I want to write about the concept of “survival of the fittest”. It is effectively guaranteed that you’ve heard about this concept, and maybe you consider it one of those rules of the world that is uncomfortable but undeniable, like that sometimes puppies die or white people can easily exchange money for dreadlocks.
That is in fact not the case, and that’s the reason I’m willing to write on this topic even though I am not an evolutionary biologist: neither are most people! Natural selection, when described as a social phenomenon as applies to human beings, is not a scientific concept: it’s a set of garbled and misremembered truisms combined with some weak principles, masquerading as science. You don’t need an evolutionary biologist to respond to a terrible argument about evolutionary biology, so if you are one, you can go back to the important work: getting wings on humans ASAP.
Examples of the type of argument I’m considering abound, particularly among men in decision-making positions. I want to illustrate three things about this narrative:
- It’s bullshit - not just a morally bad argument, or based on some questionable assumptions, but completely ascientific and replete with contradictions.
- As a result of its acceptance as a law of nature, much of the discourse surrounding how our society should be structured is a binary where both sides are incorrect, with a strong bias towards inhumanity.
- That’s no accident, and it fits into a rich tapestry of bullshit faux intellectualism actively designed to fuck up our society for most of the people in it.
Let’s consider the actual argument I am talking about here.
A Social Darwinist’s Axioms of Natural Selection
- In nature, entities that share an environment are inherently in competition, firstly for the resources necessary for survival that they can obtain from the limited available pool, and secondly to reproduce.
- Reproduction of the gene is the ultimate goal, other activities are a function of the need to reproduce.
- The process of competition is governed by “fitness”; the more effectively you can obtain the necessary resources for survival, and the more effectively you can attract a mate, the more likely you are to survive and reproduce.
- Over time, as the most fit members of the species have the highest reproduction rate, this process increases the overall fitness of the species for its environment.
Extending “Natural Selection” to Social Darwinism
- The process of natural selection is an innate dynamic of human societies; it is effectively an immutable rule of nature.
- Natural selection is a fundamentally good thing.
- Efforts to overcome natural selection, e.g. by protecting the “least fit”, are either impossible, have inherent weaknesses, are bad for the species as a whole in the long term, or are just a bad thing in and of themselves.
You might think all of this sounds very sensible. I want to emphasise that I am not saying evolution isn’t real or natural selection is a made-up concept; what I am talking about is the idealised special case of natural selection presented above as a universal truth, the assertion that it has moral value, and its application to human society. The combination of these three things turn a valid description of a biological phenomenon into an ascientific and socially harmful ideological position.
To illustrate this, consider this description of natural selection by Andrew Lo, from his book Adaptive Markets:
In a biological population, individuals will naturally vary from each other, with their physical traits reflecting their genetic inheritance. In any given environment, however, this variation will lead different individuals to have different numbers of offspring. Over time and on average, individuals who are better adapted to their environment will have more descendants, and individuals who are less adapted to their environment will have fewer descendants. As a result, those traits associated with the better adapted individuals will become more common in the overall population, leading the population as a whole to become better adapted to its environment.
This sounds like a perfectly valid statement of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and it certainly captures the gist, but can it be applied to a human society? The answer is no, for three straightforward reasons.
The first is that it uses the phrase “any given environment”, but by virtue of the rest of the statement (”over time and on average”) what it means is “any given environment in which the qualities required for survival remain static over the same timescale as biological evolution can be measured to a statistically significant level”. Not only is human society decidedly not static over any such timescale, human society does not have a ”natural environment” in the evolutionary sense; our environment is constructed and managed by other humans. Some humans have, via closely designed, agentive decisions made from positions of power, constructed an environment that is hostile to many people. In that context, even raising the concept of “natural selection” in this form, despite its patent irrelevance and clear obfuscation of the role of human agency, is pretty suspicious.
The second is that, given a static environment and well-understood ecosystem, “better adapted” can be defined and therefore tested, giving this statement the most important quality it requires to potentially turn from a paragraph to a hypothesis: falsifiability. The concept of better adapted human beings is, to put it lightly, a contentious one. It is certainly not a robustly well-defined measurable value, innate in someone’s biology, possible to completely isolate from environmental factors with statistical confidence. Without falsifiability, this idea permits the circular argument that if someone is surviving more effectively, it’s simply because they’re more fit, and nature selected them. Again, given this is not the case, introducing the notion is questionable.
