Human Evolution is on the Ballot

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The choice we face this November is not just between two wildly different men and two wildly different political parties. It’s also a choice between our biological evolution and our social evolution. That choice may determine whether our species can rise above our ape origins—whether we can survive in an age of global warming, nuclear weapons, frequent pandemics and Orwellian technology of surveillance and control.

Biologically, we evolved in small clans dominated by alpha males. That is our instinctive model.

The alpha male didn’t have to be smarter or better than the rest. All he had to be was bigger, stronger, quicker to anger or good at fighting and intimidating other males. Dominating others was his job and his skill.

Doesn’t that description fit Donald Trump perfectly? Is he smarter, better informed, or wiser than his rivals? (Hint: he doesn’t even read his briefing papers!) Or is he just good at dominating others and giving that impression?

Why have so many former rivals, including Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, knuckled under to Trump? How can you explain his mode of “debating”? He ducks the truth. He changes his mind and direction at random. He brags and praises himself endlessly. He fakes or ignores substance and reason.

But he’s all full of insults, “chops,” derision and humiliation—the tools of male-ape-like domination on every school playground and in every college fraternity. So is Trump a Man of Reason or a successful alpha ape?

Jesus told us, “Love they neighbor as thyself,” and “Love they enemy.” He probably didn’t have in mind putting children in cages, ripping them from their parents’ arms, tear-gassing and baton-bashing peaceful protestors, or bad-mouthing every racial, ethnic and religious minority in this great, diverse nation of ours. He probably didn’t have in mind mocking and humiliating people with physical disabilities. Those are not acts of a Christian or a modern human leader, but of a dominant alpha ape trying to keep his rivals and subjects cowed and in line.

Jesus was no alpha ape. Western folk have worshipped or respected him for over two millennia. But sometimes we forget. Sometimes the pull of our biological evolution—domination by an alpha-male ape—is just too strong.

Julius Caesar, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong were no accidents. Nor today are Bashar al-Assad, Jair Bolsonaro, Andrzej Duda, Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Abdel Fattah el Sisi, or Xi Jinping. They were and are all cases of backsliding down our evolutionary pathway to alpha-male-ape domination. Not surprisingly, many of them have caused—or are now preparing—our species’ greatest disasters and worst atrocities.

Men like Trump, Hitler, Stalin, Assad and Caesar don’t just corrupt their governments. They corrupt whole societies and cultures, too. For them, domination and violence are ends in themselves. Their people learn those dismal lessons through repetition, example, and subjugation. They teach us to revert to troglodytes.

The teaching is easy because it’s instinctual. It all fits nicely into our evolution out of alpha-male-dominated clans. Subjection to a male monarch or despot almost feels “right”—even today, and even if the despot in question is far from ideal. Just ask Bill Barr.

So flirtation with despotism, even as we try to maintain democracy, is no anomaly or passing phase. It derives from a fundamental conflict—a contradiction—in our biological evolution.

On the one hand, we evolved as clans of individuals dominated by alpha-male apes. On the other hand, our chief evolutionary advantage over all other species on our planet was and is our ability to empathize, communicate and cooperate. We didn’t build skyscrapers, aircraft, Moon landers or the Internet by taking orders from a single alpha male, let alone by fighting among ourselves.

If nothing else, the specialization that our complex society requires precludes us from taking all our orders from single alpha male. No single individual can command all the knowledge and expertise—from transplanting hearts to piloting an aircraft to designing and programming computers—that we need to make our complex society run. That’s one of many things tragic and frightening about Trump: he doesn’t know it all but thinks he does, so he often countermands the orders of those who do. Just ask Anthony Fauci.

Today it’s up to our social evolution—which is much weaker but works much faster than biological evolution—to make the final choice. We can choose to prioritize our chief biological-evolutionary advantage—cooperation among specialists—over the part of our biological evolution that is holding our social evolution back. We can resist the instinct that propels us into subjugation to a single alpha ape, and thence to error, tribalism and catastrophe.

Today the choice is especially urgent. We no longer live in a state of nature. Our collective civilization has come to dominate our globe. It threatens our biosphere and our own survival. We can destroy ourselves with the global warming we have caused, which is now accelerating, jolted by positive feedback. We can maim or extinguish ourselves by making war with nuclear or biological weapons, or by neglecting the pandemics that occur now more and more frequently as we pack ourselves more densely onto our limited globe.

