Customer Reviews

Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom (Rutgers Series in Human Evolution)

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In good evolutionary psychologist form, Paul Rubin tries to explain our existing political behaviors by looking at the Era of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA). The EEA is the time during the Pleistocene when humans became humans and our ancestors' innate tendencies were etched into our genes. This analysis benefits from the fact that Rubin is an economist and understands how incentives matter in human behavior. Many other writers lack this insight; most notably the great Richard Dawkins who, after articulating selfish gene theory, tries to wish away his conclusions.

It is interesting that Rubin, a professor of law and economics at Emory, was a libertarian when he began to write this book but ended up questioning the rigidity of that ideology. You can see this come through when he begins the book by dispelling myths on both sides of the traditional political spectrum. He explains that the state of nature is a useless metaphor because humans never existed in such an anarchic state, and also that humans are not malleable, but instead have a certain human nature.

Our species' patrilocality is an important theme that runs throughout the book. Male dominance and the ease with which males could form political alliances in the EEA is key, according to Rubin. But while that ease made some males dominant, it also helped those left out to join together to make sure they weren't too dominant. Rubin also distinguishes between male and female evolved risk preferences and how this affects political behavior today.

Economists assume rationality in their models, but empirical studies would suggest that people don't behave so sensibly. Rubin takes a stab at reconciling this bogeyman of economics by positing that behavior that seems unreasonable today may have been reasonable in the EEA. For example, evolving in a zero-sum world leads to a mistrust of capitalism in today's nonzero world. Also other arguably irrational behavior, like religious conviction, may still be useful to genes today.

In sum, the book is a good survey of the evolutionary psychology literature with Rubin's insights about what it means for political behavior. This is decidedly an academic text, but a good one and ou shouldn't be put off by this because it's very readable--especially if you understand the language of evolution and economics. I would certainly recommend it.

Socialism doesn't work. Two large-scale forced experiments, the Soviet and Maoist, failed. Many lesser socialist states have gone bankrupt. These experiments in institutionalized goodness failed because we humans are born selfish. We glorify equality, but down deep we want nothing more than to outshine the others. We deplore poverty and misery, but when the lotto win falls our way, we don't distribute it to unfortunates.

Rubin, a micro-economist, has written a resounding defence of capitalism understood as the system of production and exchange that optimizes the trade-off between selfishness and large-scale social interaction through a win-win system whose participation inducement is reward rather than deterrence. The dazzle of rewards unleashes the flow of human capital that generates economic growth and multiplication of public goods. The core value of the system is individual freedom and autonomy. Rubin undertakes to explain capitalism's evolutionary origin and the psychology that sustains it. He appropriates game theory to explain how the basic psychology of cooperation, including specific traits such as intelligence, might have evolved under selection pressures generated by the evolutionary `arms race'. This abstract computation is given flesh by suppositions drawn from primatology and anthropology. The result is then projected back to the late Pleistocene when the hominid line speciated as sapiens. There is no remedy for this speculative procedure because there is no direct evidence, apart from hand axes, about human behaviour and psychology in `the state of nature'. However, hominid palaeontology is a dynamic field invigorated especially by new findings from China. Homo sapiens continued to evolve after speciation put the large brained biped in place. Racial differentiation occurred; subtle but important behavioural and psychological differentiation may also have occurred. This caveat assumes critical importance because of what happens next--nothing much, until agricultural settlements appeared about 10,000 years ago, which in turn precipitated the gallop to the initial founding of states in Mesopotamia 4,000 years later. This very peculiar pattern calls for explanation, but the author passes it by in silence. For Rubin the entry into political association is positive, in that it commences the advance to capitalism, but it is negative in that it was purchased at the high cost of supplanting the original hunter-gatherer freedom and autonomy for subordination to autocratic rule-a blight eliminated only in the recent past, and then only by Europeans and nations of European descent. The current situation is that the free market/personal freedom combination remains largely European. The Middle East, Central Asia, Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America display a rainbow of free market-autocracy hybrids. In Sub-Saharan Africa political structures are insecure against tribal dynamics. Since that's five-sixths of world population, let's await to see if capitalism really is the culmination of human evolution.