It is also worth noting that this pseudoscientific version of natural selection implicitly treats fitness as a relatively static value. I don’t really know to what extent that is true in animals, but it is strictly untrue in humans. This is the reason we have devoted a huge part of our efforts as a species to education; practically none of the skills relevant to our survival are with us when we exit the womb. They are learned, meaning the vast majority of human “fitness” is socially manufactured rather than inborn. Not only do we control the environment itself, but to a significant degree we dictate people’s capacity to interact with it.
Finally, insofar as you can ignore the above (you cannot), does the sole prediction made by this hypothesis - reproduction rates - bear out? Across society, people on lower incomes have more children. Globally, low-income countries have more children than high-income countries. Yet to much the same cohort that would see the quote above as ”common sense”, both of these facts are seen as social issues to be remedied rather than evidence of genetic superiority or fitness. Indeed, it’s often seen as an example of their inability to make decisions, and they are punished for it in a wide variety of ways.
In Lo’s defence, he doesn’t say anything especially egregious in his book. He highlights areas of contention surrounding the application of evolutionary theory to society and ultimately points out that the worst theories he discusses were debunked. However, he uses a type of writing, very common among academics, which I find quite irritating in situations like this: essentially, he charts a history of ideas by treating each one as perfectly legitimate, if not really smart, until it is replaced. Let me show this to you in action with some excerpts from his history of sociobiology:
Far from depicting a world of “nature, red in tooth and claw,” however, these models explain many counterintuitive behaviors among individuals of different species, including altruism, cooperation, reciprocity, and self-sacrifice—perhaps even among humans. Why are these behaviors evolutionarily counterintuitive? They all have one thing in common: at first glance, none of them seems to help the individual’s ability to reproduce itself. In fact, some behaviors, such as self-sacrifice, are downright counterproductive to survival. If evolution depends on an individual’s reproductive success, why would one individual help another to become more reproductively successful at its own expense?
In the 1950s, the British population geneticist J.B.S. Haldane came close to solving this puzzle, when he announced to his students in a London pub that “he would lay down his life for two brothers or eight cousins.” This throwaway remark had at its core a deep genetic truth: Haldane’s brother would be 50 percent genetically identical by descent to Haldane; similarly, Haldane’s cousin would be 12.5 percent identical to Haldane. Reproductively speaking, Haldane was equivalent to two brothers or eight cousins. Therefore, by the logic of natural selection, Haldane’s altruistic self-sacrifice for his two brothers (or eight cousins) was an evolutionarily fair trade.
While these ideas were definitely in the air among population geneticists, it wasn’t until the publication of the British evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton’s pathbreaking work in 1964 that a clear mathematical statement emerged. In two classic papers, Hamilton showed under what conditions an individual would be prepared to sacrifice itself for another—individuals would be more likely to aid another selflessly if their degree of relatedness was greater than the reproductive cost-benefit ratio. A very close relative could expect altruistic behavior from another even if the reproductive benefit was relatively low, or the cost to the other party was relatively high. On the other hand, a stranger might not be the recipient of any altruistic behavior at all, even if its possible benefit was very high, or the cost to the other party very low. The British population geneticist John Maynard Smith quickly termed this preferential survival of close relatives, kin selection.
Note that this body of thought is described as containing “a deep genetic truth”, “pathbreaking” and ”classic”. Note that, despite making a clear empirical claim which could easily be tested and presumably would hold even when people had no knowledge of their degree of relatedness, Hamilton’s claim regarding kin selection is a total assertion but is stated essentially as fact. In a following paragraph he describes how this phenomenon explains some behaviour in social insects. This is where its story ends up going:
Unfortunately for Wilson, Sociobiology quickly became a polarizing work in the social sciences. For many scholars, Wilson’s ideas, while acceptable enough to describe the evolutionary basis for animal behavior, smacked of biological determinism when applied to human beings. The social sciences had just finished a generation of cleaning house from the biological determinism of the late nineteenth century. This work was often ideologically driven junk science by the standards of the day in which it was written—but much of it had enormous political influence. In the United States, theories of biological and genetic determinism helped support racial discrimination, immigration quotas, and possibly most disturbingly, the eugenics movement. This movement, not very well known today, tried using political power to eliminate “defective” individuals from the population’s gene pool, often through involuntary sterilizations.
