Science and Politics, Libertarian and Socialist

My foray into evolutionary biology began in the mid 1990s, when I discovered a deep paradox. All animals are evolved for communal behaviors, while standard 20th Century Darwinism predicts that they should be selfish. 

When I say “communal behaviors”, I don’t necessarily mean cooperating on a large scale or doing favors for one another in small groups. Certainly those behaviors exist, but they are far from universal. The deep communal behaviors that are built into animal biology are sex and death.  Sex is the sharing of genes. Sexual reproduction reduces fitness by a factor of two compared to clonal reproduction (this was politely referred to as the “cost of males” before men became sensitized to microaggressions). Death is programmed into the life plan of almost all animals with a fitness cost that varies widely from one eco-niche to another, but it can be even more than the factor of two for sex.

I learned (in the 1990s) that conventional evolutionary theory had no answers concerning sex and aging. For the former, they talked about the “masterpiece of nature” without being able to offer a coherent explanation. For the latter, they twisted themselves out of shape to deny the copious evidence that aging and obligate death are evolutionary adaptations. 

How do sex and aging and other “altruistic” traits evolve? One hint is that, though they are bad for the individual, they are good for the community. Sex (gene sharing) assures that a community is diverse, and less likely to succumb to extinction during high-stress events like famines and epidemics. Aging helps to keep populations diverse by assuring that a large birth rate won’t lead to population overshoot.

I threw myself at this project with the skill I knew from my academic work in physics: computer modeling. Nowadays, Neil Ferguson has taught us that you can get a computer model to produce any desired result just by adjusting the input parameters. But for five years, I had only false starts and was unable to produce aging from simulations of natural selection, even when I manipulated the input settings. The cost to the individual is too high, and the benefit to the community is too low. (Which is exactly what people in the field who had more experience than I were telling me.)

My breakthrough

I credit Damon Centola, when he was still a grad student at Tufts, for sharing his results modeling a community of predators. The key insight, which came clear to me only gradually is that 

All animal communities share common pools of food species that they depend on. It is an existential threat to the community if the food species is depleted by overconsumption. All animal communities are highly motivated to cooperate in the preservation of their food pool.

Individual animals must back off from what would otherwise be their most direct path to selective success, i.e., to eat as much as possible, turn the food into reproductive capacity, and thus dominate the gene pool of the next generation (which is the neo-Darwinist definition of fitness). 

The direct result of cooperation over the prey pool is to curb predation. But once it is established that no individual can maximize his evolutionary advantage, the knock-on effect is to encourage a spectrum of different cooperative behaviors. As I said, this insight gelled for me only over the course of several years. 

Plants can behave selfishly and grab all the light in the vicinity, investing it in growth and reproduction. There is no danger of killing the sun. But animals must curb their selfishness to preserve their common food source. 

Animals are evolved to preserve the ecosystem on which we depend. This is a communal adaptation that goes back half a billion years.

Politics

I’m a libertarian by temperament. I bristle at people telling me what to do. I distrust authority. I am a strong believer in freedom of expression, medical freedom, freedom to congregate, freedom to travel, freedom of association, freedom to march in the streets. I am an uncompromising advocate of freedom to practice religion, though I have no organized religious community. For me, medical freedom means bodily autonomy. I side with the pro-choice Democrats and with the Republicans who oppose vaccine mandates. I interpret the Fourth Amendment literally to say our government should not be routinely collecting information about us. I deplore our coercive legal system, with its threats and plea bargains and power imbalance between the State and the accused. I protested the 2001 Patriot Act and its successors

                               Marx           —           Faure          —           von Mises

The government has a duty of transparency. The individual has a right to privacy. In the computer age, this is turned upside down. Your government spies on you, and what they don’t get directly they seek from Google — and Google is happy to comply. Meanwhile, government secrecy has metastasized to the point where decisions are made in secret, the data on which those decisions are based are secret, votes are counted in secret, agreements between government and corporations are secret. There are whole areas of research (advanced technologies, UFOs, bioweapons) that are outsourced to private corporations for the sole purpose of evading FOIA requests.

Since 2016, our Federal government has conducted a campaign to undermine the First Amendment. They promote the idea that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to Donald Trump, or it doesn’t apply to Julian Assange, or Alex Jones, or it must be tempered to protect public health, or it is limited to truthful speech, or the government’s idea of truthful speech. You’ve seen the video with 100 “independent” commentators intoning in unison that disinformation is “extremely dangerous to our democracy”. The Orwellian reality, of course, is that papering over the First Amendment is extremely dangerous to our democracy. If the government gets to decide what’s true, they can justify anything they wish to do. Censorship is a shortcut to tyranny.

In all these ways, I am comfortably aligned with most libertarians. But I part company when it comes to the libertarian credo of the sanctity of private property.

Private property is not a God-given right, and it is certainly not “natural law”. The earth doesn’t belong to me, and the fact that I dig up a diamond doesn’t imply that my ownership is an unalienable right. Not only doesn’t the earth belong to me, it doesn’t belong to Bill Gates or Exxon Mobil or the Bureau of Land Management. Chief Seattle was closer to the truth when he told us that we hold the earth in sacred trust for the seventh generation to come. 

I do not believe that God gave us dominion over “the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” I believe that the welfare of the Earth’s ecology is a fundamental value, beyond human notions of right and wrong.

That humans cannot live without a living ecosystem is almost beside the point. I do not disagree with Charles Eisenstein when he speaks of nature as sacred.

