Anyone heard of these people? Facebook fed me an ad for them, and I thought it was going to be an eccentric think tank of outcasts, or even a one-person philosophical cult. But the Evolution Institute (not to be confused with the Shinkansen Ultra Evolution Institute) turns out to be staffed by a bunch of academics from universities that are at least moderately good, and various other people who have real jobs and successful careers. Their self-chosen niche seems to be, social policy analysis justified by reference to evolutionary biology. At a glance their work seems to mostly be liberal (in the American sense), though I noticed one essay on “socialist Darwinism”, and nothing resembling “race realism”.
If I had to intuitively guess what they are, I’d say they’re a milquetoast IDW for whose leadership the Institute functions as a consulting gig, but that really is just a guess. Does anyone have an opinion about them, fact-based or otherwise?
P.S. Caveat lector, I’m a ratsymp, and located somewhere on the political reverse horseshoe between Trump and Gabbard, so I’m often at odds with the zeitgeist here. But I have acquired that taste for wanting to know the politics of intellectual groupings, and I know there are many keen watchers of the evo-psych scene here, so…
Let me help you out here. The Evolution Institute is associated with David Sloan Wilson and the Cultural Evolution Society. They tend to favour an extended evolutionary synthesis which incorporates multilevel selection, (cultural) group selection and evolutionary game theory. For atheists, they tends to be quite understanding towards religion and religious people.
They share some significant intellectual influences with some IDW ideology - their perspective can generally be considered pro-sociobiology. But there are also significant differences, most notably not being genetic essentialists and favoring structural analysis over methodological individualism. They encourage lower-case “evolutionary psychology” but are distinct from the Santa Barbara School “capital E capital P” Evolutionary Psychology associated with Cosmides & Tooby.
So although Evolution Institute people may sometimes associate with some IDW types, to me they sit on the other side of the line from being douchebags. There are significant intellectual disagreements between the two groups - for instance, David Wilson has been trying to debate Brett Weinstein about group selection for months. Unsuccessfully, because the IDW aren’t serious people.
The IDW types tend to follow Dawkins, Pinker, Cosmides and Tooby: genes are all that matter, culture isn’t adaptive, and group selection isn’t a major force in evolution. They tend to be more hostile to religion. When someone talks about evolutionary mismatches or the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, you know you’re talking to the right wing of sociobiology.
The divide dates back to the nineteenth century split between social Darwinists (ie the IDW) and Darwinian socialists (i.e. Kropotkin). Fascinating history there.
For more reading, see: David Sloan Wilson, Does Altuism Exist and This View of Life Jo Henrich, The Secret of Our Success Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety
So, a fascist then
There’s a reverse horseshoe?
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