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I have a blog dedicated to understanding how political psychologies evolved, their purposes, and how to debate with them. The fundamental premise is here, and it is that Liberalism and Conservatism are outgrowths of more primitive strategies known in Evolutionary Biology as r and K-selected psychologies.

These psychologies are designed to adapt an organism to the r and K-selective environments, namely an environment of free resource availability, and an environment of limited resource availability. In short, r's (Liberals) are designed to operate in an environment where they (and their offspring) don't need to compete for resources, due to the free availability. They don't need to produce highly fit offspring, so they avoid fighting, mate promiscuously with whoever, parent singly, sexualize children, and have no loyalty to in-group.

K's (Conservatives) are designed for an environment where those resources are less common, and they are designed to produce fit offspring, capable of competing. They are aggressive/competitive, mate competitively (through careful selection and monopolizing mates through monogamy) rear children intensively, in two parent families, delay mating of offspring until maximally fit and mature, and have high loyalty to in-group to promote group success in competition.

There is more on all of this on the parent page here, which is where this page is from, here.

This graphic also describes the theory quite well.

I know, this all seems to not be important, but I think this understanding offers insights into how to defeat Liberals in the rhetorical domain, as I discussed in yesterday's post, here.

Thank you.

I get your parallelism between evolutionary strategies and human lifestyles.

But I don’t think it works out in fact. Any evolutionary or genetic issue based on differential reproductive success would take at minimum many, many generations to show up in a population.

Our present socio/economic/political environment is at most only a few generations old.

I find it extremely odd that you seem to be proposing that the historical expansion into new territories and other risk-taking was primarily by those we would today call liberals. The opposite seems a lot more likely to me.

Finally, “survival of the fittest,” which of course really means survival of the genes of the fittest, is totally turned on its head in modern societies. In every “advanced” society those who are most likely to pass on their genes are those who are least socially and economically successful by the terms of that society. There is a direct inverse relationship between economic success and reproduction. See the movie Idiocracy.

A word or advice: When using an abbreviation (r/K) you should at least clarify what it means at least the first time you use it. I have no idea what it means and hence, no compunction to read past it’s first use.

The left/libertarians and their abortion and homosexualizing the military, open borders and the homosexual agenda, their anti-conservatism seems pretty backwards to me.

Bookmark for later

Fortunately, the Liberal bunnies found birth control, though they make up for it with proselytizing, incentivizing, and immigrating.

Islamists seem to combine the fertility of bunnies with the aggression of wolves.

First, you should probably explain your terms right off. I still don't know what r and K stand for and why those letters were chosen. I didn't know until I started writing this that r and K weren't something that you came up with.

Secondly, I'm not at all sure that, say, the Republican states represent a truly more competitive environment than the Democrat states. Surely New York is more competitive, more K than Montana.

Third, you fudge things by associating female aggressiveness with r environments and fatherly abandonment, when others would simply give women the credit for pursuing the same competitive strategies that men do.

Fourth, it's pretty clear that larger smarter animals might have a greater potential for fellow feeling (at least with their own kind). If you have a small brain and a short-lifespan you're not going to be able to form complex relationships. But the human world is more complex than that. Nature doesn't constrain us as much as it does a rabbit or hamster (but are our human wolves and sharks really as capable of loyalty or fellow feeling as less aggressive humans?)

Fifth, it's clear from everything I can see that more competitive environments (New Jersey, Connecticut) do put off breeding until the young are more able to compete and do invest more in education (at least for the chosen few). The problem with the theory is that those environments are politically liberal.

The conservative states are the ones where more people marry and have children earlier even when it may get in the way of education. So it looks to me like there isn't the kind of clean fit between your environmental theories and the political lessons you want to draw from them.

Of course, the problem is that there are different populations within a given environment who follow different strategies, say wealthy suburbanites and poorer urban or rural populations. But the differences here aren't always ideological. Scarsdale and the South Bronx follow very different strategies but vote the same way (and maybe you could find parallels in the conservative parts of the country as well). There isn't one "liberal" evolutionary strategy. There are two (at least if we judge by how people actually vote).

Theories like yours might have fit politics better some years ago, when wealthier areas of the country were more conservative. Nowadays, though, some of the richest people are very liberal. Contraceptives also throw off your theory. Promiscuity isn't necessarily associated with many offspring. I also have to wonder, comparing the two halves of the country where people really start having sex earlier or whether there is really that much difference between liberal and conservative areas (leaving aside a few areas that really are distinctive).

I haven't gone through all the ins and outs of your theory and didn't want to be very confrontational, but now I have to wonder. This explains all of politics? The people you approve of resemble the larger, smarter mammals we ascribe positive qualities to and those you disapprove of resemble the smaller, stupider, swarming creatures? Isn't there something reductive and creepy about your theory? Or maybe it's just a reworking of the ant and the grasshopper or the tortoise and the hare.