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The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations – Social Disintegration, Birth Rates, and the Path to Extinction
The renowned New York Times bestselling author of Before the Dawn breaks down the startling ways that evolution explains why societies succeed and fail.
In the modern world, human nature is seldom taken into account by those who would reshape society. Nicholas Wade argues that’s a terrible mistake.
Human nature, in the view of the progressive left, is easily ignored or else shaped into whatever the latest political doctrine may require. But the conservative view, that social engineering can never change human nature for the better, is not true either.
In this deeply researched survey of biological and political history, Wade reveals the effect of ideologies that ignore human nature. Marx and Engels proposed to eliminate the family as a social unit. Their followers have sought to overturn the patriarchy and divert allegiance from the family to the state. In reality, while some policies influence human nature for the better, like those that have abolished tribalism, others, such as socialism, conflict with human nature and undermine the operation of a society.
Combining the scope of Yuval Noah Harari with the political savvy of Francis Fukuyama, The Origin of Politics, Wade’s work draws from anthropology, evolutionary biology, and historical analysis to explore how human nature shapes the direction of society—and how policies which ignore human nature risk chaos and even extinction.
Political scientists agree that the roots of politics must lie in human nature, but then assume that human behavior is infinitely flexible. The Origin of Politics shows that limits set by human evolution cannot be ignored without penalty.
In the modern world, human nature is seldom taken into account by those who would reshape society. Nicholas Wade argues that’s a terrible mistake.
Human nature, in the view of the progressive left, is easily ignored or else shaped into whatever the latest political doctrine may require. But the conservative view, that social engineering can never change human nature for the better, is not true either.
In this deeply researched survey of biological and political history, Wade reveals the effect of ideologies that ignore human nature. Marx and Engels proposed to eliminate the family as a social unit. Their followers have sought to overturn the patriarchy and divert allegiance from the family to the state. In reality, while some policies influence human nature for the better, like those that have abolished tribalism, others, such as socialism, conflict with human nature and undermine the operation of a society.
Combining the scope of Yuval Noah Harari with the political savvy of Francis Fukuyama, The Origin of Politics, Wade’s work draws from anthropology, evolutionary biology, and historical analysis to explore how human nature shapes the direction of society—and how policies which ignore human nature risk chaos and even extinction.
Political scientists agree that the roots of politics must lie in human nature, but then assume that human behavior is infinitely flexible. The Origin of Politics shows that limits set by human evolution cannot be ignored without penalty.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published September 9, 2025
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303 people want to read
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March 12, 2026
This is Nicholas Wade's sociobiological manifesto on, as the title says, The Origin of Politics. For the unaware, Wade is a notorious partisan for the importance of evolved biology in social outcomes, striking an aggressive posture on the topic. He's previously argued that religion is an outgrowth of our evolved biology in The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures and that race is a biological phenomenon in A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. He is no stranger to controversy given that he was one of the first journalist to get a respectable scientists (David Baltimore) on the record about SARS-CoV2's possible lab origins. Generally, his biology-first position is unpopular with many humanities and social science professors, though it also may have more purchase than Wade let's on too. It just depends on who one asks and how one asks it. There are many scientists and public intellectuals who have taken extremely similar positions on these subjects, including Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson, Robert Trivers, and Robert Plomin.
Similar to his arguments about religion, Wade advances the claim that political institutions and national trajectories are deeply animated and constrained by the nature of humans. The position is built on three assumptions: 1) there is a human nature 2) human nature is the product of evolutionary forces and 3) Because evolution has long time horizons, it is hard to re-engineer human nature.
Without immediately disagreeing with any of these assumptions (some of which themselves have empirical support that Wade reviews), one may still ask: How does evolution shape politics? The path is complex and indirect. First, evolution shapes the brain, including psychological tendencies and instinctual drives (Wade makes much of reproductive dynamics). Second, our individual tendencies are propagated by kinship networks and coalitions. We build families and groups with shared genetic and material interests. Finally, these biosocial units scale up over time (Wade makes a lot of male-male coalitions) leading to clans, institutions, cities, and eventually nations. There is a path dependency to this development, meaning some of the biosocial choices of pre-history follow us into modern times. Hence, Wade casts the nation-state as an extension of the known evolutionary dynamics that hold kinship networks together.
This model begins from the fairly sound premise that humans evolved in small kin-based groups during the Pleistocene, where survival depended on cooperation among relatives, competition against outsiders, reciprocal altruism, and clear hierarchies of authority. Apart from some dedicated Rousseauns (i.e. noble savage beliefs), few would disagree with this general picture of human evolution. From these conditions emerged enduring social instincts and practices, including strong attachment to family, patrilocal kinship networks, sensitivity to status and hierarchy, predispositions toward in-group loyalty, and the sexual division of labor. Wade perhaps sees these phenomena as more "natural" than some other scholars, who might highlight the interactions between biology and culture, but it is hard to say that the biology doesn't matter at all. Wade also points out that these practices have endured a long while and are perhaps locked in.
