The Misguided Conservative Obsession with Evolutionary Psychology

All the more reason to seriously study hunter-gatherers

I have been on a bit of a Helen Lewis binge recently. I loved her article on The Death of Millenial Feminism for The Atlantic last month (which inspired my own popular piece arguing that Hannah Neeleman and Lindy West are basically the same). More recently, I was intrigued by her recent cover story on The Men Who Want Women to be Quiet, and the associated Ezra Klein podcast, The New Right’s Very Old Vision of Men, and then, since I was on a roll, I went all the way back to 2018 and watched her most famous interview of all time with Jordan Peterson for British GQ (71 million views on that one. Damn).

Initially, I wanted to write a response to “The New Right’s Very Old Vision of Men” (what the heck do they even mean by “very old” here? The 1950s is not old. Ancient Greece is not even old. The Paleolithic is old) but then I realized that there’s another question being skirted in all of this that bugs me even more:

Why are conservatives so obsessed with evolutionary psychology?

At one point in the viral Jordan Peterson vs. Helen Lewis interview, Peterson starts railing on left-leaning ideological capture in universities (a point to which I am not entirely unsympathetic) and says this:

[Leftist ideologues] are destroying the universities, and that’s not a good thing. And they’re particularly destroying the social sciences and the humanities. The sciences are safe so far, but not for long...There isn’t a competing position on campuses except among the evolutionary biologists and the evolutionary psychologists, and they’re under complete attack. They’re certainly next on the chopping block as far as I can tell.”

Listening to that, I was kind of flummoxed. You see, I studied evolutionary biology at Stanford, and (although this was 15 years ago) I was not under the impression that the humanities and biology departments were at war. They probably did not interact and talk to one another as much as they should have. But it’s not like the biology lectures I sat in on included searing take-downs of gender studies department papers. (My favorite biology professor, Robert Sapolsky, did occasionally take pot-shots at the worst of the “social construct” school of thought. In his blockbuster book Behave he called a paper with the title “PMS is a mode for the expression of women’s anger resulting from her oppressed position in American capitalist society” a “howler”. But last I checked, no one was circulating petitions to fire him.)

And furthermore, although the biology professors were certainly more likely than some of the humanities people to admit that men and women are different (anatomically and behaviorally), that genetics matter (no one is a blank slate), or that we share an unfortunate natural proclivity for aggression and hierarchy with every other primate, they were, for the most part, pretty ideologically left-leaning. They were more likely to come barefoot to a lecture than wearing a suit, they were pretty gung-ho on environmental activism, they were 100% atheist, and they were generally in favor of things like income redistribution and universal healthcare.

Peterson would probably take this as evidence of the fact that ideological capture has penetrated so deep into the universities by now that even the biology departments have not come out unscathed. To be sure, some biology departments have produced some shamefully bad science in the name of justifying leftist political ideologies within the last ten years. But for the most part, evolutionary biologists lean left because…well, because there is nothing in evolutionary biology that says they shouldn’t. The only people using evolutionary biology to justify a conservative worldview — who feel it’s the only logical take-away based on the “science” — are the people who don’t know very much about evolutionary biology. They are the kinds of people who think we can make a straight leap from lobster behavior to human behavior without reckoning with the 350 millions years of evolution that happened since we parted ways on the tree of life.

When I first started this newsletter, I was honestly quite surprised by how many conservative-leaning thinkers it drew. I myself was a card-carrying liberal feminist (although I have since drifted right on some issues), and I was talking about things like our evolutionary legacy of allomaternal care, birth spacing, breastfeeding, and gender egalitarianism in hunter-gatherer societies. These hardly felt like themes that should be popular with conservatives.

Then again, my husband pointed out to me that, almost by definition, there is no more “conservative” worldview than the worldview of evolutionary mismatch. What I am essentially arguing, in most of my work, is that replicating certain elements of our ancestral living would be good for our brains and bodies, and would, based on extensive empirical evidence, lead to greater health and happiness for many people, even in modern society. This is certainly not a “progressive” worldview - at least not in the literal sense.

Then again, one of the very reasons why I got so interested in evolutionary biology in the first place was because I was tired of hearing half-truths about “natural” human behavior from people like Peterson. Look, Peterson isn’t stupid, and I actually agree with a lot of what he has to say, but his understanding of evolutionary biology is partial, and he cherry-picks evidence to support his preferred ideologies. You can make an argument that humans are hierarchical and status-conscious, and that this is a very ancient, highly conserved biological urge that can be found even in animals as simple as lobsters OR you can make the argument that humans are actually one of the most egalitarian, sharing, empathetic and collaborative species ever to have walked the earth. The truth is that we have both in us. Focusing too much on one without mentioning the other is not necessarily false, but it’s intellectually flat.

