EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND DEMOCRACY

As a physiological chemist of sorts, I do not see the great divide between our physical being and our mental being, our body and our mind that some see. It is all biochemistry; it can be no other way.  Biologist can feel confident in making statements such as living things do not like extremes in anything. This is what adaptive evolution is all about. We all understand that a giraffe’s neck is proportionality too long if you are a mouse, while the neck of a mouse is too short if you are a giraffe. At the same time, among giraffes a neck could be too long to support survival just as to could be too short. The same is true of personalities, there are averages and there is variability.

Some aggression is good but too much can be bad. Some selfishness if good but too much is bad. These are taken from a long list of emotion, notions, beliefs, concepts, feeling etc. The lists are so long that they appear to be analog, one blending into the next as a continuum. This means that personalities are unique just as individual DNA is unique, as everyone who watches crime scene investigations TV knows. The only way we can cope with the mass of personality types (7 billion) is shoe horn them into manageable groups. Thus, we all recognize the product of genetic determinism but fail to apply them as general social concepts. We know, for example, that women act like women and men act like men. We also know we cannot mash everyone into these deterministic groups any more than we can tell you what the anatomic length of a giraffe’s neck will be when conceived.

I believe greed and altruism, gregariousness and individualism, aggression and shyness, among many, many other personality traits are genetically determined and amalgamated in to unique personalities. This is the basis of my belief that a person’s politics are genetically determined. The idea is that we can squeeze people into political groups (parties), some more easily than others can recognizing there is significant overlap. Much like height, the extremes are easy to tell but when we approach average, we are describing no one—we cannot be precise—still we can tell some Republicans from the Democrats just as we can tell tall people from short people. Some refuse to accept this idea because if we accept genetic dominance we sacrifice our freewill to join or be active or not be active in the political party of our choice. We cannot eschew learning. What we learn modifies genetic determinism but cannot change it. Time after time, experience has shown that, for example,  a genetic female personality cannot learn to be a male personality or visa versa regardless of anatomy.

When it comes to politics, consider hawks and doves. Can they accept which one they are? Does it matter which one they want to be? Which is best does not matter? Like political personalities they exist in a rationally arrived at equilibrium. Of course, hawks and doves are different genera, but my premise is that equally divergent personalities as represented by hawks and doves can exist in human beings. Doves (liberals) exist in greater numbers while hawks (conservatives), the ones that feed on doves, live in smaller numbers but dominate individual situations—a rational equilibrium.  Hawks are leaders and altruists are followers. In civic terms, the much larger House of Representatives (mass of people) balance the economic elite (senate). An American form of government designed to get away from having a King (economic elite) and his subjects (followers) tempered with a system of voting—a democracy. It seems a long way from biochemistry but to me our government is genetically determined form of social organization: a pecking order.

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