Continuing to build on his sociobiological premises, Wade asserts that many contemporary political ideologies deny or misinterpret human nature, assuming that social arrangements are almost entirely products of culture, learning, and environments and can, therefore, be redesigned at will. He calls this the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM). He sees it as profligacy even invoking the popular term "luxury belief" to describe position that are derived from the SSSM, such as the endorsement of male-to-female transgender athletes competing against natal females. Wade treats the SSSM as the defining feature of modern ideological politics, particularly since the mid-twentieth century. He contrasts ideological visions of society, whether socialist, radical egalitarian, or certain forms of liberal universalism, with what he sees as the empirical lessons of evolutionary biology and anthropology. Although this sound similar to conservative political rhetoric, Wade is explicit about the need for both liberal and conservative political tendencies in a nation.
According to Wade, attempts to radically reshape social life have repeatedly faltered because they run against durable human dispositions. He points to historical cases, such as efforts in revolutionary communist states to weaken or abolish the family, communal child-rearing experiments in twentieth-century collectives (kibbutzim), and other attempts to create radically egalitarian societies. In Wade’s interpretation, these experiments tended to end catastrophically or revert toward traditional family structures because parental investment, kin loyalty, and reproductive competition are deeply rooted evolutionary drives. It is hard to disagree with this interpretation of social and political history. Yet, it seems many haven't learned these lessons.
On this front, Wade expresses concerns about fertility and demographic stability. He posits that the family structure historically served as the key institution aligning biological reproduction with social order. Marriage norms, gender roles, and expectations surrounding child-rearing provided incentives for individuals to reproduce at or above replacement levels. Advanced societies have weakened these institutions via cultural and ideological change, particularly by redefining marriage, lowering the social prestige of parenthood, and expanding individual autonomy in ways that decouple sexuality from reproduction. The result is the collapse of fertility rates seen across most wealthy nations. These demographic declines are not temporary fluctuations but symptoms of a deeper mismatch between evolved reproductive psychology and modern cultural norms.
Such a divergence between the purview of evolution (reproductive fitness) and politics prompts questions that Wade doesn't directly address. The argument is all about modern culture and institution drifting from biological moorings, but how could this happen under his model? Is it because group competition has declined too much? Is there something radically new about today's world order? If culture can run so far from our biology, how sure can we be about which tendencies are evolved or not or even which ones are mostly biological or mostly cultural? Wade doesn't methodologically define how we can isolate biology from culture even though both have been shown to be subject to evolutionary dynamics and to interact with each other. He implicitly acknowledges this but leaves this complexity aside. For instance, lactase persistence only evolved because the cultural technology of dairying emerged. In that case, a cultural innovation changed the biology of some people.
Wade interprets the decline in marriage and fertility as part of a broader process of social disintegration downstream of SSSM-based politics. Interestingly, he also include inequality in this calculus, though he's less clear about how inequality can be resolved. The problem of fertility fits his model more neatly. Societies with persistent sub-replacement fertility inevtiably face economic stagnation, rising dependency ratios, military conquest (as victim or aggressor), or eventual demographic contraction severe enough to threaten the continuity of national cultures.
The book also addresses immigration as a possible but limited response to demographic collapse. Wade strikes a moderate position, balancing the importance of stable demographics against the need to sustain a population. Wade argues that importing labor through immigration can temporarily offset population decline but may create new political tensions if migrants come from cultures with different social norms or institutional expectations. He frames this problem as another manifestation of the interaction between evolved group loyalties and modern political ideology, while ideological frameworks often assume that societies can easily integrate diverse populations, Wade cites social science that indicates deep-rooted tendencies toward group identity and cultural inheritance complicate this process.
Wade’s vision of biorealist politics is intriguing. It is much more persuasive than many other grand narratives of political origins. It likely over-indexes on the ideas that human proclivities and actions are shaped wholly by evolution. This isn't to say he is over-exaggerating the import of biology, but rather biology matters but not always because of evolution. Our biology can still meaningfully shape behavior without being the product of selection given that drift, random mutation, and other stochastic processes introduce variation. It is also important not to undersell how our biology interacts with the social and natural environments. There are many historically important ways that human biology and environments have shaped human history. Subsequently, his model of politics is likely greatly simplified, but this doesn't dramatically detract from many of his normative points. To the extent that evolved proclivities can be confidently known (e.g. male-female mating strategies), I generally agree that our politics would be wise to adjust for this reality. We probably cannot easily engineer ourselves out of our natural tendencies or dynamics that are deeply rooted in our biological defaults.
Similar to his arguments about religion, Wade advances the claim that political institutions and national trajectories are deeply animated and constrained by the nature of humans. The position is built on three assumptions: 1) there is a human nature 2) human nature is the product of evolutionary forces and 3) Because evolution has long time horizons, it is hard to re-engineer human nature.