Just in the last year, I’ve heard references to evolutionary biology invoked to justify everything from why women should stay home, why only men should vote, and why cancel culture is women’s fault. Let’s be clear: there is literally no evidence whatsoever that women are biologically primed to seek out mid-level bureaucratic jobs like human resource management, where they waste away their sorry lives forcing men to follow totally pointless rules, like not sexually harassing their female colleagues (why can’t we just go back to the good old days when a little workplace sexual harassment was all part of the fun?). Nor do I think that there is any real evidence to suggest that women are naturally more “meddlesome and quarrelsome,” that our propensity to pop SSRIs is evidence that we have been misled by feminism and should be making more babies, etc etc.

A shitty understanding of evolutionary biology is a dangerous thing, which is exactly why I started this newsletter.

Unfortunately, all of this misunderstanding and misuse of evolutionary biology in conservative circles is giving the whole field a bad name. People like Ezra Klein and Helen Lewis unwittingly contribute to the problem when they conflate every single historical time period and then write off the whole lot as a bunch of conservative nostalgia. In the New Right’s Very Old Vision of Men, they proceeded to shit on not just the 1950s and Ancient Greece, but also all those weird people who are obsessed with “primitive” stuff, like the MAHA movement. Way to lump us all together. To them, the only positive vision for the future of humanity is a futurist one. There was no attempt to make any sense of why prehistory actually matters to modern human psychology in a way that Ancient Greece does not.

So I feel the need to articulate (or perhaps re-articulate) why studying hunter-gatherer societies, and evolutionary biology, really does matter — why this is a serious scientific field worthy of our interest and attention and not just a bunch of weird conservative nostalgia for times gone by.

First if all, I know I sound like a broken record on this point, but all humans lived as hunter-gatherers for 95% (if not 99%) of our history as a species. Most experts in human evolution consider every animal in the genus Homo to be a human. Under that definition, humans first emerged about 2.8 millions years ago, but those first humans were different from us in important ways. Our species, Homo sapiens, emerged about 300,000 years ago (and we keep pushing the timeline back as new discoveries are made), and those humans were already very much like us. In all likelihood, if we could somehow time-travel back a few hundren thousands years and adopt a Paleolithic Homo sapien baby, teach them English and dress them in Gap or H&M, no one would know the difference.

Agriculture, on the other hand, first emerged in some parts of the world about 12,000 years ago, which seems like a long time, but really isn’t compared with 300,000. Since then, the pace of human cultural and societal change has far outstripped evolution’s ability to make changes to our DNA, meaning we are now in a state of “mismatch”: our ancient brains and bodies expect conditions to be very different from what they actually are. You may think you are an AI-enabled futurist God, but the truth is that you are just another hairless bipedal ape who happens to have a smartphone and an internet connection.

I’ll concede that evolution can happen very quickly when selective pressures are high and when the genetics involved are not too complex (single-allele mutations, for instance). Examples include our ability to digest lactose into adulthood for some populations, lighter skin in Nordic peoples, and better starch-digestion, which are all post-agricultural evolutionary adaptations. There’s also compelling evidence that we underwent some major immunological changes in response to new kinds of highly infectious diseases. Evolution can happen very fast in some instances, but the essentials were already in place 300,000 years ago.

I’ll also concede that not every academic agrees with the “evolutionary mismatch” framing of things. There’s an age-old debate among evolutionary scholars about how adaptable humans really are, versus how stuck we still are in the Paleolithic.

On one side of this debate we have the Evolutionary Psychologists. These guys tend to believe that we have this highly inflexible primitive brain which we are desperately trying to use to make sense of a very foreign modern world. To be clear, this is my club. The human adult brain is plastic, but not that plastic. The most powerful and enduring elements of human psychology were shaped long, long before we started planting potatoes.

On the other side, we have the Behavioral Ecologists, who tend to believe that human behavior is infinitely flexible and adaptable, and we adjust to whatever our environment dictates. Obviously, there’s some truth to this as well. Human behavior is indeed more flexible than it is for most other animals. There is no single human ancestral environment, just as there is no single contemporary hunter-gatherer society that can represent every ancestral environment. Humans quickly colonized a broad range of ecological niches, and by studying contemporary hunter-gatherer populations, we have come to understand how the constraints of these various environments influence culture and social structure.

When I asked Dr. Nikhil Chaudhary, a professor at University of Cambridge in human evolution and behavioral ecology, he put it this way:

“I think part of the issue is that different disciplines, even within the evolutionary social sciences or evolutionary sciences, have these starting assumptions which are a bit too broad brushed. So evolutionary psychology really emphasizes mismatch: we’ve got stone age minds and adaptive lag. And then another key discipline is human behavioral ecology, which really highlights how flexible we are, how responsive we are to environmental changes and different conditions and to some degree rejects the idea of mismatch. And I think in reality neither are right. There are different levels of adaptability, some traits are more flexible than others, and to disregard mismatch is somewhat naive and equally to think mismatch is always the case is also naive.”

