Darwinian Politics: the Evolutionary Origin of Freedom.

• Author: Linster, Bruce
• Position: Book Review

By Paul H. Rubin. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Pp. xx, 228 pages. $25.00 (paperback).

Paul H. Rubin's Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom is another in a sequence of books that attempt to explain human behavior through the use of evolutionary psychology. In some ways Rubin's book is the most ambitious of the lot. I say this because the others tend to explain specific, often sexual, behaviors using evolutionary concepts, but Rubin tries to explain the existence of political institutions and why people participate in activities that do not seem to be evolutionarily adaptive. He tries to explain Aristotle's claim that "man is by nature a political animal" outside the Aristotelian framework. Rather, he employs the tools of sociobiology; this is no trivial task.

Earlier books, such as Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation and Robert Wright's The Moral Animal, use evolutionary biology to explain why selfish genes may lead to actions that look like unselfish or moral behavior. This book attempts to reach a little further than the others in terms of explaining modern institutions as well as individual political and economic behavior. Rubin explores the implications of evolutionary biology on the nature of humans and their preferences. In short, he tries to show that early Homo sapiens looked nothing like the Lockean or Hobbesian blank slates on which much of modern political science is based. Rather, like Aristotle, he thinks there are such things as human natures, and they are important. Rubin's vision of humans differs from Aristotle's, however. Rather than viewing man as potentially between the beasts and the gods, Rubin sees humans as very smart beasts. Although Rubin's view of humankind can go a long way toward explaining quite a bit of human behavior, there are some things that sociobiology cannot explain very well. Unfortunately, many of these are political behaviors.

Rubin begins with a nice discussion of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) and the impact that environment would have had on early humans. In the EEA there would have been little of the division of labor that Adam Smith identifies as the source of wealth, and the world would have seemed like a zero-sum place. This, in addition to the fact that male reproductive success is limited primarily by access to females, can explain why males who effectively engage in political...