Without immediately disagreeing with any of these assumptions (some of which themselves have empirical support that Wade reviews), one may still ask: How does evolution shape politics? The path is complex and indirect. First, evolution shapes the brain, including psychological tendencies and instinctual drives (Wade makes much of reproductive dynamics). Second, our individual tendencies are propagated by kinship networks and coalitions. We build families and groups with shared genetic and material interests. Finally, these biosocial units scale up over time (Wade makes a lot of male-male coalitions) leading to clans, institutions, cities, and eventually nations. There is a path dependency to this development, meaning some of the biosocial choices of pre-history follow us into modern times. Hence, Wade casts the nation-state as an extension of the known evolutionary dynamics that hold kinship networks together.
This model begins from the fairly sound premise that humans evolved in small kin-based groups during the Pleistocene, where survival depended on cooperation among relatives, competition against outsiders, reciprocal altruism, and clear hierarchies of authority. Apart from some dedicated Rousseauns (i.e. noble savage beliefs), few would disagree with this general picture of human evolution. From these conditions emerged enduring social instincts and practices, including strong attachment to family, patrilocal kinship networks, sensitivity to status and hierarchy, predispositions toward in-group loyalty, and the sexual division of labor. Wade perhaps sees these phenomena as more "natural" than some other scholars, who might highlight the interactions between biology and culture, but it is hard to say that the biology doesn't matter at all. Wade also points out that these practices have endured a long while and are perhaps locked in.
Continuing to build on his sociobiological premises, Wade asserts that many contemporary political ideologies deny or misinterpret human nature, assuming that social arrangements are almost entirely products of culture, learning, and environments and can, therefore, be redesigned at will. He calls this the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM). He sees it as profligacy even invoking the popular term "luxury belief" to describe position that are derived from the SSSM, such as the endorsement of male-to-female transgender athletes competing against natal females. Wade treats the SSSM as the defining feature of modern ideological politics, particularly since the mid-twentieth century. He contrasts ideological visions of society, whether socialist, radical egalitarian, or certain forms of liberal universalism, with what he sees as the empirical lessons of evolutionary biology and anthropology. Although this sound similar to conservative political rhetoric, Wade is explicit about the need for both liberal and conservative political tendencies in a nation.
According to Wade, attempts to radically reshape social life have repeatedly faltered because they run against durable human dispositions. He points to historical cases, such as efforts in revolutionary communist states to weaken or abolish the family, communal child-rearing experiments in twentieth-century collectives (kibbutzim), and other attempts to create radically egalitarian societies. In Wade’s interpretation, these experiments tended to end catastrophically or revert toward traditional family structures because parental investment, kin loyalty, and reproductive competition are deeply rooted evolutionary drives. It is hard to disagree with this interpretation of social and political history. Yet, it seems many haven't learned these lessons.
On this front, Wade expresses concerns about fertility and demographic stability. He posits that the family structure historically served as the key institution aligning biological reproduction with social order. Marriage norms, gender roles, and expectations surrounding child-rearing provided incentives for individuals to reproduce at or above replacement levels. Advanced societies have weakened these institutions via cultural and ideological change, particularly by redefining marriage, lowering the social prestige of parenthood, and expanding individual autonomy in ways that decouple sexuality from reproduction. The result is the collapse of fertility rates seen across most wealthy nations. These demographic declines are not temporary fluctuations but symptoms of a deeper mismatch between evolved reproductive psychology and modern cultural norms.
Such a divergence between the purview of evolution (reproductive fitness) and politics prompts questions that Wade doesn't directly address. The argument is all about modern culture and institution drifting from biological moorings, but how could this happen under his model? Is it because group competition has declined too much? Is there something radically new about today's world order? If culture can run so far from our biology, how sure can we be about which tendencies are evolved or not or even which ones are mostly biological or mostly cultural? Wade doesn't methodologically define how we can isolate biology from culture even though both have been shown to be subject to evolutionary dynamics and to interact with each other. He implicitly acknowledges this but leaves this complexity aside. For instance, lactase persistence only evolved because the cultural technology of dairying emerged. In that case, a cultural innovation changed the biology of some people.
Wade interprets the decline in marriage and fertility as part of a broader process of social disintegration downstream of SSSM-based politics. Interestingly, he also include inequality in this calculus, though he's less clear about how inequality can be resolved. The problem of fertility fits his model more neatly. Societies with persistent sub-replacement fertility inevtiably face economic stagnation, rising dependency ratios, military conquest (as victim or aggressor), or eventual demographic contraction severe enough to threaten the continuity of national cultures.
