Evolutionary federalism: A research program

I recently got accepted to do a PhD in political philosophy at the University of Ghent (UGent). I will conduct a Darwinian evolutionary analysis of U.S. constitutional thought. The core of the research project is detailed below.

Comments and recommendations are welcome, both to improve the research project as such and to enhance my future pitches for research grants. If you are interested in collaborating on this or related research, send me a direct message or email me at craig[dot]willy[at]ugent[dot]be.

* * *

Human nature and politics are inextricably interrelated. One’s view of one will necessarily inform the other. As James Madison said in defending a system of checks and balances in the U.S. Constitution:

It may be a [negative] reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

Reflections on how human nature ought to inform ethics and politics go back to ancient times, as in the works of Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, and others. But as children of the scientific revolution, our conception of human nature has fundamentally changed as a result of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. It follows that evolutionary science can shed light on politics.

The first step of my research will be to describe a methodology for analyzing political systems in terms of gene-culture coevolution (GCC). That might sound high-fallutin’, but it basically means answering three questions for any polity (or any other cultural group, like a religion):

1. How does the regime influence demography? This sums up the culture’s impact on the gene pool. Mechanisms may include (anti)natalism, immigration policy, restrictions on intermarriage, and eugenics.

2. How does the regime influence culture and itself evolve? This would look at how the regime encodes mechanisms for cultural stability and change. (E.g., reverence for Founders and foundational texts may promote fidelity, free speech may promote cultural experimentation and change). This is likely to be the most complex part of the analysis.

3. How does the regime promote survival in inter-group competition? Polities and religions are group entities and as such must also be analyzed in terms of group selection through successful competition with other groups. This may include mechanisms promoting group loyalty, group size, and, more darkly, overpowering of out-groups (this can take the form of assimilation, conversion, or elimination).

Understanding how cultural groups like states impact genetics, persist and evolve over time, and succeed in inter-group competition can help us better understand the human evolutionary trajectory more generally—past, present, and into the future.

Understanding group gene-culture coevolution can help us understand, for example, which forms of social organization can survive inter-group competition, which forms can remain adaptive and thus survive future ecological threats, and which forms are most likely to promote human flourishing (or any other human goods we may decide are desirable). Evopolitical analysis can thus yield very practical recommendations for political systems and policies.

There is much debate and study among evolutionary biologists today about the emergence of groups and the impact of culture in evolution. The emergence of culture would appear to be a major evolutionary transition—on the same scale as the first emergence of multi-cellular organisms or of sexual reproduction—because it fundamentally changes the nature of evolutionary processes, namely by enabling game-changing levels of scale and specialization, and/or by changing the process of change itself (including so-called evolvability).

Culture is what Joe Henrich calls the secret of our success as a species, enabling unprecedently rapid and novel behavioral change and expansion of our capabilities through technology. Culture is what enabled our ancestors to expand out of a limited African ecological niche to just about every terrestrial habitat on Earth, a feat accomplished as far as I know by no other species (except, I would guess, microbes and domesticated animals piggybacking on us).

In his last book, the late Edward O. Wilson stressed that humanity’s conquest of earth was social, meaning it was enabled by our unique capacity for large-scale and flexible cooperation. The emergence of, evolution of, and competition between cultural groups—like tribes, states, and religions—have been crucial to this.

Despite this centrality of cultural groups, relatively little of the evolutionary literature, even that on gene-culture coevolution, actually looks at specific cultural groups, their impact, and what makes for their success. An exception is Darwin’s Cathedral by David Sloan Wilson (the other big Wilson of evo studies), which applies evolutionary thinking to religion and lays out a research program for evolutionary analysis of religious groups drawing from humanistic and social science literature.

While many evolutionary scientists seem to prefer study to be abstract and/or mathematical, D. S. Wilson points out that Darwin’s theory of evolution itself was largely based on descriptive studies from botany and zoology. The humanities (especially history) and social sciences abound in arguably similar descriptive studies of human cultures that are ripe for evolutionary analysis. Though Darwin’s Cathedral was published in 2002, it appears few scholars have taken up his research program of evolutionary analysis of human cultural groups.

Having developed a methodology for analyzing cultural groups, I would apply this methodology to the United States through a careful reading of foundational political texts defining the American regime. Texts to be covered include:

1. Texts of the Founding era (~1775-1815): The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, significant texts of various Founding Fathers (Franklin, Paine, Washington, Adams, Jefferson…). This would also at least briefly cover significant texts informing the early American cultural background, such as earlier Puritan thinkers.

2. Texts of the Civil War and Reconstruction (~1860-1887): This period was essentially a Second Founding that redefined the American regime. Authors covered would include Abraham Lincoln and the promoters of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments which lay the foundations for a radical transformation and expansion of the role of the federal government.

3. Texts of the post-Darwin era (~1859-1935): This period saw both the zenith of Darwinian influence in American thought in general, including political thought, and the Progressive reforms which set the foundations for the expansion of government (both state and federal) ever since.

   1. Relevant thinkers include Oliver Wendell Holmes (who marks the penetration of evolutionary thinking in U.S. jurisprudence), Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson (who sold his project of Progressive reform of the federal government in evolutionary terms), and the Pragmatist philosophers. To make the material of manageable size, I would focus on constitutional aspects of these thinkers.

   2. This reading will be somewhat paradoxical as it will involve assessing the evolutionary implications of historical examples of evolutionary thought. When such thought appears scientifically valid, it may be used to refine my methodology. The study may also attempt to identify when, historically, evolutionary theory was superficially or falsely used to justify political positions.

