The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations

Societies that ignore social disintegration and collapsing birth rates are putting their future in peril. So why are we ignoring the signs?

?In The Origin Of Politics, Nicholas Wade explains how our political systems compete with a more ancient set of rules for organizing society—those developed by evolution. Modern ideologies are in constant tension with structures inherent in human social behavior, such as the family, the tribe, and male-dominated institutions.

This tension plays out in various ways. Sometimes nature prevails over politics, as in the proposal by Marx and Engels to eliminate the family, the basic unit of society. The founders of the kibbutz movement put this radical idea into practice, only to find that the conflict with human nature was unsustainable. In other cases, culture has successfully modified evolutionary behaviors, replacing polygamy with monogamy and dissolving the bonds of tribalism to make way for modern states.

But the evolutionary framework of human societies is not infinitely flexible. The nation-state, especially in the case of the United States, is prone to disintegration if disruptive ideologies are allowed to undermine the cohesive affinities that hold its disparate cultures together.

The worldwide decline in fertility in most countries except those in Africa signals a severe derangement in the behaviors evolution has devised for ensuring that a population will maintain itself. If the causes of this disruption cannot be understood and reversed, human societies will embark on an unsought path to extinction.

Other fraught issues in which human biology and politics conflict include the innate specializations of the sexes, the stratification of society by ability, and the mismatch between the inequalities of wealth-creating societies and the egalitarian ethic inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

We live in an iridescent bubble, the intoxicating richness of modern culture. Shielded from the natural world, we have lost our awareness of the evolutionary forces that still guide our motivations and shape the foundations of our societies. The Origin of Politics explores the risks of underestimating evolution’s fundamental role in human affairs.

Why do modern political systems so often fail when they conflict with the ancient blueprints of our own biology?

• Politics and Evolution: A critical look at how modern ideologies are in constant tension with the social structures—family, tribe, kinship—that evolution has wired into our species.
• The Family Unit: The revealing story of the Israeli kibbutz, where a utopian attempt to abolish the family ultimately failed against the powerful, innate bonds between parents and children.
• Tribalism to Nation-State: How societies successfully modified deep-seated behaviors, replacing polygamy with monogamy and dissolving ancient tribal bonds to pave the way for the modern state.
• Inherited Behaviors: An examination of the conflicts over innate sex specializations, social stratification, and the mismatch between modern inequality and the egalitarian ethic from our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

Nicholas Wade is a journalist who was educated in Cambridge, England, and has worked at Nature Science, and for 30 years at  the New York Times where he was an editorial writer and science editor. He is the author of three books about recent human evolution - Before the Dawn, The Faith Instinct and A Troublesome Inheritance. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.