The book also addresses immigration as a possible but limited response to demographic collapse. Wade strikes a moderate position, balancing the importance of stable demographics against the need to sustain a population. Wade argues that importing labor through immigration can temporarily offset population decline but may create new political tensions if migrants come from cultures with different social norms or institutional expectations. He frames this problem as another manifestation of the interaction between evolved group loyalties and modern political ideology, while ideological frameworks often assume that societies can easily integrate diverse populations, Wade cites social science that indicates deep-rooted tendencies toward group identity and cultural inheritance complicate this process.
Wade’s vision of biorealist politics is intriguing. It is much more persuasive than many other grand narratives of political origins. It likely over-indexes on the ideas that human proclivities and actions are shaped wholly by evolution. This isn't to say he is over-exaggerating the import of biology, but rather biology matters but not always because of evolution. Our biology can still meaningfully shape behavior without being the product of selection given that drift, random mutation, and other stochastic processes introduce variation. It is also important not to undersell how our biology interacts with the social and natural environments. There are many historically important ways that human biology and environments have shaped human history. Subsequently, his model of politics is likely greatly simplified, but this doesn't dramatically detract from many of his normative points. To the extent that evolved proclivities can be confidently known (e.g. male-female mating strategies), I generally agree that our politics would be wise to adjust for this reality. We probably cannot easily engineer ourselves out of our natural tendencies or dynamics that are deeply rooted in our biological defaults.
October 15, 2025
An easy read containing some interesting information on human evolution and politics. Nicholas Wade does make some valid and/or provoking points. But his book is ultimately disappointing. It is simply not well thought through. Wade argues for his thesis that human genetics, as formed by evolution, determines how society and politics works. But his text is muddled and incoherent, and it is too often rather lazily argued. This is a text with an axe to grind. There is no sense of intellectual curiosity; the book lacks a will to explore.
Wade correctly criticizes those anthropologists and sociologists who deny any role for genetics or evolution in understanding the behaviour of humans. His response is unfortunately to take the equally absurd position that genetics and evolution determines everything. Institutions are "mere extensions of behaviours that evolution has programmed into the genome". And yet those institutions can in some cases somehow be directly contrary to human nature? Time and again, Wade illustrates that culture affects human societies to an extraordinary degree, yet he maintains that genetics rules.
In more than a few instances the text contradicts itself within the space of less than one page. On page 131, the threat of human extinction is "based not on the precarious extrapolations of computer models but on a profound demographic change..." Later on the same page: "Birth rates are hard to predict." On page 149: "elite schools [are] forced to broaden their intake...". Two paragraphs later: "universities have become more selective."
The fundamental flaw in Wade's argument is that it views human nature as something like a cage: "Lasting solutions will be found only within the framework of human nature." His insistence that culture and politics are mere extensions of evolutionary traits is, ironically, similar to the thoroughly debunked Marxist idea that culture and politics is just a superstructure on top of the economic system, fully determined by it, and not really of any consequence. The seemingly obvious alternative solution that genetics and culture can co-exist and affect each other and society is not seriously discussed.
The relationships between human society, culture, politics and human evolution are very interesting and important. It is a shame that this topic didn't get a better treatment.
Wade correctly criticizes those anthropologists and sociologists who deny any role for genetics or evolution in understanding the behaviour of humans. His response is unfortunately to take the equally absurd position that genetics and evolution determines everything. Institutions are "mere extensions of behaviours that evolution has programmed into the genome". And yet those institutions can in some cases somehow be directly contrary to human nature? Time and again, Wade illustrates that culture affects human societies to an extraordinary degree, yet he maintains that genetics rules.
In more than a few instances the text contradicts itself within the space of less than one page. On page 131, the threat of human extinction is "based not on the precarious extrapolations of computer models but on a profound demographic change..." Later on the same page: "Birth rates are hard to predict." On page 149: "elite schools [are] forced to broaden their intake...". Two paragraphs later: "universities have become more selective."
The fundamental flaw in Wade's argument is that it views human nature as something like a cage: "Lasting solutions will be found only within the framework of human nature." His insistence that culture and politics are mere extensions of evolutionary traits is, ironically, similar to the thoroughly debunked Marxist idea that culture and politics is just a superstructure on top of the economic system, fully determined by it, and not really of any consequence. The seemingly obvious alternative solution that genetics and culture can co-exist and affect each other and society is not seriously discussed.
The relationships between human society, culture, politics and human evolution are very interesting and important. It is a shame that this topic didn't get a better treatment.
November 29, 2025
Wade isn’t bringing a lot of new insights here…but that depends on his audience.
His main point is let’s lay down the foundation of evolution and then make folks on the Left realize the ramifications…
Humans are designed for two sexes, women birth and care for children, men aggressively try to dominate groups while building coalitions that create real self-spaces.
Family, tribe, and nation states are the outgrowth of evolution and to believe humans are exempt from these rules is high folly.
