials for building a theory that will itself be an instrument of social change (E. Allen et al, "Sociobiology--Another Biological Determinism," BioScience no. 3 [March 1976]).

Although they did not identify what kind of "social change" they wanted, most of the members of the Sociobiology Study Group could be identified as ultra-leftists.  Some of them--like Richard Lewontin--identified themselves as "Marxist biologists" who shared "a commitment to the prospect of a more socially just--a socialist--society" (R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin, Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature [New York: Pantheon Books, 1984], p. ix.).  This would explain why they wanted "no relevant constraints placed on social processes by human biology" that might hinder the achievement of a socialist society.

Wilson responded to these critics with two arguments.  He denied that he was a genetic determinist.  And he denied that his sociobiology supported a reactionary politics of oppression.

To say that "human nature is to some extent genetically influenced" is not genetic determinism, he argued.  While denying that human nature is "infinitely malleable," he also denied that it is "completely fixed."  Because "the truth appears to lie somewhere in between, closer to the environmentalist than to the genetic pole."  Consequently, one of the pervasive themes of Wilson's sociobiology became the need to understand the coevolution of genes and culture.

On the question of the significance of human sociobiology for political thought, Wilson warned the Science for the People group that their insistence that cultural determinism was unconstrained by human nature would remove all barriers to oppressive rule by the most powerful people in a culture.  Wilson even quoted leftist Noam Chomsky as making this point: "If people are, in fact, malleable and plastic beings with no essential psychological nature, then why should they not be controlled and coerced by those who claim authority, special knowledge, and a unique insight into what is best for those less enlightened?"

Wilson's solution to this problem was to claim that human resistance to oppression can be grounded in those human rights that are rooted in human nature.

To the extent that the biological interpretation noted here proves correct, men have rights that are innate, rooted in the ineradicable drives for survival and self-esteem, and these rights do not require the validation of ad hoc theoretical constructions produced by society.  If culture is all that created human rights, as the extreme environmentalist position holds, then culture can equally well validate their removal (Wilson, "Academic Vigilantism and the Political Significance of Sociobiology," Bioscience 26 [March 1976]: 183, 187-190).

But then what is it about evolved human nature that supports these natural rights?  In Sociobiology, Wilson pointed to the "emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain," which generate the moral emotions such as anger, indignation, guilt, shame, gratitude, sympathy, and love that enforce our human sense of rights and duties (pp. 3, 120-21, 129, 547-75).  Some years later, in his book Consilience: The Unity of Science (New York: Norton, 1998), Wilson saw his evolutionary explanation of morality as a revival of the idea of moral sentiments as developed by David Hume, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, and Edward Westermarck (pp. 172-80, 238-40, 248-56).

I have argued that we should see Darwin, Westermarck, and Wilson as the three evolutionary waves of Adam Smith’s liberal moral theory, because each of them initiated a new turn in the evolutionary moral psychology that has confirmed and deepened Smith’s liberal theory of the moral sentiments.  I have identified this as a liberal moral theory for three reasons.  It assumes a liberal individualism that recognizes the natural separateness of individuals and the moral claims that individuals make.  It asserts the liberal no-harm principle of justice as a “negative virtue” that justifies punishing individuals for any unprovoked harming of others through force or fraud.  And it employs the liberal idea of society as a largely self-regulating and spontaneous order arising from the social interaction of individuals seeking to satisfy their individual desires.

WADE'S DARWINIAN NATIONALIST CONSERVATISM

                                                                         Nicholas Wade

The first prominent published defense of Wilson's sociobiology against the Sociobiology Study Group was by Nicholas Wade writing in the journal Science, where he was a staff writer and editor.  He accused the members of the Study Group of distorting Wilson's book, particularly on the question of genetic determinism.  Far from being a genetic determinist, Wade observed, Wilson had sad that "the genes have given away most of their sovereignty," and that perhaps no more than 10 percent of social behavior has a genetic basis.

Wade also charged the Study Group with engaging in personal attacks and inflammatory political rhetoric--such as associating sociobiology with Nazism--that might scare people away from investigating this new field of human sociobiology (Wade, "Sociobiology: Troubled Birth for New Discipline," Science 191 [March 19, 1976]: 1151-1155). 

And yet Wade himself was not deterred from such studies, because he has written a series of books on the evolution of human nature as the foundation of human social life.

In 2014, his book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History, provoked a fierce controversy over his claims about the influence of racial differences in recent human history.  This debate was almost as fierce as the earlier debate over Wilson's Sociobiology, or the debate in 1994 over Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press).  I have written about these debates over Wade's Troublesome Inheritance and Herrnstein and Murray's book.  The emotional intensity of these controversies is due to the fact that these books challenge a fundamental assumption of the modern social sciences--that human social behavior, in both its uniformity and diversity, is largely if not entirely shaped by culture rather than biology.

