In Darwin and Political Theory, Denis Dutton reviews Rubin’s Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom:
Evolutionary psychology gives hope against this pessimism. Political philosophers are right to posit a natural background that underlies construction of political systems, evolutionary psychologists say, but it required Darwin ?nally to explain that background to us. A lucid attempt to spell out the implications evolution for politics has now been published by Paul H. Rubin, a professor of economics and law at Emory University, in the form of Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom (Rutgers University Press, $25.00, paperback). Some of his conclusions are what anyone familiar with evolutionary psychology might suppose even without picking up the book. Others come as a surprise, and were unexpected even by Rubin himself. The book is both fascinating and unpredictable.
It sounds like a book I’ll have to pick up — or at least add to the old wish list.
Dutton gives a brief primer on human evolution:
The scene of evolution is the Environment of Evolutionary Adapted-ness, the EEA, essentially the Pleistocene, the whole, long period lasting from 1.6 million years ago up until the shift to the Holocene with the invention of agriculture and large settlements 10,000 years ago. Our present intellectual constitution was achieved by about 50,000 years ago, or 40,000 before the Holocene. Keep in mind the immensity of this time scale: calculating at twenty years for a generation, there were 80,000 generations of humans and proto-humans in the Pleistocene, while there have been a mere 500 generations since agriculture and the ?rst cities. It was in the earlier, much longer period that selective pressures created genetically modern humans.
From there, he reviews “a few basic components of hunter-gatherer political structures as described by Rubin” — or, more accurately, the modern, political consequences of having evolved in bands of about 100 hunter-gatherers:
Group size.
Dominance Hierarchies.
Envy in a zero-sum society.
Risk and welfarism.
Youth, defense, and monogamy.
Untenable libertarianism.
Read the whole article for the details.