“genes that affect behavior. The process of natural selection rewards anything that increases survival, whether it be a change in body or behavior. Why should evolution pay no attention to all the behavioral variations that might enhance an individual’s survival, as the social constructionists assume? What magic wand do they suppose commands the forces
… The research shows that almost all behaviors have a substantial hereditary component. In the best known of these studies, the Minnesota Twin Study, heredity was found to account for 70%”
—height is genetic, intelligence is genetic, it’s harder to believe that personality is genetic. Bio-chemical instructions on how extroverted one happens to be seems sketchy and smacks of rigid determinism that human agency rebels at…but genes are far more powerful than we want to give them credit for
“…intelligence between pairs of separated twins and for 50% of most differences in personality. The Minnesota twins raised separately were almost as similar to their co-twins as are identical twins raised in same household, suggesting the genetic effects overwhelm.”
—evidence of how strong genes are
“social behavior of chimps is specified in their genes. This is why all chimp societies work in much the same way and differ from those of other great ape species. And what is true of our close cousins the chimpanzees is also true of humans. Much of our social behavior is genetically specified. These behaviors provide the basis of our distinctive social structure”
—-no one believes that chimps decide how their society is organized, but humans hubris demands we did decide.
“UP faces show happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust and contempt, in a manner entirely familiar from one society to another,” he writes. “A young woman acting coy or flirting with her eyes does it in a way you would recognize quite clearly . . . “The core of a normal UP family is composed of a mother and children. . . . Marriage . . . is institutionalized.”
—cultures share vast similarities
“reasonable speculation is that early people saw dead relatives in their dreams and assumed they must be living in some parallel world.”
— a side point here is if one reads Julian Jaynes one can make the case those ancient relatives were folks listening to sides of their minds before the corpus callosum fully connected…
—-What makes humans unique in the animal kingdom? We’re the only animal smart enough to have figured out the rules of the game:evolution… …and the only animal so stupid it thinks the rules no longer apply to them…
“after the birth of a second child that children have their own distinctive characters—hence the saying that the parents of one child are environmentalists but those of a second are geneticists.”
—that’s a good line
“All these genetically inherent behaviors are flexible and can be extensively modulated by culture. But there is evidently a limit to how far can they be stretched before the whole system crashes. It seems that if you radically alter the evolutionary roles of men and women, render men less able to support a family and less needed, subvert the institution of marriage, and undermine the influence of religion, you will then have achieved a quite novel and unexpected path for social development, one that leads to oblivion.”
—the huge decline in population is evidence that all these factors may be crashing
“The undeclared classes of a meritocratic society are if anything more invidious than those of aristocracies. It was no fault of your own if you were born into a peasant family in an aristocratic state. But to be poor in a meritocracy implies a lack of merit. “It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none. No underclass has ever been left as morally naked as that,”
—good point
“The structure of many societies, particularly but not only meritocratic ones, is largely shaped by genetics. People with the requisite social skills marry people like themselves, rise to the elite, and genetically bequeath to their children the talents to remain in the elite for many years while the wheel of generations slowly turns. Cultural interventions have almost no impact on this hereditary process. Social mobility cannot be increased because it has already done its work over the centuries and continues to do so at its own unhurried pace.”
“It’s a long-standing puzzle in evolutionary biology to explain why members of social species should expend effort helping others when such actions would seem to detract from their own chances of survival.”
—this has always been an interesting puzzle for me. How did reciprocal altruism arise from a dog eat dog world. The notion that family love expands to include the tribe and then the nation state seems a bridge too far.
“process of expelling ethnic or religious minorities. When Turkey and Greece settled the war between them in 1923, Turkey expelled more than a million Greeks who had lived for generations in the Ottoman Empire, and Greece evicted 400,000 Turks.”
—another aside: this was what Israel needed to do with Palestine
“The reservation arises from his surprising finding that in more diverse communities the lower trust applies not just to people of other races but a person’s own race too. “Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/ out-group hostility, but anomie or social isolation,” he said.
…In communities of higher diversity, people of all groups withdrew from social activities, trusted their institutions less, took less part in local politics, and had fewer friends and lower quality of life.”
—interesting and surprising
“The Aborigines fought each other at all levels, from individual to family to tribe. As many as five tribes would gather for a battle. These armies, if victorious, would slaughter the men, women, and children of their adversaries, and ceremonially eat them”
—so much for Rousseau’s noble savages
“Evolution is a blind and random process. It offers no guarantees that its creations will be peaceable or virtuous or possessed of a single value that we prize. Indeed cruelty and savagery are the hallmark of the jungle where animals kill, eat, or parasitize each other with horrifying voracity and absence of remorse.”
—see my earlier point about altruism growing out of this stew of homicidal self interest.
