We need to shed our prehistoric policymaking practices and turn to evolution for guidance, argues David Sloan Wilson.

It’s bad enough that so many people are in denial about evolution, especially in America but increasingly elsewhere. Even worse, those who do accept the theory don’t connect it to matters of importance in their lives. For almost everyone, evolution is about fossils, dinosaurs and human origins. But it should also be about governance, education, health, peace and virtually every other public policy issue relevant to human welfare.

Why is evolutionary theory missing from the toolkit of politicians and their expert advisers? One familiar reason is that evolution became associated with policies that justify social inequality. Consider Sir Julian Huxley, grandson of ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ Thomas Henry Huxley, one of the architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1940s and a passionate humanist. Here is how Huxley used evolution to inform public policy: “The lowest strata are reproducing too fast… They must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilisation.”

Today, it is difficult to imagine how a public figure could suggest such a classist and coercive policy from any perspective. The culprit here is not evolutionary theory but a worldview that regards it as acceptable for the privileged to impose life and death decisions on the unprivileged without gaining their consent.

Another reason why evolutionary theory is rarely used to inform policy is the allure of other theories that promise to explain the length and breadth of human nature on the basis of a few minimalistic principles, such as rational choice theory in economics. For many decades, economists have justified their assumptions by pointing to the success of the policies based upon them. Now that the policies are failing, the need for a more sophisticated understanding of our species has become painfully apparent.

Is it really possible for a new theoretical perspective to make a difference? Everyone is guided by a theory – formal or informal, implicit or explicit – whether they know it or not. With no theory, the world is a buzzing confusion that incapacitates action. The wrong theory organises the world in a way that seems to make sense but leads to dead-end solutions. The right theory organises the world in a way that leads to successful solutions. The right theory can make all the difference.

Politicians and their expert advisers need evolutionary theory for the best of reasons: it provides new tools for making humane decisions on everyone’s behalf. That’s why I have become involved in the creation of the Evolution Institute (EI), the world’s first evolutionary think tank. The EI’s mission is to connect the world of evolutionary science with that of public policy formulation. Initiated in 2007, we have already made progress in areas such as childhood education, risky adolescent behaviour and the mother of all policy issues: the regulation of human social interactions.

Childhood education

We are a cultural species. Our capacity for culture is a sophisticated adaptation that evolved genetically. Given that capacity, most of our behaviours come from our cultures, not directly from our genes. One reason that we have such a long life cycle is because we have so much to teach and learn. Yet, when we examine how teaching and learning take place in most cultures, especially hunter-gatherer cultures, we find very little that resembles formal education. Instead, children go around in mixed age groups and learning usually takes the form of self-motivated play. Younger children are eager to emulate older children, who in turn are eager to become adults. The community is the classroom and explicit instruction is provided upon request.

If learning and teaching can be this spontaneous, perhaps we should reassess an educational system in which children are segregated by age and receive all their instruction from adults. While we’re at it, let’s question the wisdom of restricting play and expecting kids to sit still for ever longer periods of time to boost academic performance. And how about ‘no touch’ rules? Superficially, they make sense as a guard against sexual harassment, but they are less understandable when we realise that people become physiologically stressed when they aren’t touched, just like many other primates.

Do you like to be told what to do without any choice in the matter? Neither do kids. How well do you learn under a looming deadline? That’s what education is like when tests become paramount. How easy is it for you to do something when all the costs are in the present and all the benefits are in the distant future? That’s what school is like for children unless short-term rewards for learning are provided.

How about individual differences? Some of us are shy or bold, early or late bloomers. Wouldn’t it be great for kids to find their own niche and learn at their own pace, as opposed to being part of a one-size-fits-all educational system?

In these and other ways, educational practices with a surface logic make demands upon children that are unnatural for our species. We are oblivious to the harm that we are doing because we don’t think of ourselves as a species with evolved capacities that work effortlessly under some circumstances but can go spectacularly wrong under others.

We don’t even think of culture as an evolutionary process, which might warrant different educational practices for different cultures. Adopting a sophisticated evolutionary perspective suggests a host of new possibilities. Some of these are new and others make sense of existing practices that work but have not yet become widespread.

Risky adolescent behaviour

Problem behaviours in youth are typically regarded as pathological. Child development is thought to be optimal in benign environments and compromised in harsh environments, resulting in pathologies such as violent competition for status and respect, breaking rules and laws, consuming and selling drugs, gang membership, early and unprotected sex, and teen pregnancy.

