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.

The Darwinian Lockean Liberalism of Goldstein's Mattering Instinct

 

                                               "What's It All About?" Cartoon by Patrick Hardin

The General Diagram for Eric Chaisson's Course on "Cosmic Evolution," Available at His Website.

The Darwinian Lockean Liberalism that I have defended on this blog supports Goldstein's theory of the mattering instinct in four ways.  

The Darwinian evolution of life explains life's self-mattering as resistance to entropy.  Lockean evolutionary psychology explains the human mattering instinct as rooted in self-ownership and religious enthusiasm.  The Lockean evolutionary psychology of morality explains the multiplicity of mattering projects as different rankings of the twenty natural desires of our evolved human nature.  Finally, Darwinian Lockean Liberalism explains how we can rightly condemn some mattering projects as immoral when they assume that mattering is a zero-sum game in which there is not enough mattering to go around.

LIFE'S SELF-MATTERING AS RESISTANCE TO ENTROPY

Patrick Hardin's cartoon shows the biological evolution of complex systems (from the less to the more complex) among vertebrate forms of life--from fish to primates to humans.  Eric Chaisson's diagram shows the cosmic evolution of complex systems from shortly after the Big Bang to the present, which includes purely physical systems as well as biological and cultural systems.  The common underlying theme is the ascent from simple disorder to complex order, or rising complexity.

That ascent to ever more complex order might seem to violate one of the fundamental laws of physics--the Second Law of Thermodynamics--which is the principle that in any natural process, the entropy (the disorder) of the Universe increases, so that energy naturally flows from hotter to colder systems, and not the reverse.  So, for example, a pot of hot soup will tend to cool off over time until it has the same temperature as the surrounding environment; and it will not spontaneously reheat itself.  Similarly, a house of cards will tend to collapse with time; and we can't expect a random collection of playing cards to assemble itself spontaneously into some ordered structure.

But this is true only for "closed systems" in which there is no flow of energy from outside the system.  In "open systems," a flow of energy from outside the system can create and maintain order in the system, and thus resist the tendency to entropy.  You can heat up the pot of soup on a stove.  And you can build a house of cards.  In both cases, you are introducing energy from outside the system to counter the tendency to entropy.  In the one case, you are turning up the gas or electrical heat from the stove.  In the other case, you are exerting your energy in building the house of cards.

The same is true for creating and maintaining the complex order of any system against the tendency to disorder--there must be a flow of energy from outside the system that sustains the order of the system.  And so life on Earth depends on capturing energy (mostly from the Sun through photosynthesis) that can be put to work in sustaining the complex systems of life and resisting entropy.  Animals capture the energy of sunlight through eating and digesting food, and through respiration, animals employ oxygen to release the energy in carbohydrates.  But while being alive is to be in resistance to entropy, eventually entropy wins, and everything that lives must die.

This explains why some evolutionary psychologists have said that "the Second Law of Thermodynamics Is the First Law of Psychology" (Tooby, Cosmides, and Barrett 2003).  Darwinian natural selection is the only known counterweight to the tendency of physical systems to the entropic loss of functional organization.  Organisms with anti-entropic mechanisms that sustain functional organization are more likely to survive and reproduce than organisms that fail to resist entropy.  

For organisms with brains, natural selection will favor psychological mechanisms that resist entropy.  As indicated in Hardin's cartoon, all vertebrates will have psychic mechanisms that incline them to "eat, survive, reproduce"--or better stated, each animal will prioritize its own eating, surviving, and reproducing, which is what Goldstein identifies as the organic message of self-mattering--every organism acts as if its own existence in this world, its persistence and flourishing, matters.  In organisms with brains, with some capacity for mental attention, this self-mattering drives them to acquire information about their environment and to seek out sources of free energy needed to resist entropy, while also avoiding threats to their existence that might hasten their death.

Chaisson's "Epic of Evolution" shows how the Second Law of Thermodynamics Is Also the First Law of Cosmic Evolution.  The ascent of the Cosmos over almost 14 billion years through eight epochs--the Particulate, the Galactic, the Stellar, the Planetary, the Chemical, the Biological, the Cultural, and the Future--moves from simpler systems to more complex systems.  At each level of complexity, these systems require a flow of energy available to work to sustain their complex order against the thermodynamic tendency to disorder.