The center-piece of the book is Rubin's game theoretic analysis of the mechanism of cooperation, using Prisoner's Dilemma as the defining matrix. He brings ingenuity and flare to the task, and I enjoyed reading his interpretation. But I'm not satisfied that his analysis advances the art. The first problem is the misfit between evolutionary assumptions about behaviour and PD. On the evolutionary scenario, behaviour optimizes inclusive rather than individual fitness, whereas PD constrains choice to single episodes of individual advantage. Critics have observed that PD is implicitly modelled on exchanges between non-reproductive males who are strangers. A different matrix would be required to model the choices of reproductive males, and a different one again for reproductive females. Secondly, Rubin does not press his analysis forward to collective action decision making. There is a large literature (Olson, Hecter, Taylor, Elster, &c), and any proposed rational choice theory explanation of large scale exchange must cover this territory. Rubin does not. Finally, the standard objection--But what if humans don't choose rationally? Rubin takes note of Kahneman and Tversky's extensive empirical studies which show exactly that. He responds by placing Gigerenzer's Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart on the scale as somehow rescuing rational choice from the demolition. For me that's too little too late. Rubin seems indirectly to acknowledge as much when he expresses puzzlement at the persistence of irrational religious belief, and the irrationality of intellectual elites who reprobate immoral capitalism and espouse government welfare structures (i.e., socialism) to soften it.

Rubin's essay prompted me to pull together my diverse arguments against an evolutionary explanation of capitalism, and for that I am grateful. I close with a telling point that Rubin makes himself. Speaking of the linkage between birth rates below replacement value and burgeoning individualism in leading capitalist nations, he says that `for many people (perhaps most people), biological fitness is not itself a goal' (p. 49). Now hear this: when the freedom and autonomy that he attributes to our species in the late Pleistocene comes to full flower, it supports not fitness but extinction! On that basis his claim that freedom is a basic human desire evaporates. There is a further implication. The importation of labor to make up for the unborn locals has created large immigrant minorities, which, thanks to their high birth rate, will become the majority in the United States and Britain in four or five decades, and a large minority in France, Germany, and Italy. These immigrants insert religious conviction and strong ethnic identity into a capitalist system unfriendly to both. Add to this scenario the possibility that the global warming alarm is real, and the future of capitalism doesn't look so bright. The `end of history' may well be nigh, but in a sense opposite to Darwin's, and Francis Fukuyama's, best of possible worlds forecast.

(...)

As I write this there are two intellectual revolutions that I am glad to say are quickly spreading and gaining momentum(they are a must for the continued prosperity of mankind). One is evolutionary psychology. Anyone who has not read a book by Dawkins(The Selfish Gene, easily the most influential book of the 20th century, it is a permanent fixture amongst many amazon.com best seller lists even though it was first published in 1976), Matt Ridley(The Red Queen, Genome), Steven Pinker(The Language Instinct, How The Mind Works, The Blank Slate), Robert Wright(The Moral Animal), or many other evolutionary psychology related authors out there, simply has little understanding of how human beings really work. The other revolution is an understanding of free-market economics(Capitalism, Austrian economics). The works of Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, their students and others influenced by them are finally reaching mass audience(I sure hope so, Capitalism is what we owe our lives to, (...)).

This book shows how our political and economic thinking/instincts evolved in a zero-sum, non-division of labor world, and how those evolved instincts(and many cultural elements as well) are counter productive in our new non-zero-sum, highly specialized division of labor world. (...) Hayek's last book "The Fatal Conceit" also married economics and evolution, but Hayek died before the recent advancements in evolutionary psychology. As Hayek said in the Fatal Conceit p118 "The envy of those who have tried just as hard, although fully understandable, works against the common interest. Thus, if the common interest is really our interest, we must not give in to this very human instinctual trait, but instead allow the market process to determine the reward." . Darwinian Politics has an entire chapter devoted to explaining the evolution of envy and how it is one of the many counterproductive instincts that served us well in the past but don't serve us as well today.