Evolutionary theory offers a different perspective. Humans have been living in harsh environments since before they were human. When the going gets tough, young people don’t exhibit pathologies; they exhibit conditional adaptations to harsh environments. These adaptations might cause problems for others and even compromise the individual over the long run, but there might not be a long run when immediate survival is at stake.

Take such ‘problem’ behaviours as violent competition for status in men and early reproduction in women. In Chicago alone, average life expectancy ranges from the late 70s in the best neighbourhoods to the mid-50s in the worst. Women in the worst neighbourhoods start having babies in their teens for the best of reasons: they want their mothers to see their children and they want to see their grandchildren. Similarly, men are prepared to ‘get rich or die tryin’’ when that is the only way to get money, women and respect.

If a misguided counsellor managed to eliminate these ‘problem’ behaviours without replacing them with something better or changing the environmental context, it would be like declawing a lion and returning it to the wild. The wiser policy is to change the environmental context or replace the ‘problem’ behaviour with a superior strategy that is less problematic. Recognising ‘problem’ behaviours as strategic might seem obvious in retrospect but it is a paradigm shift compared with the prevailing pathology model.

Adopting a conditional strategy is not necessarily a conscious choice and can take place early in life – even before birth. Increasingly, we are discovering that humans, along with other mammals, are adapted to sense their environment through their mother in utero, altering their physical and mental development accordingly. Careful longitudinal studies are beginning to reveal that social factors experienced early in life, such as the presence of the fatherin the household, can influence the onset of puberty and behavioural styles of interacting with the opposite sex. The conscious choice of strategy is just the tip of the iceberg and we will never know what lies below the surface unless we decide to adopt an evolutionary perspective.

The nature of regulation

Nature is teeming with groups that are well regulated to achieve shared objectives, from single cells to multicellular organisms and social insect colonies. Exploitation from within is an ever-present danger for biological groups, no less than human groups, and biological regulatory systems include sophisticated defences that might be new to our imagination. We should consult nature for new ideas about regulation, just as we do for new ideas about pharmaceuticals.  

We are vastly more cooperative than any other primate species. Our capacity for cooperation evolved genetically and takes place spontaneously in small groups, at least when certain conditions are met. ‘Spontaneous’ does not mean ‘simple’: vision is spontaneous but the neurobiology of vision is mind-bogglingly complex. Similarly, the innate psychological mechanisms that enable us to cooperate spontaneously in small groups are complex and must be discovered by scientific research, even though we employ them at every waking moment.

In a nutshell, cooperation takes place ‘naturally’ in small groups when norms agreed upon by consensus can be easily enforced at low cost to the enforcers. Most of us are happy to be solid citizens and even to dedicate our lives to shared objectives, but we’re also tempted to cheat the system, some of us more than others. We must agree on the dos and don’ts, and transgressions must be easy to detect and punish. It sounds simple, but chimps will never achieve what comes naturally to us because we have been bred to cooperate in this way for many thousands of generations.

Alexis de Tocqueville got it right when he wrote in 1835: “The village or township is the only association that is so perfectly natural that… it seems to constitute itself.” Evolutionary theory is required to take this insight seriously and build upon it to understand how larger human associations – such as the nations of France and the US, which de Tocqueville compared so perceptively in Democracy in America – can also function as well-regulated units. Large-scale human societies evolved over a period of millennia by a process of cultural evolution.

Even though politicians and their expert advisers think about culture all the time, they do not think about it as an evolutionary process, differing in some respects from the process of genetic evolution but otherwise similar. Bringing the study of cultural change inside the orbit of modern evolutionary theory is a profound reorientation that leads to many new possibilities. For example, it raises the question of whether the modern nation state, which arose over a period of centuries in Europe in the context of constant warfare, is an appropriate model for transplanting elsewhere in the world, such as modern-day Afghanistan or Africa.

Whenever the environment changes, adaptations to previous environments can become mismatched with the new environment and go tragically wrong. Consider the plight of baby sea turtles. When they hatch at night and emerge from the sand onto the open beach, they are attracted to reflected light, which for millions of years has caused them to head toward the sea. Their genetically evolved adaptation makes them head inland when a row of brightly lit beach houses is built on the other side of the beach. The only solutions are either to allow the turtles to adapt genetically to their new environment – requiring many generations, countless deaths and a strong likelihood of extinction – or to perform an environmental intervention, such as shielding the lights from beach houses or collecting the turtles and carrying them to water.