Wade stated his main idea in one sentence that he repeated many times: "human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional" (4).  More fully stated, he argued:

that there is a genetic component to human social behavior; that this component, so critical to human survival, is subject to evolutionary change and has indeed evolved over time; that the evolution in social behavior has necessarily proceeded independently in the five major races [sub-Saharan Africans, Caucasians, East Asians, Australian and New Guinean aborigines, and American Indians] and others [including ethnic groups such as the Ashkenazi Jews]; and that slight evolutionary differences in social behavior underlie the differences in social institutions prevalent among the major human populations (242).

As you can imagine, this provoked vehement scorn, particularly among academic intellectuals, because it seemed to promote biological racism, although Wade denied this.

Now, in a new book--The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations (New York: Harper, 2025)--Wade renews his argument for the evolution of human nature as shaping social and political life, but he says almost nothing about race (although he does say a lot about ethnicity)--perhaps to avoid the nasty attacks that he stirred up in 2014.  The Oxford English Dictionary reports that the word "ethnicity" was hardly ever used from 1770 to 1950.  But then it became much more frequent after 1950.  This was probably because "ethnicity" could replace the word "race," which had become a distasteful word because of Nazi race theory.

Like Wilson, Wade in his new book continues to challenge "the ideology of the ultra-left" and particularly "the ultra-left's prohibition on applying Darwin's theory to people" (p. 215).  His reader might infer from this that he is defending conservative or right-wing politics, just as Wilson's left-wing critics thought he was promoting a "deeply conservative politics."  

Wade denies that this is the case.  But his denial is ambiguous and evasive.  Consider this one long passage:

The survival behaviors that evolution has built into the human genome--sex differences, family formation, pro-natalism, the religious instinct, tribalism/nationalism--sound very much like conservative values.  Does this mean that evolution is somehow a validation of conservative politics?  Not really.

Evolution conserves survival behaviors that have worked in the past.  It's a process that can only look backward, not forward.  Conservatism also values behaviors and traditions that have worked in the past.  The two systems inevitably overlap.  Moreover, many conservative values, such as love of family and country, are universal and shared by liberals as well.  It's just that conservatives place a greater emphasis on these traditional principles.

But human societies cannot stay the same.  Not only must they adapt to the impositions of a changing environment, but they are also in fervent competition with one another.  Politics has to promote and govern change as well as the conservation of values and traditions.  The evolutionary perspective provides no basis for favoring conservative over liberal politics.  It establishes only that certain values, widely held even if more firmly emphasized by conservatives, are the pillars that support the structure of human societies (p. 211).

Wade's readers should read that over a second time.  They might then ask themselves, if "the pillars that support the structure of human societies"--the pillars "built into the human genome" by evolution--are "more firmly emphasized by conservatives," doesn't that mean "that evolution is somehow a validation of conservative politics"? 

Moreover, if his readers notice how heavily Wade relies on the arguments of Yoram Hazony--particularly, in his book The Virtue of Nationalism--who is the leading theoretician of "national conservatism," they will have to infer, as I do, that Wade is promoting a Darwinian nationalist conservatism (pp. 161, 172, 210, 226).

Since Hazony rejects any rooting of nationalism in "Darwinian science" (Virtue, p. 69), Wade's Darwinian argument for nationalist conservatism departs from Wade's argument in that respect.

Now since I have written a book entitled Darwinian Conservatism, and since that's also the title of this blog, you might think that I would be in total agreement with Wade.  I do agree with most of what he says.  But I can't agree with him on every point.

My Darwinian conservatism is a Darwinian liberal conservatism.  Or, as I sometimes say, a Darwinian Lockean liberalism or classical liberalism.

Consequently, I disagree with Wade's Darwinian nationalistic conservatism on some important points.  For example, while Wade argues that the social cohesion of a nation requires ethnic homogeneity or at least a dominant ethnicity, I believe that a free society can allow for a multiethnic nation.  And while Wade believes that social cohesion requires highly restrictive immigration to favor the native culture of the nation, I believe that a free society benefits from largely open borders that allows immigrants to "vote with their feet" for freedom.

Also, I don't worry as much as Wade does about declining fertility rates leading to the extinction of the human species.   I see this as an evolutionary reproductive strategy in which parents in the richer and more developed nations can decide to invest more resources in fewer children so that those children are more likely to be successful adults because of the value of their "human capital."  

Moreover, the explosive growth of the human population over the past 200 years from 900 million to 8.3 billion doesn't suggest that human extinction is coming anytime soon.  And as long as countries like the United States with low fertility rates are open to immigration, they will continue to have growing populations.  The U.S. population has grown every year for over 100 years, primarily because of immigration.  Of course, Trump's anti-immigration policies could slow or even reverse that growth.

I will elaborate these points in my next post.