With the disastrous incompetence of the Bush presidency and further government expansion, the Capitalist engine might very well collapse , and the uneducated politicians will try to plan more(which the masses always fall for) which will only make things worse. As Hayek said "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design" . To our problems add religious conflict. Mr Rubin's discussion about the evolution of religions is very good and more important now than ever.

Very few people understand evolution. Very few people understand Capitalism. And obviously an even smaller number understand both. We need both, and this is the best book out there that explains this crucial fact.

Most books on evolution are about the usual subjects of evolution: fossil evidence, speciation, variation, etc. This book takes the subject to a new and novel level: politics and economics. In that way, it is very unique and illuminating. It really makes you think about the vast ramifications of evolution in so many aspects of our lives, such as our political views and biases, legislations, and freedom. The book broadens one's perspective about evolution. I enjoyed reading the book and recommend it.

Socialism doesn't work. Two large-scale forced experiments, the Soviet and Maoist, failed. Many lesser socialist states have gone bankrupt. These experiments in institutionalized goodness failed because we humans are born selfish. We glorify equality, but down deep we want nothing more than to outshine the others. We deplore poverty and misery, but when the lotto win falls our way, we don't distribute it to unfortunates.

Rubin, a micro-economist, has written a resounding defence of capitalism understood as the system of production and exchange that optimizes the trade-off between selfishness and large-scale social interaction through a win-win system whose participation inducement is reward rather than deterrence. The dazzle of rewards unleashes the flow of human capital that generates economic growth and multiplication of public goods. The core value of the system is individual freedom and autonomy. Rubin undertakes to explain capitalism's evolutionary origin and the psychology that sustains it. He appropriates game theory to explain how the basic psychology of cooperation, including specific traits such as intelligence, might have evolved under selection pressures generated by the evolutionary `arms race'. This abstract computation is given flesh by suppositions drawn from primatology and anthropology. The result is then projected back to the late Pleistocene when the hominid line speciated as sapiens. There is no remedy for this speculative procedure because there is no direct evidence, apart from hand axes, about human behaviour and psychology in `the state of nature'. However, hominid palaeontology is a dynamic field invigorated especially by new findings from China. Homo sapiens continued to evolve after speciation put the large brained biped in place. Racial differentiation occurred; subtle but important behavioural and psychological differentiation may also have occurred. This caveat assumes critical importance because of what happens next--nothing much, until agricultural settlements appeared about 10,000 years ago, which in turn precipitated the gallop to the initial founding of states in Mesopotamia 4,000 years later. This very peculiar pattern calls for explanation, but the author passes it by in silence. For Rubin the entry into political association is positive, in that it commences the advance to capitalism, but it is negative in that it was purchased at the high cost of supplanting the original hunter-gatherer freedom and autonomy for subordination to autocratic rule-a blight eliminated only in the recent past, and then only by Europeans and nations of European descent. The current situation is that the free market/personal freedom combination remains largely European. The Middle East, Central Asia, Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America display a rainbow of free market-autocracy hybrids. In Sub-Saharan Africa political structures are insecure against tribal dynamics. Since that's five-sixths of world population, let's await to see if capitalism really is the culmination of human evolution.

The center-piece of the book is Rubin's game theoretic analysis of the mechanism of cooperation, using Prisoner's Dilemma as the defining matrix. He brings ingenuity and flare to the task, and I enjoyed reading his interpretation. But I'm not satisfied that his analysis advances the art. The first problem is the misfit between evolutionary assumptions about behaviour and PD. On the evolutionary scenario, behaviour optimizes inclusive rather than individual fitness, whereas PD constrains choice to single episodes of individual advantage. Critics have observed that PD is implicitly modelled on exchanges between non-reproductive males who are strangers. A different matrix would be required to model the choices of reproductive males, and a different one again for reproductive females. Secondly, Rubin does not press his analysis forward to collective action decision making. There is a large literature (Olson, Hecter, Taylor, Elster, &c), and any proposed rational choice theory explanation of large scale exchange must cover this territory. Rubin does not. Finally, the standard objection--But what if humans don't choose rationally? Rubin takes note of Kahneman and Tversky's extensive empirical studies which show exactly that. He responds by placing Gigerenzer's Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart on the scale as somehow rescuing rational choice from the demolition. For me that's too little too late. Rubin seems indirectly to acknowledge as much when he expresses puzzlement at the persistence of irrational religious belief, and the irrationality of intellectual elites who reprobate immoral capitalism and espouse government welfare structures (i.e., socialism) to soften it.