Nor was the United States alone in this trend. In Europe, the abuse of the biological sciences was even worse, leading to the rise of Nazi ideology and the horrors of the Holocaust. It’s no wonder that many social scientists adopted a “shoot first and ask questions later” approach to any theory which smacked of genetic determinism.
There are three things to note here. First of all, the presentation of these theories is undeniably extremely charitable in light of this - if Lo knows the story ends with eugenics it is pretty bizarre of him to start it the way he did. Secondly, this is a shockingly, offensively blase account of what happened. The phrasing “shoot first and ask questions later“ implies social scientists were just so freaked out by the Nazis that they kicked out any theory with “biology” in the name and poor Wilson got caught up in the flood; that is a total lie. Rather, what happened was that the questions were asked, before, during and after WWII, extensively debated, and a conclusion was reached. Biological determinism was being debunked by scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois over three decades before WWII and, crucially, was bullshit all that time.
Finally, perhaps most importantly, despite quite literally having described a “clear mathematical statement” linking biology and human behaviour, Lo undermines that this theory very much exactly is biological determinism by saying it just “smacks” of it ”for many scholars”. Note how important this link is: as he points out, biological determinism is ideological junk science that walks a straight line to eugenics; yet he doesn’t acknowledge that this is it.
This is the type of writing that would usually be described as even-handed, presenting both sides fairly, and making sure to warn against intellectual laziness. Lo later describes an experiment where altruism arose naturally from a selection algorithm, and pointed out the algorithm worked “for stable environments in which “best suited” and “least suited” are well defined and fixed”. In fact, the overall hypothesis of the book is interesting and novel, and the most confusing thing is that as far as I can tell none of the content above is even remotely necessary to actually support it.
This is how social Darwinism survives, even in apparently even-handed writing that actively rejects eugenics. It begins with a trick that disguises a moral opinion most people would not accept as an incontrovertible scientific fact. Scientific facts are closely defined and falsifiable; the common understanding of natural selection takes such statements, strips away the rigour, and builds an ideology in its ruins. This ideology is so ingrained in our intellectual tradition, even someone who knows it is wrong can accidentally be strangely supportive of it. Lo claims to lament the attribution of moral value to science where it isn’t there:
A scientific explanation of a social phenomenon is often taken as justification for that phenomenon, as repellent as that phenomenon might be; hence, sloppy, slanted, biased, or even fraudulent explanations in these fields can be used as support for a social phenomenon. Some people have proposed evolutionary psychological or sociobiological theories that closely fit their political agendas. While we may be very far from the dark days of the twentieth century when eugenics and Rassentheorie were used to justify mass sterilizations in the United States and mass murder in Europe, we should never forget those examples of science abuse.
First of all, we’re not far from those dark days at all; forced sterilisation occurred in the United States until the 70s, i.e. when Lo was in his teens. But the key point is this: as I illustrated above, Lo’s description of natural selection is not scientific, and so it is not a scientific explanation of a social phenomenon. People see it as a justification because it is a transparently moral statement about human society and individuals. Look at some of the ways he describes natural selection:
Consider an analogy to illiterate children given their own laptop computers. A few children might be content to flip the power switch back and forth, watching the pretty lights go on and off. Others might try to see what the keyboard and mouse pad do. By chance, one child might start a program that takes greater advantage of the computer’s new capabilities. Some might possibly become precocious computerphiles, self-taught programmers, or even hackers.
Asserting that there is no value judgement in the way he presents this example - that he wouldn’t rather have ”precocious computerphiles” than people ”watching the pretty lights” is ridiculous.
To a nonacademic, this kind of back-and-forth may seem incredibly tiresome and frustrating—we just want the answer, please! But this misses the point—it’s the ongoing exchange of ideas that ultimately leads us to the answer, and this too is an evolutionary process. Natural selection applies to narratives as well as to genes. In fact, it’s the scientific method, coupled with the reward structure of academic institutions, that produced the great discoveries and technologies that have allowed Homo sapiens to conquer all of our natural predators, extend our lifespans, and master every environment on this planet and the moon.
This passage hits a trifecta of being grossly patronising to ordinary people, simpering to academics, and not even being a valid analogy because describing the process by which the selection of dominant theories takes place as “natural“ strips the term of all meaning. Aside from being propaganda for academia, it is also propaganda for natural selection. Not only is conquering all our predators and mastering every environment on this planet painted as an objectively good thing even though we may end all life in the process, he is also willing to describe the time we took a few steps on the moon in a $700,000 spacesuit as “mastering” to make natural selection look good.