Dr. Chaudhary was also quite emphatic about the fact that studying hunter-gatherer societies is just the starting point. It gives us windows into areas of potential evolutionary mismatch that only further empirical studies can confirm. We cannot just say, “hunter-gatherers do things this way, and Westerners do things differently, and the old way is automatically better because it’s ancestral.”

That said, my interest in hunter-gatherer societies is not purely driven by an interest in evolutionary psychology and evolutionary mismatch, and I try to be clear about this in my writing. There are actually three specific reasons why I am interested in these ancient cultures:

1. Uncovering mismatches between how we evolved to live and how we live now. To determine whether something is actually a good candidate for “evolutionary mismatch” requires that we look at universals across hunter-gatherer societies that are largely absent from contemporary society: things like frequent and extended breastfeeding, allomaternal care, and multi-age playgroups for children. If there’s fossil evidence, that should be considered as well. For instance, we can learn things about the historical age of weaning from fossilized teeth, and it generally lines up with what we see in hunter-gatherer societies. And then it should be triangulated with the existing empirical or lab evidence. So, for instance, there is a large body of research supporting the health benefits of breastfeeding for both mothers and babies in contemporary, Western populations. So I feel pretty comfortable saying that contemporary breastfeeding practices (lower initiation rates, lower frequency, shorter duration) are a case of evolutionary mismatch. Other hunter-gatherer universals like mother-infant co-sleeping have mixed support in modern empirical studies. But I still think it’s worth knowing that co-sleeping is the evolutionary norm. That makes the debate look different. We are starting from a fundamentally different assumption.

2. Busting myths about what’s “natural” for humans, especially for women and mothers. As discussed above, there has been so much abuse and misuse of evolutionary science in order to justify women’s role in society, and understanding the truth about women’s roles in hunter-gatherer societies is a powerful antidote. In this case I am less interested in universals, since a practice does not need to be common across every hunter-gatherer society in order to disprove contemporary myths about what’s “natural.” For instance, I often talk about how, in many hunter-gatherer societies, women are the primary breadwinners, because their foraging efforts bring in more calories than men’s hunting. This is not true in every hunter-gatherer society, nor should it be used as evidence that women today have to work outside the home to be happy and healthy (the evidence does not suggest that working mothers are any more or less happy than stay-at-home mothers, as long as these lifestyles are freely chosen). What it does allow us to say with great certainty, however, is that there is nothing unnatural or biologically aberrant about women wanting to work for economic gain, and wanting to outsource some childcare in order to do so.

3. Learning new ways of doing things from cultures that are very different from ours. Sometimes I cross the line from being an evolutionary biologist to a cultural anthropologist. There are plenty of people out there studying small-scale societies for no other reason than that they are interesting. It’s interesting to see how people organize themselves and make sense of their world in cultures very different from our own. Good cultural anthropologists know how to put their own ideologies and cultural biases aside and meet people where they are at. This is, in and of itself, a good life skill. But it also helps you see the faultlines in your own ideologies where previously you might have had a blind spot. Or it helps you imagine a new way of doing things you might never have imagined. When I write about things like parenting strategies, or gender relations, I am wearing the hat of a cultural anthropologist more than an evolutionary biologist (although many evolutionary biologists also argue for long-standing universals in gender relations and parent-child relationships).

Hunter-gatherer societies really do have things to teach us, whether about a shared ancient psychology, more healthy ways to approach modern living, or longstanding cultural practices that keep humans’ worst impulses in check. It shouldn’t be written off just because it’s occasionally misunderstood and misused by people who don’t know what they are talking about, or because it cuts across contemporary political ideologies in a way that can feel confusing or uncomfortable.

At one point in the Peterson-Lewis interview, Peterson accuses Lewis (somewhat unfairly) of “not integrating the specifics of your personal experience with what you’ve been taught to synthesize something that’s genuine and surprising and engaging…That’s the pathology of ideological possession.” This is one point on which Peterson and I agree. At some point, ideologies become a substitute for thinking. When you can predict every single point of view a person holds based on their position on a single issue, it’s boring, it’s shallow, and it’s probably wrong on some level.

In my case, I feel that studying hunter-gatherer societies, with an open mind, rather than as a search for evidence to support my pre-existing worldview, has been a great gift. I’ve broken with some of my ideological dogmas and I’ve reinforced others. All in all, I find that I am happier for it. My life as a mother makes more sense this way. And I want to help others find that same equilibrium — at least, those who are ready to hear it.