“one that comes from human choices—has somehow been imposed on the random walk of evolution,”
—Wade is wrong. There have been six or seven extinction level events and each time evolution has rebuilt life from simple to complicated…evolution seems designed to create complexity…so it’s not a random walk
His main point is let’s lay down the foundation of evolution and then make folks on the Left realize the ramifications…
Humans are designed for two sexes, women birth and care for children, men aggressively try to dominate groups while building coalitions that create real self-spaces.
Family, tribe, and nation states are the outgrowth of evolution and to believe humans are exempt from these rules is high folly.
“genes that affect behavior. The process of natural selection rewards anything that increases survival, whether it be a change in body or behavior. Why should evolution pay no attention to all the behavioral variations that might enhance an individual’s survival, as the social constructionists assume? What magic wand do they suppose commands the forces
… The research shows that almost all behaviors have a substantial hereditary component. In the best known of these studies, the Minnesota Twin Study, heredity was found to account for 70%”
—height is genetic, intelligence is genetic, it’s harder to believe that personality is genetic. Bio-chemical instructions on how extroverted one happens to be seems sketchy and smacks of rigid determinism that human agency rebels at…but genes are far more powerful than we want to give them credit for
“…intelligence between pairs of separated twins and for 50% of most differences in personality. The Minnesota twins raised separately were almost as similar to their co-twins as are identical twins raised in same household, suggesting the genetic effects overwhelm.”
—evidence of how strong genes are
“social behavior of chimps is specified in their genes. This is why all chimp societies work in much the same way and differ from those of other great ape species. And what is true of our close cousins the chimpanzees is also true of humans. Much of our social behavior is genetically specified. These behaviors provide the basis of our distinctive social structure”
—-no one believes that chimps decide how their society is organized, but humans hubris demands we did decide.
“UP faces show happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust and contempt, in a manner entirely familiar from one society to another,” he writes. “A young woman acting coy or flirting with her eyes does it in a way you would recognize quite clearly . . . “The core of a normal UP family is composed of a mother and children. . . . Marriage . . . is institutionalized.”
—cultures share vast similarities
“reasonable speculation is that early people saw dead relatives in their dreams and assumed they must be living in some parallel world.”
— a side point here is if one reads Julian Jaynes one can make the case those ancient relatives were folks listening to sides of their minds before the corpus callosum fully connected…
—-What makes humans unique in the animal kingdom? We’re the only animal smart enough to have figured out the rules of the game:evolution… …and the only animal so stupid it thinks the rules no longer apply to them…
“after the birth of a second child that children have their own distinctive characters—hence the saying that the parents of one child are environmentalists but those of a second are geneticists.”
—that’s a good line
“All these genetically inherent behaviors are flexible and can be extensively modulated by culture. But there is evidently a limit to how far can they be stretched before the whole system crashes. It seems that if you radically alter the evolutionary roles of men and women, render men less able to support a family and less needed, subvert the institution of marriage, and undermine the influence of religion, you will then have achieved a quite novel and unexpected path for social development, one that leads to oblivion.”
—the huge decline in population is evidence that all these factors may be crashing
“The undeclared classes of a meritocratic society are if anything more invidious than those of aristocracies. It was no fault of your own if you were born into a peasant family in an aristocratic state. But to be poor in a meritocracy implies a lack of merit. “It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none. No underclass has ever been left as morally naked as that,”
—good point
“The structure of many societies, particularly but not only meritocratic ones, is largely shaped by genetics. People with the requisite social skills marry people like themselves, rise to the elite, and genetically bequeath to their children the talents to remain in the elite for many years while the wheel of generations slowly turns. Cultural interventions have almost no impact on this hereditary process. Social mobility cannot be increased because it has already done its work over the centuries and continues to do so at its own unhurried pace.”
“It’s a long-standing puzzle in evolutionary biology to explain why members of social species should expend effort helping others when such actions would seem to detract from their own chances of survival.”
—this has always been an interesting puzzle for me. How did reciprocal altruism arise from a dog eat dog world. The notion that family love expands to include the tribe and then the nation state seems a bridge too far.
“process of expelling ethnic or religious minorities. When Turkey and Greece settled the war between them in 1923, Turkey expelled more than a million Greeks who had lived for generations in the Ottoman Empire, and Greece evicted 400,000 Turks.”
—another aside: this was what Israel needed to do with Palestine
“The reservation arises from his surprising finding that in more diverse communities the lower trust applies not just to people of other races but a person’s own race too. “Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/ out-group hostility, but anomie or social isolation,” he said.
…In communities of higher diversity, people of all groups withdrew from social activities, trusted their institutions less, took less part in local politics, and had fewer friends and lower quality of life.”
—interesting and surprising
“The Aborigines fought each other at all levels, from individual to family to tribe. As many as five tribes would gather for a battle. These armies, if victorious, would slaughter the men, women, and children of their adversaries, and ceremonially eat them”
—so much for Rousseau’s noble savages
“Evolution is a blind and random process. It offers no guarantees that its creations will be peaceable or virtuous or possessed of a single value that we prize. Indeed cruelty and savagery are the hallmark of the jungle where animals kill, eat, or parasitize each other with horrifying voracity and absence of remorse.”