Chaisson argues that this correlation between energy and complexity allows us to use "energy rate density" as the universal metric of complexity for all complex systems--from physical systems to biological systems to cultural systems.  Energy rate density is defined as "the amount of energy passing through a given system per unit time per unit mass" (Chaisson 2006:293).  This can be quantified as the number of ergs per second per gram (erg/s/g).  

By this measure, human beings are more complex than stars like the Sun because the energy rate density for a human being is much higher than for the Sun.  And within human beings, their brains are one of the most complex systems in the Universe.  Although our brain occupies only about two percent of our body's mass, our brain uses almost twenty percent of our body's total energy intake because of the high metabolism required to maintain the electrical activity of about 86 billion neurons with about 100 trillion synaptic connections (Chaisson 2006:295).

Although Goldstein does not cite Chaisson's work, she agrees with his central idea about energy rate density as the metric of complexity: "All life, all flourishing, depends on capturing energy (from sunlight or food) and applying it in local anti-entropic resistance.  And the more complicated the system, then the more ways for it to be disordered, and hence the more resistance required.  Again, our brains are the most complicated objects yet discovered in the universe and, not coincidentally, require a lot of energy" (57).

THE HUMAN MATTERING INSTINCT AS ROOTED IN SELF-OWNERSHIP OR DIVINE OWNERSHIP

The unique complexity of the human brain has created an emergent difference in kind from other animal brains, such that human beings are unique in their mattering instinct.  Every animal is driven by an organic mandate that ensures it matters to itself--that it pays attention to itself and to what it needs to do to secure its survival and flourishing.  But we human beings are the only animals for whom it is not sufficient that we subjectively feel that we matter to ourselves, because we must persuade ourselves that we truly objectively deserve to matter.

In persuading ourselves that we truly matter, we must appeal to one of two kinds of the mattering instinct of our evolutionary psychology--one grounded in divine ownership and the other grounded in self-ownership.  The natural human experience of religious transcendence--of being possessed by religious enthusiasm--can persuade us that we belong to God because He created us to serve His purposes, and therefore we matter because we matter to God.  In that case, we are transcenders on Goldstein's Mattering Map.

Or the natural human experience of self-ownership can persuade us that since we naturally own ourselves--our bodies and our minds--we are naturally free to pursue whatever conception of happiness or human flourishing that is best suited to our individual temperament, circumstances, and talents, and therefore our life matters because we are striving for some kind of moral or intellectual excellence in our life.  In that case, we are either socializers, heroic strivers, or competitors on the Mattering Map. 

 

In his Second Treatise, Locke seems to support the transcenders by grounding his law of nature in the "workmanship" of God in creating human beings:

The State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one: And Reason, which is that Law, teaches al Mankind, who will be consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions. For Men being all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; All the Servants of one Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his order and about his business, they are his Property, whose Workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another's Pleasure. And being furnished with like Faculties, sharing all in one Community of Nature, there cannot be supposed any such Subordination among us, that may Authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another's uses, as the inferior ranks of Creatures are for ours (para. 6).

Locke believed that the workmanship argument would require a rational theology that could prove the existence of God.  From “the idea of ourselves as understanding, rational creatures,” we would have to infer “the idea of a supreme Being, infinite in power, goodness, and wisdom, whose workmanship we are."  Through an anthropomorphic analogy, we could project from the idea of our own minds and other human minds the idea of a Divine Mind.  Thus, man would create God in man’s image.  But then Locke admitted that having the idea of God in one’s mind does not prove God’s real existence (ECHU, IV.3.18; IV.3.27; IV.10.1; IV.10.7; IV.10.19; IV.11.1).

Similarly, some evolutionary psychologists—such as Justin Barrett and Jesse Bering--have argued that the natural evolution of religious belief is rooted in the propensity of the human mind to detect rational agency in humans and other animals and then to infer a supernatural intelligent agency analogous to that of human minds.  But this anthropomorphic analogy between human and divine minds is dubious, and even if this explained the natural evolution of the idea of God in the human mind, that would not prove the existence of God.

This led Locke to conclude that believing in the existence of God is ultimately not a matter of reason but of faith.  And since “faith is not knowledge,” we cannot know what the true religion is (Locke, 1870, pp. 94-96; 1997, pp. 248-50; ECHU, IV.17-18). 