Just as in nature, the evolution of ideas doesn’t play favorites. Throughout this process, each participant—researcher, discussant, journal editor and referee—is given many incentives for uncovering the truth, either by developing new truths or helping to challenge old truths that may no longer be true. And this process never ends; or at least it shouldn’t, because once it does, we’ll stop learning.
Here the same totally inappropriate analogy (and intense misrepresentation of how well designed academic incentives are) is used to assert that if natural selection stopped, human progress would also stop. Again, I don’t think Lo is actually ideologically a social Darwinist; but it is fascinating how, by accepting the social Darwinist’s axioms of natural selection, his writing seamlessly moves to implying social Darwinism.
Note even a more subtle concession: “these models explain many counterintuitive behaviors among individuals of different species, including altruism, cooperation, reciprocity, and self-sacrifice”. These behaviours are essentially the foundation of moral value in human society. Yet a whole body of thought existed to attempt to prove they were fundamentally self-interested - stripping the moral value of humankind away. Given that these theories were ultimately junk science, it is interesting that Lo describes these behaviours as “counterintuitive”, as this treats the empirically mistaken premise that humans are amoral as the intuitive, natural result.
There is no accident here. A version of evolutionary theory that strictly adheres to the scientific method can make very few real claims about human society, if any. Literally since day one, this idea has been forced somewhere it doesn’t fit for the sole purpose of claiming to be able to “scientifically” illustrate that some humans are superior than others. It didn’t appear out of a vacuum; it arose during a period of colonial genocide and was bought and paid for predominantly by genocidal colonisers.
It is, to use his phrase, ideologically driven junk science. He is capable of identifying that about practically everything peripheral to this false model of natural selection in human society, but amazingly its cloak of scientific legitimacy is effective enough that it totally evades his notice. He then reaches the exact moral conclusion the junk narrative was designed to help you reach, that some humans are superior than others. To avoid dealing with the idea that science has just proven this repellent notion, he says some guff about people taking explanations as justifications. The scientific method often tells us ways to improve our lives, and yes, obviously that is, if not a justification that overrides all else, at least one good reason to do those things. As a result he is deeply concerned by the moral conundrum of whether science can provide legitimate justification to benefit many at the cost of a few; but it’s nothing to do with legitimate justification. It’s illegitimate science.
Let’s move on to somebody who promotes social Darwinism even more explicitly, and appears equally uncomfortable about it. This author is also in the proud tradition of men from the finance industry writing “theory of everything” books to let us know how poorly a career gambling with other rich men transfers to understanding the world. He is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and these are some excerpts from his New York Times bestseller Antifragile - it was tough to narrow to these, as this book has whole chapters full of this stuff. Pay close attention to how, compared to Lo, Taleb moves firmly into the realm of social Darwinism as I defined it above:
- Nietzsche’s famous expression “what does not kill me makes me stronger” can be easily misinterpreted as meaning Mithridatization or hormesis. It may be one of these two phenomena, very possible, but it could as well mean “what did not kill me did not make me stronger, but spared me because I am stronger than others; but it killed others and the average population is now stronger because the weak are gone.”
- Sometimes we see people having survived trials and imagine, given that the surviving population is sturdier than the original one, that these trials are good for them. In other words, the trial can just be a ruthless exam that kills those who fail... The surviving cohort, clearly, is stronger than the initial one—but not quite the individuals, since the weaker ones died. Someone paid a price for the system to improve.
- ... species are potentially antifragile, given that DNA is information, but members of the species are perishable, hence ready to sacrifice and in reality designed to do so for the benefit of the collective.
- Some of the ideas about fitness and selection here are not very comfortable to this author, which makes the writing of some sections rather painful—I detest the ruthlessness of selection, the inexorable disloyalty of Mother Nature. I detest the notion of improvement thanks to harm to others. As a humanist, I stand against the antifragility of systems at the expense of individuals, for if you follow the reasoning, this makes us humans individually irrelevant.
- We saw the trade-off between the interests of the collective and those of the individual. An economy cannot survive without breaking individual eggs; protection is harmful, and constraining the forces of evolution to benefit individuals does not seem required. But we can shield individuals from starvation, provide some social protection. And give them respect. Or more, as we see next.
There’s obviously a lot to unpack here, but it provides good examples of practically everything I said at the start of this post, so let’s revisit some of those things.
It’s bullshit - not just a morally bad argument, or based on some questionable assumptions, but completely ascientific and replete with contradictions.