I foresee that assessing American constitutional thought’s implications for genetic change (demography) and inter-group competition will be fairly straightforward. Far more complex will be assessing American constitutional thought’s implications for cultural evolution itself. I will say a little bit at this stage as to how cultural groups may encode mechanisms for cultural evolution.

Contrary to a lot of naïve thinking, not all forms of change qualify as “evolution” in a Darwinian sense. Darwinian evolution must involve three mechanisms:

1. Hereditary transmission of characteristics to units (e.g., individuals, groups).

2. Partial heritable modification of these characteristics.

3. Competition among the units leading only some to persist.

Many entities, including non-biological ones, may fulfil these criteria and be subject to Darwinian evolutionary processes. They notably apply to cultural groups like states and religions. States and religions have mechanisms to transmit group identity (citizenship, baptism…), group traits (laws, customs, doctrines…), and potentially to create new groups (founding of colonies, founding of sects). History is in great part a graveyard of states and religions; those who have been eliminated by their rivals.

This is group selection. Darwin himself and the two evo-Wilsons argue human cooperativeness—which seems exceptional in the animal kingdom in the degree to which it extends beyond immediate genetic relatives—has emerged through group selection. Put simply, cooperative tribes, states, and religions have tended to beat and replace less cooperative tribes, states, and religions; leading humanity to become a more cooperative species over time.

States and religions have historically often used strategies promoting scale and homogeneity to defeat other groups. Oftentimes, the bigger you are, the easier it is to beat others. In addition, one can, after eliminating competitors, reduce the emergence of competitors by, for instance, restricting political life or by affirming fixed religious doctrines and crushing heresies. The Roman Empire, the Chinese empires, Catholicism, and Islam can all be said to have followed variants of these two strategies.

By eliminating competitors and their emergence, these strategies also tend to eliminate competition itself. Paradoxically, this often fatally weakens hegemonic empires and religions in the long run. Unchallenged hegemony can cause an empire or religion to become stagnant, brittle, and deceptively vulnerable, like a person who through persistent isolation has developed an unprepared immune system. The apparently powerful hegemon may then collapse or be reduced to impotence with surprising speed when a new competitor with novels traits appears.

The upshot is that long-term political success cannot be based on eliminating the competition in ways that lead to ossification and brittleness. Rather, an adaptive political regime will both adapt to external competition and have internal cultural evolutionary mechanisms. Within organisms, the immune system is such an internal evolutionary mechanism: antibodies with variable traits are semi-randomly generated to be able to respond to constantly-evolving bacterial and viral threats.

The regime-type which replaced the old universal monarchies was the capitalist nation-state. It provides for scale through intense mass participation (delimited by the boundaries of an ethno-linguistic group) and an arguably Darwinian evolutionary process in the form of the market economy. Enterprises are constantly being generated through the investment of capital, failures are ruthlessly whittled down, while those who are able to meet market demand by providing desirable goods and services acquire more capital, enabling ever-greater investments.

The capitalist process of “creative destruction” leads not only to technological advancements and their application, driven by capital investments, but also constant socioeconomic change. Whatever one thinks of the capitalist nation-state, it has proven decisively more competitive than both feudal systems and communist states.

The U.S. constitutional regime encodes many mechanisms for change which are arguably evolutionary. These include:

• Capitalism: As described above, the constant generation of new enterprises and projects through capital investment, leading to their retention and expansion of capital if these meet market demand.

• Individualism: The strong commitment to individual liberty means a great experimentation in individual lifestyles. Lifestyles that come to be perceived as more successful become prestigious and may be selected via imitation by others.

• Religious freedom: American history has always been marked by the presence, emergence, and change of religious groups. Insofar as these have different values, behaviors, and rates of reproduction, conversion, and member retention, this leads to cultural (and often genetic) change.

• Federalism: The states’ ability to experiment as “laboratories of democracy” in different areas enables new policies to constantly be tested. Successful state policies will be selected via two mechanisms: 1) Other states may imitate their policies. 2) Individuals will move to more attractive states (“voting with their feet”).

• Free speech: The ability to freely voice ideas leads, as Oliver Wendell Holmes argued, to competition in the “marketplace of ideas” in which more attractive ideas (at least to the predominant cultural actors of society) will be selected and transmitted over time.

A major part of the analysis will be to consider the extent to which each of these mechanisms can be described as evolutionary and what conditions the mechanism can be adaptive at group level (i.e., whether it fosters the survival and geopolitical competitiveness of the United States as a whole).

Internal evolutionary mechanisms can be maladaptive for the group if, for example, these weaken the polity’s capacities in geopolitical competition or lead to break-up through secession. (Within an organism, an extreme version of maladaptive internal evolution is the emergence and spread of cancer cells, ultimately leading to the death of the whole organism.)

The potential insights and benefits of this research include the following:

• A methodology for understanding the adaptiveness of cultural groups (such as states and nations) and their evolutionary impact on humanity.

• A better understanding of the rise and evolution of the United States.

• Insights into what makes for adaptive political systems able to survive by succeeding in inter-group competition and adapting to environmental changes.

• Better understanding into what forms of federal governance are adaptive may be especially relevant to make recommendations to policymakers in the United States, the European Union, and other (con)federal systems.

• Insights relevant to U.S. constitutional debates about interpreting a static vs. a “living” constitution.

So there is, roughly, what I would like to do.