Is Politics an Evolutionary Force?

Penn State evolutionists see politics interacting with natural selection to direct human evolution.

A PhysOrg headline states, “Politics can interact with evolution to shape human destiny.”  The gist of the argument by Penn State political scientist Pete Hatemi is explained in this paragraph:

The researchers said that there is an interaction between political and cultural forces and evolutionary results. Genes can shape culture and political institutions, which in turn can shape biology and physiology, passing on certain traits to future generations. The environment’s influence on adaptation and how it changes biology is better known and often easier to observe, said Hatemi, but the way culture can affect gene expressions in future generations is often harder to show and may take longer to reveal itself.

Although he didn’t equate politics with natural selection, it’s hard to see how an evolutionist could deny it; the human brain, society and politics are all manifestations of natural selection in their view.  Most people see politics involving mental choices by intelligent agents, not unguided processes of the environment.  Politics may affect future generations, to be sure, but that occurs by intelligent design (whether beneficent or malevolent).

It may not take as long as Hatemi thinks for politics to affect future generations.  Interestingly, he cites 20th-century totalitarian governments as examples of generational forces:

One more obvious way to see how culture affects natural selection is the effect that politically inspired atrocities—for example, Communist purges in China and USSR and the Nazi Holocaust—have on genetic diversity, according to the researchers, who released their findings in a recent issue of Advances in Political Psychology.

Hatemi did not think to draw a connection between the atrocities and the Darwinian ideology that inspired the worst of them (e.g., 11/30/05).

Evolutionists view every subject in nature as a nail for which their only tool, natural selection, is the hammer.  But if natural selection determined their own will to write this paper, then, well—they can’t nail anything but their own brains.  Trick or treat: they’ve just refuted their own theory.  The sight of brains and blood spilling out of a hole in the head is pretty scary for Halloween, for sure.