These quotes have all the same junk science issues as Lo’s: he turns evolution from a scientific statement into a series of truisms that can’t be proven or disproven in any meaningful way, and in exactly the way this intellectual tradition is designed to work, he concludes the human race would actually be better off if some people just died. I can’t stress enough that this argument, aside from being immoral, ascientific and incorrect, is incoherent. Even internally to itself and absent any response, it just barely follows from sentence to sentence.
To illustrate that let’s chart the progression of an idea through these quotes (which are in chronological order). He starts with “the average population is now stronger because the weak are gone”. We’ll accept his assertion that ”strong” and ”weak” have real meanings which can be related to individual survival and measured at a population level even though this is not remotely proven; but the words “average population” do a lot of work here. “Average” does a lot of work because it hides that our population is most likely now numerically smaller, and therefore actually weaker in a key sense. “Population” does a lot of work because it implicitly means surviving population. As he sort of admits in the next quote, the people who went from “weak” to “dead” aren’t stronger at all; he’s just opted not to count them. That might be fine applied to a system of genuine natural selection in the wild, but applied to measures of human wellbeing it is nonsensical; it implies that if you are critically ill that is a terrible tragedy and a harm to yourself and society, but if you die it’s neutral to you and a benefit to society. In fact, because “strength” is so loosely defined, practically any death could be justified as socially beneficial by this logic, including murder (and spoiler: it has).
Note how this argument can collapse in either direction: Lo above cited “extending our lifespans” as a benefit, but is it? Isn’t people dying young an objective benefit to the population because it removes the weak? Taleb repeatedly promotes antifragility as an important way to design economies to encourage entrepreneurs, but what is the point of having an economy that produces innovation and improves our quality of life if, by definition, doing so prolongs the life of the weak and is bad for the species? Taleb actually, in a way, acknowledges my point that human development has removed the natural environment as a factor determinative of most people’s survival. However, rather than taking the obvious path of accepting that that’s great, but means we need a different set of tools to analyse human society, he instead sees it as a reason to reject intervention in people’s survival at the same time as arguing the importance of producing survival-improving innovations efficiently. He directly contradicts himself.
Of course, because it is a contradiction, this can go the other way as well: if natural selection is, you know, natural, why should it inform any decision we make at all? If it actually does apply to human society regardless of what innovations we produce, shouldn’t it operate without regard to any conscious decisions we make and therefore be irrelevant to the design of policy and economies? If natural selection is such an immutable law of nature, why should we even worry that we might fool it by giving poor people money for food? How can it ever be an argument for doing, or not doing, anything? We never seem to have to worry that our policy choices might fuck up gravity, for instance.
This is the contradiction that arises in the very first and most robust statement of this idea. Yet, over the coming paragraphs, the words that are doing all the work - average, and population - disappear, while the least defined ideas - strength and weakness, and some nebulous benefit they bring to the population even as it lets many die - remain. This culminates in him confidently stating, “An economy cannot survive without breaking individual eggs; protection is harmful, and constraining the forces of evolution to benefit individuals does not seem required.” This massive statement, impossibly broad in its scope, murderous in its history, is stated as fact and based on exactly nothing.
As a result of its acceptance as a law of nature, much of the discourse surrounding how our society should be structured is a binary where both sides are incorrect, with a strong bias towards inhumanity.
Taleb actually provides me a perfect example of this: “some of the ideas about fitness and selection here are not very comfortable to this author, which makes the writing of some sections rather painful—I detest the ruthlessness of selection, the inexorable disloyalty of Mother Nature.”
This summarises perfectly what is so pernicious about applying this pseudoscience version of natural selection to human society. As it has been designed so the only conclusion that can be drawn is that some people are better off dead, the discourse about how we should treat people becomes warped. Rather than discussing the best way to help society by helping every individual in it, we discuss the tension between helping society as a whole and helping individuals. As a result, for one side it becomes perfectly legitimate to say, “helping them may be nice, but it will harm society overall, so really we have no choice but to let them burn; nature said so.” The other, who accept that this is essentially logical and true, are forced into a false moral tradeoff where none exists and left haggling over how many people we can afford to save without making society too weak. Taleb describing himself as a “humanist”, acknowledging that it is optimal for the weak to die “but we can shield them from starvation” is this in a nutshell.