Since he doubted that reason could prove God’s existence in support of the workmanship argument, Locke developed the self-ownership argument that would provide a purely natural ground for his law of nature.  He wanted to appeal to a rational theology of divine workmanship, but if that failed, he could fall back onto his natural self-ownership argument.  These two tracks—God and nature--are suggested by Locke’s repeated appeals to “the Laws of God and Nature” (FT, 56, 124; ST, 60, 66, 90, 93, 142, 195).  The “fixed and permanent rule of morals” could be “firmly rooted in the soil of human nature,” and human nature could be understood as created by “nature or God” (1997, p. 125).  Notice that the creative source of human nature is nature or God.

Locke affirms individual self-ownership in his chapter on property in the Second Treatise:

Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. (para. 27)

From all which it is evident, that though the things of Nature are given in common, yet Man (by being Master of himself), and Proprietor of his own Person, and the Actions or Labour of it) had still in himself the great foundation of Property. (para. 44)

Here the foundation of Locke's political philosophy of natural rights is not God's ownership of the world and His rule by natural law, but rather the idea that human beings have natural rights because they are self-owners. Moreover, it is this natural autonomy of human beings, rather than their natural subordination to God, that informs the modern understanding of human rights.

Evolutionary science can show that the evolved psychology of ownership is rooted in self-ownership.  The human brain has an evolved interoceptive sense of owning the body that supports self-ownership and the ownership of external things as extensions of the self-owning self.  In this way, evolutionary neuroscience supports a Lockean liberal conception of equal natural rights rooted in natural self-ownership.  We can see how this sense of each person’s self-ownership arises in the evolved neuroanatomy of the brain to serve the survival and well-being of the human animal.  We can understand this as expressing interoception—the neural perception of the state of the body.

HUMAN FREEDOM AFFIRMS THE MULTIPLICITY OF MATTERING PROJECTS

In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke says that in all of their actions, all human beings are moved to satisfy their natural human desires, and while there are many natural desires--I have identified twenty--they are all part of the human pursuit of happiness.  Human beings differ, however, in how they rank the natural desires.  For example, some human beings rank the natural desire for religious transcendence above all, while others rank the natural desire for intellectual understanding as the greatest pleasure.  So while there is no single summum bonum or highest good for all people, there is a single summum bonum for each person, and the pursuit of that highest good will be that person's mattering project (ECHU, 2.21.31-73).

If every human being is free to pursue his summum bonum, then every person's life matters.  The Lockean liberal regimes promote that freedom.  Countries that rank high on the "Human Freedom Index" tend to be countries that secure the widest pursuit of happiness and the multiplicity of mattering projects.  That is confirmed by the patterns of immigration: generally, people want to leave the less free societies and immigrate to the free societies.  Human beings vote with their feet for freedom.

HUMAN FREEDOM DENIES THE ZERO-SUM MATTERING PROJECTS

And yet a free society cannot tolerate all mattering projects.  It cannot tolerate those immoral mattering projects in which one person's sense of mattering comes from denying the mattering of others.  For example, when Frank Meeink was seventeen-year-old neo-Nazi skinhead, he was sent to prison for three years for kidnapping and torturing a teenage boy whom he believed to be a SHARP (a Skinhead Against Racial Prejudice), and thus a traitor to the neo-Nazi movement.  Meeink's mistake was in thinking that mattering is a zero-sum game in which one person's gain is another person's loss because there isn't enough mattering to go around.

On the contrary, the fundamental moral principle in a Lockean liberal social order is that all lives matter because there really is enough mattering to go around, as Goldstein argues (271-292).  Locke conveyed this thought in Some Thoughts Concerning Education when he advised parents about the importance of instilling the virtue of "civility" in their children, so that they would show "general good will and regard for all people," knowing that we are "not to think meanly of ourselves and not to think meanly of others" (secs. 141, 143).

REFERENCES

Chaisson, Eric. 2006. Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos. New York: Columbia University Press.

Locke, John. 1870. Four Letters on Toleration. London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler.

Locke, John. 1997. Political Essays. Ed. Mark Goldie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tooby, John, Leda Cosmides, and H. Clark Barrett. 2003. "The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the First Law of Psychology." Psychological Bulletin 129:858-865.