Why politics needs more Darwinists – and fewer economists

An ardently left-wing friend of mine is travelling over from Thailand next week to look for a private school for his daughter. My email to him was short. It read ‘Charles Darwin 1, Karl Marx 0’.

Nobody among the sharp-elbowed middle class ever allows his political convictions to override the pursuit of a good education for his children. They will pay or move house or, if those two approaches fail, rapidly reawaken a long-dormant interest in Catholicism.

One reason for this inconsistency is explained in four words by the evolutionary theorist and sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, by common consent the world’s leading expert on ants. His simple observation on Marxism was ‘Beautiful theory. Wrong species.’

What Wilson explained is that among ants and some other insects, a kind of socialism can work: when you are infertile and closely interrelated to your cohort, the survival and propagation of your genetic code is served by subordinating your individual interests to the good of the colony. Humans aren’t like that. We are a social species of a different kind: co-operative and competitive at the same time (like two women in a kitchen). In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt memorably describes the human make-up as being 90 per cent chimp, 10 per cent bee.

You would think that this insight, combined with recent advances in other fields of evolutionary science and psychology, might influence public policy. It could help explain why higher inheritance tax, while desirable in many ways, is a political no-no. And it might cast light on why education may be a much tougher problem to solve than health: while we may want everyone else to be equally healthy (bee), we want our children to receive a better education than our neighbour’s children (chimp).