The origins of human freedom

I had lunch today with Paul Rubin, a very smart law and economics scholar who also likes chicken tacos. Paul has just published a book on the Darwinian origins of politics and human freedom.

Here is a very brief summary from Randall Parker at Futurepundit:

Rubin sees both the impulse for support of the welfare state and the opposition to high taxes and the resentment toward freeloaders as all consequences of Pleistocene adaptations. Helping others in tough times might lead to their helping you out at a later point. At the same time. food was too scarce to tolerate freeloading. Rubin also argues that libertarianism is contrary to human nature and that humans want to meddle in each others’ lives. Read the whole review. Very interesting.

He is referring to Denis Dutton’s recent review of the book on aldaily.com, worth reading as well. It also summarizes the book nicely and in much more detail.

Here is Parker’s provocative conclusion:

My guess is that the distribution of alleles for the desire to be altrustic or to enforce rules or to force people not to be freeloaders will be found to be different in different parts of the political spectrum. A lot of political divisions will turn out to be, at least in part, due to average differences in personality characteristics that have their origins in the Pleistocene era. my bet is that once people start genetically tinkering with their offspring purer forms of socialists, libertarians, social conservatives, and other political types will be born and the political divisions within some societies and between societies will become greater as a result.

On this point, I do suspect that much of our political orientation springs from our basic inborn temperament. Shouldn’t this make us more skeptical of any particular views we happen to hold? It may feel right to have those views, but hey, that would be a genetic accident, and not a reflection of which policies are actually good for us.