—see my earlier point about altruism growing out of this stew of homicidal self interest.
“one that comes from human choices—has somehow been imposed on the random walk of evolution,”
—Wade is wrong. There have been six or seven extinction level events and each time evolution has rebuilt life from simple to complicated…evolution seems designed to create complexity…so it’s not a random walk
September 25, 2025
Shit. This was good. But also it may upset some people who come with predisposed ideology.
September 25, 2025
Another success.
January 1, 2026
لطالما واجهت نظرية داروين منتقديها، بدءًا من الأصوليين الدينيين الذين خشوا تفسيراتها البديلة للوجود البشري، وصولًا إلى الأكاديميين الذين يؤيدون إنكار اليسار التقدمي لأي أساس بيولوجي للجنس أو العرق في القرن الحادي والعشرين، وهو أمر مثير للدهشة.
إن ميراثنا التطوري ليس مجرد "افتراض" بالطبع، بل هو راسخ تمامًا كأي حقيقة علمية، مهما كانت غير مريحة. ويمثل التطور مفتاح فهم الطبيعة البشرية.
يمكن تصور الطبيعة البشرية على أنها تتكون من عنصرين، أحدهما أناني والآخر اجتماعي. السلوكيات الأنانية هي تلك التي يلبي بها كل كائن احتياجاته الأساسية - الأكل والبقاء والتكاثر. في عدد قليل من الأنواع، تطورت السلوكيات الاجتماعية بعد ذلك، مدفوعة على الأرجح باحتياجات الدفاع؛ فمن الأسهل على المجموعة الدفاع عن نفسها ضد الحيوانات المفترسة من أن يفعل ذلك فرد واحد.
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Nicholas Wade
The Origin of Politics
Translated By #Maher_Razouk
إن ميراثنا التطوري ليس مجرد "افتراض" بالطبع، بل هو راسخ تمامًا كأي حقيقة علمية، مهما كانت غير مريحة. ويمثل التطور مفتاح فهم الطبيعة البشرية.
يمكن تصور الطبيعة البشرية على أنها تتكون من عنصرين، أحدهما أناني والآخر اجتماعي. السلوكيات الأنانية هي تلك التي يلبي بها كل كائن احتياجاته الأساسية - الأكل والبقاء والتكاثر. في عدد قليل من الأنواع، تطورت السلوكيات الاجتماعية بعد ذلك، مدفوعة على الأرجح باحتياجات الدفاع؛ فمن الأسهل على المجموعة الدفاع عن نفسها ضد الحيوانات المفترسة من أن يفعل ذلك فرد واحد.
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Nicholas Wade
The Origin of Politics
Translated By #Maher_Razouk
December 1, 2025
Nicholas Wade has had a long career as a science journalist, and in recent years has become a controversial science journalist. For details on the controversial stuff, I recommend his Grokipedia entry, which seems far more even-handed than Wikipedia's, which has an unrebutted anti-Wade bias.
I reported on one of his controversial works, A Troublesome Inheritance, back in 2014. In more recent years, he has written in favor of the lab-leak origin of Covid; my posts on that are here, here, here, and here.
This book looks at how humans have organized themselves into governing groups over their long existence; Wade feels (with much justification) that the role of our underlying genetic code has been given short shrift. To a certain extent this is ideology-driven: the notion that humans are born as "blank slates" and their cultural environment can mold them arbitrarily, shedding ancient ideas of sex roles, opening up a utopian vision of an egalitarian future.
Wade notes that blank-slatism has been thoroughly debunked. He details the experiment with kibbutzim in early Israel, where idealists set up communities based on collective ownership, sexual equality, child-rearing by the community instead of mom and dad, etc.; over the span of a relatively few years, this proved unstable, and the communities mostly reverted to more traditional ways.
Our original social organizations were tribal, similar in many ways to our chimp cousins, and they were a decent evolutionary "solution" to the problems of cooperation, defense, production, and cultural survival. They "worked" for many millennia, after all. And they still persist in some parts of the world. But cultural evolution has molded most of us into citizens of nation-states, a model that has more survival value in the modern world.
Wade argues that humanity is still constrained by the realities of our genetic heritage; ideologies that (for example) deny the fundamental differences between guys and gals are always going to wind up in disappointment, but not before causing a lot of misery along the way.
He also argues that the traditional bonds that hold nation-states together seem to be badly fraying today: common languages, religions, ethnicities. He points out increasing social stratification caused by assortive mating in our meritocracy.