How many failures of human regulation are comparable with the turtle example? In addition to genetically evolved adaptations that are mismatched with our current environment, how about cultural adaptations to past environments? These questions can only be addressed from a genetic and cultural evolutionary perspective.

Getting started

Adding evolutionary theory to the policymaking toolkit does not necessarily mean starting from scratch. There are already world-class authorities who employ the evolutionary perspective in their own work and call for its more widespread adoption. A recent conference on ‘The Nature of Regulation’, organised by the EI, together with the National Evolutionary Synthesis Centre, illustrated the degree to which the evolutionary community is poised to expand beyond the biological sciences. Participants included economists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, psychologists, neurobiologists, ecologists, theoretical biologists, social insect biologists and animal behaviourists. Communication was possible because everyone spoke the common language of evolutionary theory.

Yet it is also important to appreciate the magnitude of the task. Most of the theories that currently guide public policy are developed without reference to evolutionary theory. Neoclassical economics was originally inspired by physics and led to an enormous body of formal theory based on assumptions that are required for mathematical tractability but that make no sense from an evolutionary perspective.

Even the new field of behavioural economics, which attempts to replace Homo economicus with a more reasonable conception of human nature, is inspired primarily by a narrow slice of psychology (cognitive heuristics and biases) and has yet to engage seriously with evolutionary theory.

The reason that everyone accepts physics and chemistry is not because they are better supported by factual evidence than evolution, but because they are so useful in our everyday lives. Evolution will become not only acceptable but also irresistible to politicians and public alike as soon as it is shown to be useful for understanding and improving the human condition. Twenty years is a reasonable estimate for looking back and saying “How did we survive so long without evolutionary theory?” – but only if we start adding it to the policymaking toolkit now.

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David Sloan Wilson is SUNY distinguished professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University and co-founder of the Evolution Institute.

Evolution and the Social Brain David Sloan Wilson is at the vanguard of a new breed of evolutionary psychologists who talk unabashedly about how genes function in a cultural context – that is, within the context of human social practices such as rearing children, gossiping or taking part in rituals and storytelling traditions. His work investigates how genes, culture and individual choices interact to generate complex social phenomena. How does all this relate to policy? The RSA’s Social Brain project has been examining how research in neuroscience and the behavioural sciences relates to politics and policy in contemporary Britain. To a large extent, we have taken the same evolutionary approach as Wilson. On the one hand, we have recognised the constraints that our long-evolved brains have put on the way we organise social practices in order to protect against our psychological frailties; on the other, we have looked at what kind of social practices might be important in realising the full potential of our brains. For example, basic capabilities that we associate with being human, such as exercising self-control and planning for the long term, are not especially well served by our brains. We have the ability to learn them but, as Wilson points out, this requires practice, social support and the right environments and incentives. If these are not sufficiently available through the culture we live in, the capability becomes that much harder to learn. The upshot of taking this approach to policy is that we can identify some general obstacles to nurturing beneficial human behaviour. This leads not to genetic determinism but to the pressing need to generate social practices that work with, not against, our brains. This supports a kind of ‘third way’: one that takes seriously the one-nation conservative emphasis on the importance of responsibility, families, communities and social norms, but that also heeds social-democratic concerns about the inequalities that result from social and material deprivation. This approach should not lead to one-size-fits-all policy directives. The human capabilities that policy might seek to encourage are best served by being learned and practised through the tacit social norms and habits that people implicitly understand and possess. These will vary from community to community, so policy should be concerned with enabling the amendment, reinforcement and expansion of social practices already in existence. To this end, the Social Brain project is carrying out research into new ways of understanding human behaviour. We will share the results with frontline public service workers who can use their ‘expertise by experience’ to think creatively about improvements in productivity and effectiveness. From an evolutionary perspective, any policy initiatives that arise from this research will have only been successful, just as Wilson suggests, when new or amended practices become self-sustaining, like de Tocqueville’s “village or township” that “seems to constitute itself”. Matt Grist is senior researcher for the Social Brain project. Find out more You can read Matt Grist’s pamphlet – Changing the subject: how new ways of thinking about human behaviour might shape politics, policy and practice (December 2009).