Or, if we choose, we can try to build a paradise on this Earth by cooperating and competing rationally. We can choose life with our individual minds.

How do we do that? It’s hard to see how if we continue letting individual alpha males dominate us, as if we were still apes living in small rival clans.

Fortunately, there are alternatives. While despotism, monarchy and empire have dominated our species’ short recorded history, there are some rules of social evolution than can guide us back (or really, forward!) to rational democratic rule. The good news is that they also have a biological basis.

First, we can vote for, fund, and support female leaders, no matter our own gender. Females were bystanders in our alpha-ape stage, never participating in the endless quest for male domination. They were and are the victims and survivors of alpha male misrule. They pick up the pieces when alpha males’ grandiose plans for dominance come to naught, or to catastrophe. They have to love and raise all their children despite an alpha male’s favoritism, dominance, absence, abuse or oppression.

Today’s gender gap is real. But it’s not just an electoral phenomenon. It’s evolutionary. It’s biological. At this stage in our social evolution, when our entire species is turning toward domination by and subjection to individual males, it’s a strong anchor to windward.

The second winning strategy is similar. We can vote for, fund, and support minorities. Doing so won’t just reduce undeserved white privilege, which would be a benefit in itself.

Even more important, supporting leaders from minorities will advance the causes of empathy, communication and cooperation among us. Who among us has felt the lash of dominance and cruelty more than our various minorities, with Black people most aggrieved? Their experience, struggle and suffering, with patience and perseverance, has fostered understanding and empathy, if not in all, at least in the best. And who but the best can succeed in a white-dominated world?

Given the choice, if all were still alive, who wouldn’t prefer Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to Donald Trump? Who wouldn’t pick the late John Lewis over Jim Jordan?

No, this is not reverse sexism or reverse racism. It’s an evolutionary and cultural strategy. It’s picking leaders who are most likely, by virtue of their social evolution—their ancestors, education, upbringing, suffering and struggle—to appreciate and heal the excesses of our day. It’s picking leaders whose social evolution and/or life experience is an antidote to the biologically-based domination and cruelty of alpha-male apes like Donald Trump.

If you want to know why Trump is president, and why so many of his erstwhile rivals and enemies are now his lackeys and sycophants, it’s not his “magic” as a demagogue. It’s not his personal “skill.” It’s something much, much deeper and more dangerous than that. It’s an instinctual yearning for alpha-male-ape leadership left over from our biological evolution and still buried deep inside each of us.

Once we understand that, the desirability of the Biden-Harris ticket becomes plain. It offers a White House with a male and a female, a white leader and a Black leader. If offers two people humbled and tempered by circumstance—one by personal misfortune and the other by institutionalized racism.

In Kamala Harris, it offers the prospect of female leadership—an alternative to the driving force of male domination that has so often led to despotism, war, neglect, and suffering. Instead, it offers the rare kind of empathy and instinctively equal treatment that female leaders have given us, from Queen Hatshepsut through Queen Elizabeth I to Angela Merkel.

If you want to crush an enemy or an already oppressed minority, pick a man as your leader. If you want a happy, peaceful and productive family, pick a woman. Female leadership, albeit rare, has changed human social evolution for the better, in fundamental ways. Just look at Angela Merkel’s Germany and its Energiewende—the most impressive and extensive conversion to carbon-free energy outside of France, whose 75% nuclear electric grid had given it a big head start.

Addendum 9/4/20: As if to confirm the foregoing favorable evaluation, the Washington Post today published a review of Chancellor Merkel’s 2015 immigration policy, which admitted over one million desperate, mostly Muslim refugees into Germany. According to the Post, the refugees have assimilated well into Germany, with nothing like the crime wave that demagogues, including Trump, had predicted. The surge of German right-wing sentiment that their migration provoked is now subsiding. And Chancellor Merkel says she would admit the refugees again because “they have to be treated like human beings.” So this female leader has not just put Germany in the forefront of the fight against climate change; she also solved a difficult refugee crisis with a unique blend of humanity and German efficiency. If only our president could emulate her accomplishments!

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