Rubin's essay prompted me to pull together my diverse arguments against an evolutionary explanation of capitalism, and for that I am grateful. I close with a telling point that Rubin makes himself. Speaking of the linkage between birth rates below replacement value and burgeoning individualism in leading capitalist nations, he says that `for many people (perhaps most people), biological fitness is not itself a goal' (p. 49). Now hear this: when the freedom and autonomy that he attributes to our species in the late Pleistocene comes to full flower, it supports not fitness but extinction! On that basis his claim that freedom is a basic human desire evaporates. There is a further implication. The importation of labor to make up for the unborn locals has created large immigrant minorities, which, thanks to their high birth rate, will become the majority in the United States and Britain in four or five decades, and a large minority in France, Germany, and Italy. These immigrants insert religious conviction and strong ethnic identity into a capitalist system unfriendly to both. Add to this scenario the possibility that the global warming alarm is real, and the future of capitalism doesn't look so bright. The `end of history' may well be nigh, but in a sense opposite to Darwin's, and Francis Fukuyama's, best of possible worlds forecast.

Paul Rubin begins this book by noting a conclusion that he reaches (Page xi): ". . .modern western nations, and particularly the United States, are the most effective societies for satisfying our evolved political preferences."

Critical for understanding human behavior is an understanding of the "environment of evolutionary adaptedness" (EEA), the environment in which humankind evolved. This is important, because our major behavioral patterns were developed then, as adaptations to a particular environment.
He traces key features of human social behavior from that period.

Power today may feature hierarchies within sectors. But government today (Page 127) "is really only one player among many and often not the key or most important player. Capitalism creates an unlimited number of hierarchies, so there is no need to compete only in the political hierarchy."

There are fascinating chapters, based on human evolutionary history, on such subjects as envy, sharing, groups, religion, and decision-making (in the political world). This is, in the end, a fascinating work.

One can raise criticisms. Are capitalist hierarchies separate from political hierarchies and, therefore, a check on political power? Or are they mutually reinforcing? In which case, things might not look so rosy. Are we really bound by the environment of the EEA? Some have hypothesized the possibility of rapid genetic change (such as via the punctuated equilibrium theory of evolution). Would this raise questions about his EAA thesis?

Despite such questions, this is a well written and worthwhile book to examine.

Other than complaining about faulty electrical equipment and a petulant style, fefl does not reveal anything about him. or herself.

Paul Rubin's book is an excellent contribution to the contemporary paradigm shift in the social sciences away from the cultural determinism of the Margaret Mead generation to the rich interplay of nature and urture revealed by evolutionary psychology. Rubin brings the insights of an economist to this field which is particularly welcome.

I am buying my second copy because it is so good and I cannt get my first copy from avid readers.

Malcolm Potts, MD, PhD. Bixby Professor, University California, Berkeley.

In this book Rubin has looked at the EEA - the human Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness - to consider the origins of human preferences and has concluded that Western societies, especially the US, best satisfy our evolved preferences. He is not debating 'what is' vs 'what should be' but does believe that satisfying these preferences is what makes us happy and anything leading to human happiness is desirable.

This is predominantly the story of the human male and today fits most neatly the self-interest of the physically fit adult male born to middle-class parents. Rubin says, and it is probably largely true, that in the EEA humans lived in male-kin groups where dominant males acquired a number of wives while other males had none. This was a zero-sum world where one man's gain was another man's loss. Males both sought dominance and to reduce the dominance of other males.

