Did Conservatism “Evolve”? Early Responses to Coyne, Pigliucci, and 2K Others

I was away this weekend, and so could only distantly watch as responses to my “Want to Understand Republicans? First Understand Evolution” piece trickled in. There are over 2,000 comments at Huffington Post, and 1.5 K Facebook likes. I haven’t even been able to read through them all.

Two prominent blogosphere responses came from Massimo Pigliucci at Rationally Speaking and Jerry Coyne. Reading these, I see that there are things I need to clarify, as both raise the idea that I am advancing an “adaptive” account of why liberals and conservatives differ–e.g., these differences were the result of evolution and exist because they increased our ancestors’ reproductive fitness or ability to survive, and therefore were passed on.

To the contrary, the Huffington Post piece (which was merely a report on a new scientific paper, not some grand statement of my book’s thesis),  itself says that “I’ll leave it to others to speculate on the root causes of these differences.” In The Republican Brain, meanwhile, I do note that some have advanced adaptive/”group selection” theories to explain the yin-and-yang of liberalism and conservatism. However, I merely report on this matter; I don’t take a side, because there was no clear way to pick a winner. It’s just as possible–and frankly, strikes me as more likely–that the difference is an evolutionary by-product or “spandrel.”

We really don’t know.

I will say more soon–all of today is caught up with prepping the next Point of Inquiry, with Yale’s Dan Kahan–but just one more note here.

I’ve been in vigorous debates with the “New Atheists” in the past; but frankly, researching The Republican Brain pushed me a lot further towards their camp than I had been before. They’re upset with religion; I’m highly critical of psychological conservatism; and there turn out to be big overlaps between the two. Indeed, conservative religiosity also appears to have a genetic component to it. Liberal religiosity strikes me as also being psychologically liberal, and therefore quite a different beast; but conservative or authoritarian religion reflects much of the rigidity (and denial of reality) of psychological conservatism.

In other words, I’d be surprised if the New Atheists–especially folks like Sam Harris, who have tried to figure out the neuroscience of the religious mind–weren’t in agreement on this one. More soon.

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