The Origin of Politics - Kibbutzim, Chimps, and Children
Would you like some genetics in your politics?
By: Nicholas Wade
Published: 2025
256 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
Wade offers up an evolutionary psychology account of how to make politics actually function; how, when you try to disconnect politics and the exercise of power from core human nature, as shaped by evolution, things go off the rails.
What authorial biases should I be aware of?
Nicholas Wade worked as a science writer for the NYT for 30 years. For the bulk of those years he was the science and health editor. He left the paper in 2012 and in 2014 he published A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. The book argued that human evolution is ongoing and that it has been “recent, copious, and regional”. The regional part got him “cancelled” or at least it attracted a lot of negative attention, since it implied that differing national outcomes might be partly genetic in nature rather than wholly the result of chance, culture, or colonization.
Who should read this book?
If you’re looking for a strong pushback against blank-slateism along with a defense of the traditional nation-state (and of tradition in general). Or if you’re looking for another reason to worry about decreasing fertility.
What does the book have to say about the future?
The aforementioned fertility decline looms large in his warnings about the future, but as I mentioned he also warns about any policy that tries to exercise power in ignorance of evolutionary drives. One of the major drives is tribalism and immigration directly conflicts with that instinct. All of this points to the potential for a demographically declining society with lots of disorder.
Specific thoughts: Children are the ultimate civilizational scorecard
According to Wade, in the beginning we were all hunter-gatherers and there were no tribes, there were just extended families. And one can usefully draw comparisons between this arrangement and the functioning of a chimp society. We might call both of these structures proto-tribes, but humans went on to develop real tribes:
Tribes began to form after the beginning of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, because they were an effective way of organizing the more populous societies that were then beginning to emerge. They provided defense, a necessity for people who had settled down and had fixed property and fields to protect. Tribal organization also established internal order by making lineages responsible for settling disputes between members. The glue of tribal society was kinship, the basic human instinct for supporting family and close relatives.
We see here the core process. Some problem arises, some threat needs to be dealt with, or an opportunity presents itself. Through cultural evolution, on top of already embedded evolutionary impulses, humans gradually figure out what works. But as they do so, there’s always a balancing act between the created systems and humans’ natural proclivities. This means that forward movement is gradual. If it’s gradual enough, evolution encodes some of the cultural norms as individuals find reproductive success within the new system.
Through this process we have eventually developed several very effective systems. But it was often a fight, and we forget how difficult that fight was and how long it took. Progress is possible, but you can’t just snap your fingers and go from where things are to where you want them to be.
Wade brings up many examples of effective systems, but I really like the example of monogamy. (As someone who’s very monogamous, I’m probably biased.) Monogamy is not how things worked in the distant past, and in many societies it’s still not how it works, but for a variety of reasons several societies have adopted it and it has turned out to be a very successful adaptation:
The rule came into prominence in ancient Greece and Rome, and was then amplified by the Christian Church throughout the Roman Empire and its successor European states. Perhaps from imitation of the Europeans’ globe-spanning colonies, monogamy became the law or custom throughout most of the world. Polygamy was banned in China in 1953 and for Hindus in India in 1955.
A cultural rule has thus been imposed, largely during historical times, on a prominent feature of human nature, that of male desire to leave as many progeny as possible. Rich men may be worse off for it, but the substantial benefits of monogamy to any society are hard to ignore…
Polygamous societies traditionally resort to sending surplus young men off to war, but provoking strife with neighbors does not always turn out well. Instituting a rule of monogamy, however, averts this threat. By removing a source of injustice and resentment, monogamy gives every man a stake in the existing order and vastly furthers social cohesion.
So powerful have the beneficent effects of monogamy seemed to some commentators that they suggest the rule is a necessity for any society to grow beyond a certain size. Others have speculated that monogamy was a force that propelled the rise of the West. “There can be no doubt that there is strong correlation between “nations becoming very large and the imposition of monogamy on their citizens,” say the biologist Richard D. Alexander and others. “It is almost as if no nation can become both quite large and quite unified except under socially imposed monogamy.”
The key thing I want to draw your attention to is how long it took for monogamy to become entrenched enough that its benefits were obvious. You can’t just size up society, decide it’s deficient in some manner, make a sweeping change to correct that deficiency and expect it to stick.
As an example of such an attempt Wade opens with the example of early Israeli kibbutzim.
In their passion for equality, the founders of the kibbutzim (the Hebrew plural of kibbutz) instituted two radical policies. First, they abolished pay and private property. Second, they dissolved the human family as a social unit.
You can guess how this went. It basically lasted about a generation, which is a testament to the founders’ passion for equality. But once people were born without that strong passion—people who hadn’t known the problems the founders were rebelling against—the two artificially imposed systems collapsed.
What’s interesting is that the kibbutz experiment is not as crazy as it seems. Hunter-gatherers have no pay and no private property, so on some level you would think it would be easy, but as Wade continues to point out evolution is ongoing and we’re now at a point, whether through cultural evolution or biological, where people found the arrangement to be intolerable.
So the question is: how do you know if you’re moving too fast, or if you’re trying something similar to the kibbutzim? Here’s when Wade gets into a bit of an anti-woke, anti-progressive polemic. And he’s not wrong, but most of us have probably heard these arguments a hundred times before. But the man is 83, so I’m inclined to cut him some slack. And once you get past that he makes a very compelling point, one I’ve been thinking about myself for awhile.
The whole point is reproductive success, and the fact that we are not finding reproductive success is exhibit A for the idea that we’re following the wrong path, or if we’re on the right path we’re moving down it too fast. Tribalism, monogamy, and even the kibbutzim either improved fertility or kept it level. But what we’re doing right now, whatever that might be, is driving our society and civilization towards extinction.
Tribalism and monogamy worked by taking evolutionary drives and using them to create a path to cohesion and order. The story of the kibbutzim shows what happens when you try leaving the path, though even that radical experiment didn’t affect fertility. Somehow, what we’re doing is even worse on that metric. Wade calls this current fertility decline “the unchosen path to extinction”. I’m not sure I agree with the “unchosen” part. I think we’ve chosen to leave the path and die in the wilderness. I’m just not sure why.
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One of the core evolutionary drives, present in chimps and 21st century humans, is status seeking. I fear my status seeking impulse is weaker than it should be. In fact I generally find it to be “icky”. That’s the whole point of trying to wrap calls for subscribing and checking out my other stuff in some humorous bit. (Note that I’m not claiming this humor always, or even mostly, succeeds.) But perhaps I should just come out and say. “I crave status! Give me more status! Read my stuff and exalt it!”