So, Wade provides quite a bit to think about. Progressives aren't going to like his take on a number of contemporary issues. Even I am not convinced of the semi-determinism that his evolution/genetic insights seem to imply. Back in (say) 1750, a Wade-like essayist could have looked at the historic record of chattel slavery and concluded that it was destined to be with us forever as part of our genetic heritage. But it wasn't, thank goodness.
January 15, 2026
Wade takes up the battle against the denial of human nature that Pinker waged in his book "The Blank Slate." His focus is on political science, a discipline that like most of the Social Sciences, begins and ends with the blank slate premise of humans. Wade brings together the evidence from Evolutionary biology, and the rare heterodox researchers in other disciplines, to decimate the denial of evolutionary explanations for the origins of politics. He does an excellent job of distillation, in what could have been a much longer book.
Naturally this book will not be reviewed by any major publication and will be ignored by most everyone in the academy. The Blank Slate as a hypothesis should be as discredited as creationism but the priesthood in the academy must defend it to the death otherwise their dream of the "New (Red) Man" the collectivist ideal will be show to be impossible. If evolutionary history working through genetic selection puts constrains on human nature and society a Marxist utopia is not achievable.
You will notice the hostile reviews here as well. It is the impulse, need, desire for how human should be rather than how they are.
Bravo to Wade for writing a book that will be ignored. Lets hope that one day before it's to late that our intellectual elites, such as they are, can change course from our path to extinction.
Naturally this book will not be reviewed by any major publication and will be ignored by most everyone in the academy. The Blank Slate as a hypothesis should be as discredited as creationism but the priesthood in the academy must defend it to the death otherwise their dream of the "New (Red) Man" the collectivist ideal will be show to be impossible. If evolutionary history working through genetic selection puts constrains on human nature and society a Marxist utopia is not achievable.
You will notice the hostile reviews here as well. It is the impulse, need, desire for how human should be rather than how they are.
Bravo to Wade for writing a book that will be ignored. Lets hope that one day before it's to late that our intellectual elites, such as they are, can change course from our path to extinction.
October 25, 2025
Nicholas Wade’s The Origin of Politics delivers a thought-provoking and boldly argued exploration of how evolution and human nature have shaped societies across history and how ideological blindness continues to shape their fate today. With the rigor of a scientist and the precision of a historian, Wade blends anthropology, biology, and political theory to reveal the genetic and behavioral roots of governance, cooperation, and conflict.
This isn’t just another treatise on political thought it’s an audacious attempt to connect the survival of civilizations to the immutable laws of human evolution. Wade’s analysis is bound to spark debate, challenging both progressive and conservative assumptions about social engineering and the malleability of human nature. It’s a deeply reasoned work that dares to tread into complex terrain with clarity and conviction.
In the end, The Origin of Politics forces readers to reconsider the foundations of every ideology, urging a more biologically grounded understanding of power, policy, and progress.
This isn’t just another treatise on political thought it’s an audacious attempt to connect the survival of civilizations to the immutable laws of human evolution. Wade’s analysis is bound to spark debate, challenging both progressive and conservative assumptions about social engineering and the malleability of human nature. It’s a deeply reasoned work that dares to tread into complex terrain with clarity and conviction.
In the end, The Origin of Politics forces readers to reconsider the foundations of every ideology, urging a more biologically grounded understanding of power, policy, and progress.
October 24, 2025
den ersten Teil fand ich noch recht interessant. dann jedoch holt der Autor zu einem undifferenzierten Rundumschlag gegen Feministen, angebliche Linksradikale in den USA usw. mit derselben Einseitigkeit aus, die er gerade der Gegenseite (m. A. n. teilweise sogar zu Recht) vorwirft. Bei diesen sensiblen Themen, deren Diskurs noch gar nicht abgeschlossen ist, hätte ich mir mehr Ausgeglichenheit gewünscht. Auch habe ich z. B. bei Schülern und Schülerinnen ganz andere Erfahrungen gemacht als der Autor uns hier vorsetzt. Ich habe das Buch dann irgendwann abbrechen müssen, es war mir doch zu sehr auf der Trumptrompete geblasen.
October 7, 2025
Wade's language betrays an out-of-date understanding of the role of genes in passing on traits. This is serious, given that his whole thesis is built upon the idea that by means of evolution (hence "The Origin of Politics") human nature has been shaped by means of specific genes encoding specific traits, and that when politics diverge from recognising these traits there is friction. Now, I am sympathetic to the argument that human nature is a real thing, and not entirely conjured out of things like social pressure, but this argument can be made without all the paraphernalia Wade drags in.
March 16, 2026
Misogynistic, hateful, anti DEI, anti LGBTQ+, all allegedly in the name of science/evolution
March 16, 2026
Excellent book
The author presents a plausible relationship between people instinctive behavior and political states. Unique view point. Well written and an easy read given complex subject matter. Eye opening.
The author presents a plausible relationship between people instinctive behavior and political states. Unique view point. Well written and an easy read given complex subject matter. Eye opening.
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