The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics (2014)
This work has several contributors from science, medicine, and engineering. The primary author, and originator of the underlying idea, is a microbiologist. He began to see these two competitive mechanisms in that field. Some microbes would try to simply consume wildly, and reproduce as fast as possible. This would often occur once they had spread to environments where resources were free, and competition was limited. There, they would actually devolve, shedding unneeded complexity, to minimize the energy required to reproduce each subsequent daughter cell.
Other microbes, in environments where resources were limited and competition with neighboring organisms was stiff, would evolve complex, energy-intensive mechanisms to try and out-compete their peers. Even when pulled out to conditions of free resource availability, these organisms would continue to reproduce slowly, until they had time to shed their complexity, and adapt to the nutrient availability.
When this idea first emerged, the authors of this work thought it was an interesting argument, which would be fun to argue. As time went on, and the research was amassed, we realized this was not merely an interesting argument to be made. This was almost certainly an unassailable truth, with the potential to alter our political dialog forever, should it spread. At that point, it was decided to release the work anonymously, for obvious reasons. From low level Leftist extremists, to high level IRS leaders, to left-leaning scientific collaborators, for all its talk of diversity, tolerance and truth, the Left is astonishingly intolerant of any dissent from their demands that everyone march in lockstep with their rabbit brigade.
We would worry that anonymity would detract from the strength of the case this work made, but in truth,the authors do not make arguments, so much as draw attention to research. We did not make up r/K Selection Theory or the traits it identifies – that has been around for decades. We did not make up our description of ideologies – we just laid out the studies by others in political science, who have been characterizing ideologies for some time now. That they are so similar, is merely a byproduct of the fact they are probably the same thing.
We did not do the studies showing Liberals have smaller amygdalae on MRI, nor did we write the studies asserting that smaller amygdalae tends to indicate deficiency in function. We did not do the studies showing that amygdala deficiency, due to lesion or disease, tends to produce docility, inability to perceive threats, hyper-sexuality, low parental investment, and lack of drive to perform self-sacrifice for peers.
We did not do the studies showing that the gene associated with adoption of a Liberal ideology is associated with one's degree of competitiveness, promiscuity, infidelity, hedonistic/addiction tendencies, or migration towards free resource availability. We did not even write the study identifying this gene as a genetic foundation of, in one researcher's terms, an r-selected reproductive strategy in humans.
The strength in this work is not the common-sense argument it makes, or the assertions of the authors. It is not your ability to look around at the free resources in our country, and see behind them manly women, promiscuously mating and then angrily browbeating the feminine, metrosexual men who leave them to raise their children alone. It is not even the ability to look back through history and see the natures of populations changing wildly with resource availability.
The real strength of this work is the inarguable accumulation of rock-solid, peer-reviewed, scientific substantiation for each piece of information which makes up this case. Get the Kindle version of the book, and for each fact cited, there is an endnote which will take you right to the study which described the fact.
Get the book now, and see our political battles from a whole new angle. Then, take pleasure in regaling your Liberal friends with an inarguable assessment of their gross inadequacy and competitive inferiority. Just don't forget to tell fellow Conservatives and Libertarians about the book.