By some accounts, the First People, before Columbus, were not hunter-gatherers, nor were they farmers and herdsmen; rather they saw their role as managing their local ecosystem so as to enrich its bounty, making the earth more abundant to justify their taking of a dividend for their sustenance. They preserved grasslands for bison, and planted a mix of synergistic trees to create forests full of fruit and nuts. Whether or not the Sioux or the Lakotas lived this way, it is the way we should be living, the best way for humans to thrive into a wide-open future.

Of course, the economy functions best if people are rewarded for their work, for their service, for their ideas. It is appropriate that some become wealthy while others have just enough to live in modest comfort. But no man’s work product is his alone. Every product owes its existence to the commonweal at least as much as to the one who brought it to market. The most creative and most productive of us stands on the shoulders of giants.

A friend went to work for a hedge fund immediately after graduating with a math degree. He has a talent for programming computers to buy stocks and sell them 1/100 of a second later. He has tens of millions of dollars in the bank before age 30. Another friend is a talented painter with a highly-developed aesthetic. He has put his unique artistic expression aside to paint portraits for judges and mayors. Still, he has trouble paying rent for a shared house in a dangerous Philadelphia neighborhood, and he can’t afford the repairs that his old car needs to pass inspection. Musicians, writers, and people in the helping professions struggle, while bureaucrats and corporate yes-men thrive.

What we call a “free market” produces not only obscene disparities between rich and poor, but fails the most rudimentary test of justice in choosing winners and losers.

There are people whose contribution to society is worth millions of dollars, and it is right that they should be rewarded with wealth. But no one makes a billion dollars honestly.

Are people intrinsically selfish and lazy?

What would happen if we all agreed that every person has a right to a room to live in and healthy food to eat? Would people settle for the minimum and stop doing things that are socially useful? Or, on the contrary, would they be freed to pursue their highest calling and contribute to society with their own unique gifts?

All Western democracies are built on the idea of a “social contract”, attributed to Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704). Their ideas also form the basis for economic theories of homo economicus, the “rational man”. The presumption is that humans are, by nature, selfish and lazy loners. Wellbeing is a personal, individual quality which people seek separately. Without some kind of enforcement from a central authority, we would be forever taking advantage of one another — or worse — for purely selfish ends. The “social contract” idea is that we participate in society and consent to be governed by rules because we have more to gain, in the way of safety and prosperity, than we have to lose in the way of limits on our freedom.

I dissent from this view. Sure, there are people who will deceive you or steal from you at every opportunity. They’re called sociopaths and they represent 2-5% of the population, depending who you ask. In East Asia, the percentages are considerably under 1%. 

Most people find meaning in life primarily from social relationships. We are highly motivated to cooperate. We feel good when we can be of service. 

Cooperation and work for the common good — this is how we are wired. Freed from destitution and freed from government coercion, most of us would choose service over selfishness.

Rocky Mountain Locust: a A Morality Tale

In the Olympics of individual Darwinian competition, the Rocky Mountain locust was a gold medalist. They could eat anything that’s green, turning it efficiently into locust eggs. If they completely denuded the local greenery, they could fly hundreds of miles to the next crime scene.

In the late nineteenth century, the American Midwest was plagued periodically by incursions of Rocky Mountain locusts. The appearance of this pest was devastating and unforgettable. In 1874, a swarm was described as being larger than California. When a cloud descended, every leaf disappeared from every tree for miles around. The ground was thick with egg masses, ready to renew the plague the following year.

The last reported sighting of a Rocky Mountain locust was in 1902. There are preserved specimens in museums and laboratories today, but no living locusts. The Rocky Mountain locust is extinct. 

Communism is another morality tale

Nobody owns the Earth, or any piece of the Earth. Nobody owns nature, or has the right to blow up mountain tops and clear-cut forests for private profit. 

The institutional solution is that stewardship of land and resources should be managed collectively, through a democratically-elected government. The danger of this approach is that so much power is concentrated in the hands of the people who make decisions about resource allocation. In the 20th century, experiments with communism have not inspired confidence.

But many indigenous cultures thrive without rules or bureaucracies. People hunt and share game with the village. People care for themselves and for their neighbors. Children are the precious charge of the community as a whole.

This suggests a path of decentralization, freedom, trust in the individual and trust in cultural norms rather than rules backed by a monopoly on violence. A hundred years ago this philosophy was known anarchism, a word whose meaning is distorted beyond recognition in today’s discourse.

So, I’d advocate return to local governance and direct democracy among Dunbar-sized communities, small enough to fit in a Town Hall meeting.

But we have global supply chains, global communications, global emigration. Any of these systems can become destructive if not managed; and yet we have no global institutions (or even national institutions) that we can trust. The international organizations and multi-national corporations are corrupt beyond redemption. I have no solutions.

The bottom line

Animals are evolved to curb their selfishness for the sake of preserving the ecosystems on which we all depend. When a hyper-competitive culture violates evolved wisdom, it is riding for a fall. In our hearts, we each have a place that knows this. But our lives are ruled by our institutions, not our hearts; and our institutions are distorted by foundational ideas of separation, individual competition, and private ownership.

We are and by rights ought to be free to do what we want, to think our own thoughts, to go where we want and associate with whom we want. The right of private ownership is not on the same level with these fundamental rights.

I want to live in a world where everyone is cared for with a decent minimum of food, shelter, education, and medical care. I want to live in a world where everyone is free.