The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics

The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics: How Conservatism and Liberalism Evolved Within Humans offers a scientific analysis of how our two main political ideologies evolved within our species. On the basis of the r/K selection theory developed by ecologists Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson, it explains how the competitive, aggressive, sexually selective and monogamous, two-parenting psychology underlying conservatism is a perfect reproductive strategy for use in a K-selected environment of limited resources, while a more competition-averse, pacifistic, sexually promiscuous, single-parenting strategy is ideally adaptive to an r-selective environment of free resource availability.

The r/K theory is used as a heuristic to explain how these two psychologies arose through evolution, how they convey advantage in their respective environments, and how they arise today in response to a society’s level of resource availability. It even shows how the emergence of one psychology or the other, in response to changes in resource availability, has altered history.

Outside of this evolutionary perspective, political ideologies are usually seen as illogical accumulations of idiosyncratic personal preferences and how they happen to so neatly assort a myriad of issues into two distinct camps of issue platforms is an inexplicable puzzle. But with The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics, the reader can readily see how ideological psychologies emerged in our species as specific adaptations to various environmental conditions we faced and how they re-emerge today in response to those same environmental conditions.

Substantiated with all the latest peer-reviewed research, The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics is the most complete analysis to date of how and why Man became a political animal.

EPUB and Kindle format. No DRM. 280 pages.