I think it is important to remember how closely rooted this ideology is in the belief that some human beings are naturally inferior to others. Consider what I mentioned above about education: this is an obvious fact anyone could observe. Nobody comes out of the womb a lawyer or a doctor, people teach them those skills. People have differential access to education, predominantly based solely on luck. And yet, Taleb, a humanist, in response to his perception of their unfitness, sees the obviously best option as letting them die rather than helping them to become fit. You cannot possibly believe someone’s death could benefit society in any way without believing that person is inferior, because you believe all the social institutions that made you successful couldn’t or shouldn’t be applied to them. So while he hand-wrings and purports to mean well, make no mistake: at the end of the day he made the choice to believe he is fundamentally superior to “the weak” in spite of every piece of evidence in the world.
That’s no accident, and it fits into a rich tapestry of bullshit faux intellectualism actively designed to fuck up our society for most of the people in it.
It is no accident that both of these books were written by men in finance. Look how closely these narratives tie in to the dominant power structures in society. Western capitalism itself took much of its current form at the time Darwin’s ideas were entering the mainstream and being ideologically bastardised, and the notion that competition is an inherent good which delivers the best outcomes via mechanical laws of nature is the core of its ideological justification. Likewise, the white supremacist idea that one race’s inherent superiority over another could justify slavery and colonisation actively sought legitimacy in science using these ideas which, as Lo observed, led to practically the entire white academic establishment promoting eugenics for a disgustingly long period. Practically all proponents of patriarchal gender roles employ pseudobiological arguments using ideas of these types.
These ideas are not natural or logical; they’re not even random. They are specific, targeted moral constructs used to justify social relations that permit one group to dominate another. The manner in which they do so operates in exactly the same way as a church, saying some are born sinners and some are not and God will judge which is which. The shame and guilt it is meant to induce in its victims is the same, the hypocrisy is the same, and the shameless exploitation is the same.
The Biggest Flaw in Social Darwinism is What it Leaves Out: Abundance and Cooperation
I want to move away from rebutting this terrible idea to close by pointing to two things which actually can explain some elements of human society, both historical and modern. These are pathways to replace the snake-oil science of social Darwinism.
The first is abundance. Natural selection may well apply when resources are limited, and fatality in your environment is easy. What if resources are more plentiful than you need? That has been the case for humanity as a species for some time now. However, a species fighting to the death for scraps on the bone is, in social Darwinist ideology, an aspiration rather than a description. As a result, our response to abundance has been a grossly unsuited political system that manufactures scarcity for many while the resources they produce are hoarded by a few. Contrary to what Taleb might like to believe, we could easily feed everyone on Earth, even the “weak”. The real question is why we choose not to.
The second is cooperation. This is a gap in the social Darwinist narrative of natural selection so wide that many entire species slip through alongside humans: we just are not all in competition with one another, all of the time. Even under conditions of scarce resources, we have always been able to identify, like many animals, that we are much stronger together. The story of practically every human success or innovation is necessarily one of cooperation. In academia, which Lo described as natural selection in action, both research and peer-review are predominantly government funded. The scale at which we are capable of cooperation is literally the defining characteristic that makes human society possible.
These two facts give us a powerful final observation: the brutal, dog-eat-dog world of violent competition social Darwinists want us to imagine is a hyper-masculine wank fantasy. In a literal sense, much of it does not exist, and what does exist need not. Natural disasters notwithstanding, the problems of feeding, sheltering, clothing and supporting large groups is one people have solved, in many innovative ways, for thousands of years. The freedom we have been given by abundance and cooperation is the space in which human nature developed.
The behaviours Lo found so counterintuitive, altruism, cooperation, reciprocity, and self-sacrifice, may well be confusing if everyone was constantly threatened with violent death. We are not. Our entire lives are not dictated by the imperative to eat and fuck at all costs, and our nature reflects that. For huge portions of history in huge portions of the world, we could be weird, create art, dance, fuck around, have sex for fun, and love each other beyond reproductive utility precisely because society freed us from the need to think about it most of the time. It says everything about Taleb’s ideology and understanding of human history that he says “the Enlightenment and the political systems that emerged from it freed us (somewhat) from the domination of society, the tribe, and the family that had prevailed throughout history.”
That‘s just a lie; society is more effectively dominating human life than ever, both for better and for worse. The fact that our modern society is no longer interested in providing many of us freedom is a tragedy, but also a crime against humanity committed by a specific class of people who benefit. Our problems are human problems; we need to chill on blaming nature for them.