Today, Rubin says, free trade and capitalism are non zero-sum and benefit everyone though this is counter-intuitive to many because it was not part of the EEA. The striving for wealth benefits all and, with the enforcement of monogamy, wealth poses no threat to the reproductive fitness of others. Business also counters government power which satisfies our preference for the restricted power of politicians and our individual freedom. Though people seek wealth from selfish motives the actual outcome benefits everyone.

Rubin is presenting something of a group-selection argument. Today inequality within a group creates greater average wealth than does equality therefore egalitarian groups are out-competed. If this is so then the implication is that those who suffer the most from inequality should accept their sacrifice because the group actually benefits. This is a problem Rubin does not address - the discontent of those whose sacrifice is required for the 'common good'.

Rubin also does not adequately address the inheritance of wealth and status except to say that no one advocates true equality of opportunity because that would require the removal of children from their parents and a communal upbringing as opportunity is largely tied to the wealth and status of parents.

Rubin briefly mentions the increased dependence of children but does not consider how dependent older humans were/are on their children. The costs of children have grown and grown and only in modern states can people avoid the costs of having children while still receiving the benefits that other people's children provide as workers and carers supporting all the elderly etc. and not just their own parents.

Rubin believes monogamy means there is no need to envy wealthy men yet clearly both sexes compete to attract the most attractive members of the other sex and wealthy men certainly can monopolize more than one attractive female. Sexual display and competition is certainly still a major factor in the seeking of wealth and status.

Rubin dismisses any concern about the environment and the limited resources of our planet. He does not even consider that the 'feel good' reward of money and insatiable consumerism might actually not be the same as happiness. Evolution is not about happiness and many things can make us feel good that actually lead to immense unhappiness eg drugs, fatty foods, sex etc. etc. - all types of impulses and addictions that provide quick fixes and long-term harm. These are things that were very limited in the EEA.

This is an interesting book and appears to follow a logical argument and it certainly coincides with self-interest especially if you are a fit, reasonably wealthy male. Much is missing regarding women, children, the environment, limited resources, our elimination of other species and where our insatiable consumption will ultimately lead. This may be the best of all possible worlds but we should be especially wary - understanding our evolved natures may suggest how we satisfy our evolved wants but this is in no way a green light to do so. Sometimes a red light may be more appropriate.

To gorge ourselves on our planet and tell ourselves this benefits all humans and creates the greatest happiness may simply mean that we will be the happiest but the most short-lived species ever - billions of us laughing our way to extinction.

I have reviewed books for many professional journals for a good many years. I also spend annually an inordinate sum of money in profesional and in lay books. I am a psychiatrist. This alone, may explain why I had a professional reason to purchase this book.
Now, for the review:
From the beginnig of his book Rubin assumes that he can stretch his own understanding of pre-history to buttress and prove his assumptions, and to argue his theories and speculations as well. (An example of this follows in due course during this review.)
"I" is the ultimate weapon the author uses throughout the book to set the grounds for his assertions (often wildly dicey) and authoritatively sounding: "I argue that the state of nature in which humans were lone individuals and in which there were no rules never existed and could not, in principle, exist." This one is just but one vignette of too many instances of the solipsistic approach Rubin inflicts on his readers and that he seems to prefer to bolster his arguments.
That sort of thing may sound good to some. But where are the missing facts and pieces of evidence to aver such ideas? But that's not all, as the fun of speculating becomes intoxicating this author tries to persuade the reader that he can explain the acquisition of wealth, the complexities of religiosity, the origin of envy and (even) the success of the field of economics, which he has now wedded (shakily) to Darwin's theories --- But he fails to convince me; a lone, chronic and dogged student of Evolution and Darwin.
The field of "Darwinian Psychiatry (and/or Psychology)" whatever those may be; are too young to promote their validity based on fantasy and speculation.
I found this book, very disappointing indeed.