Minds, Brains & Machines

On Natural Selection & Social Theory: Why I Left "The Left"

As far back as memory serves, I have always considered myself firmly on “the Left.” Some of that attachment was romantic long before it was theoretical. It began with the beautifully designed Soviet books my mother used to buy for me in the early 1990s, a small but reliable Diwali ritual that made socialism feel tactile, generous, and serious. Later, in my teens, I stumbled onto Noam Chomsky, and through him the bracingly honest scholarship of Howard Zinn, Eqbal Ahmad, Bhagat Singh, and Edward Said. From there, the romance moved outward—to the streets, to slogans, to the exhilarating feeling of raging against the machine. For what it’s worth, it was genuinely good while it lasted. I still carry fond memories of Chumbawamba concerts in Auckland, long late-night arguments about sampurna kranti in dingy Hyderabad pubs, and unvarnished conversations with ex-communists in working men’s bars along the French Riviera. But over the last decade or so—particularly with the rise of the woke movement and the identity-politics-driven hijacking of #MeToo—a persistent discomfort crept in. Not disagreement so much as fear: fear of becoming precisely the kind of moral authoritarian I had once defined myself against. By the early 2020s, I could no longer tell where I stood. I tried—earnestly—to recalibrate, to look the other way, to reassure myself that “mistakes happen,” that things were not as bad as they felt. But I have always been uncomfortable with moving, even when the walls were beginning to show cracks. So I convinced myself that a quick plaster would fix them.

Then E. O. Wilson died. Watching a lifetime of scientific work vilified with a confidence and entitlement disturbingly reminiscent of darker intellectual purges, I realized that the unease I felt was not temporary. It wasn't just the rooms of my wall... the foundations of my house were beginning to crack.

I did not leave in a single dramatic moment. There was no thunderclap, no apostasy ritual. It was more like watching a beloved neighborhood slowly forget why it was built in the first place. The buildings were still there, but the foundations had quietly eroded. Somewhere along the way, the Left stopped believing that humans were anything in particular.

What replaced that belief was an increasingly doctrinaire insistence on social constructivism: the idea that human behavior, cognition, motivation, even desire itself, is endlessly plastic, written and rewritten by culture, discourse, and power. Biology became suspect. Evolution was treated as a reactionary whisper from the nineteenth century. “Human nature” was denounced as a right-wing talking point, a Trojan horse for hierarchy. The blank slate was resurrected, not as a hypothesis, but as a moral necessity.

The house of my youth was ready to crumble. Then my mother passed. From adenocarcinoma. A form of cancer with well established genetic roots in non-smoking sub-continental women. A loss that was only made bearable... no, sensible... once I came to terms with the genetic lottery. It wasn't counseling, it was no barrage of rhetoric that made the loss a little less sanity eroding. It was the dispassionate understanding that I am not special. My mother was not special. She was to me. But not otherwise. It wasn't lack of nurture that took her from me. It was the sheer randomness of nature. Of mutations. I am not the first. She won't be the last. From comprehensibility came acceptance. Once I accepted, I knew I was ready to leave. That leaving, or losing, does not undo what was. Nor does it mean betrayal of what felt, feels, good or comforting. We once knew that. But we were taught to forget. To pretend that we are the center of the universe, the nurturing architects of nature.

The irony—one that Meera Nanda has diagnosed with painful clarity—is that this all too familiar epistemic drift was not radical at all. It was indulgent. Postmodern skepticism toward science, framed as a critique of Western power, ended up hollowing out the very idea of objective constraints. If nature does not push back—if facts are merely narratives—then there is nothing left to anchor critique itself. Everything becomes politics by other means, and politics becomes aesthetics.

Noam Chomsky saw this early. His impatience with postmodernism was never stylistic; it was moral and epistemic. If truth dissolves into discourse, lies lose their teeth. Power thrives in fog. A Left that abandons realism does not become subversive; it becomes decorative. Chomsky’s phrase “Armchair radicalism” stung because it was accurate: a politics that performs rebellion while refusing explanation.

Nowhere is this refusal more evident than in how contemporary social science talks about evolution and the human condition.

Take the endlessly recycled objections to something as basic as sexual selection: attractiveness changes over time. The dashing young man of Marlon Brando’s era, we are told, looks nothing like the heartthrobs of the 1990s or today. Therefore, any claim about evolved mate preferences must be nmere projections of culture and ideology.

But this objection only works if one mistakes signals for mechanisms.

Brando was not attractive because leather jackets or 1950s masculinity were culturally reinforced. Nor is there a biological preference for angry young men in leather jackets. But there is a biologically encoded instinct to seek out signals for reproductive success. He was attractive because, in that historical moment, he instantiated cues that human minds reliably attend to: youth, physical vitality, sexual confidence, dominance tempered by charisma, norm violation without total social exile. When those cues are repackaged—through different bodies, clothes, postures, or media economies—preferences track the signals, not the surface form. The signals which, by the way, are often misleading. Evolution does not equip us to know the truth, as the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman and E. O. Wilson have repeatedly pointed out. It merely creates the drive to reproduce. The instincts that we have to try and attain this goal were evolved in hunter gatherer times. Times when agressive physically vital individuals did offer greater survival chances. Times have changed, and those qualities offer little value today. Unfortunately humans live barely a century, and evolutionary traits develop over geological epochs. We are stuck with stone age minds in modern skulls.

Evolution does not predict objects of desire. It predicts decision rules. The mind does not say “prefer Marlon Brando”, or "Marilyn Monroe". It says “prefer what, in your ecology of ancestral adaptedness signals reproductive value, protection, provisioning, status, and ultimately reproductive success.” It's that simple. We reproduce. We do other things too. But those other things are contingent on us being born. On reproduction. Historical change is not a refutation of evolved preferences; it is exactly what we expect from mechanisms designed to operate across variable environments. With the sole goal to reproduce successfully. Not everyone reproduces, of course. But most of us do. Those who do not do so as a conscious educated choice. If things were otherwise over-population would not be an issue now, would it?

This distinction—between underlying computation and cultural instantiation—is precisely what much of social science refuses to acknowledge.

Sexual selection is treated as if it implies rigidity, inevitability, or moral endorsement. Parental investment theory is caricatured as Victorian gender ideology in lab coats. Yet the theory itself is almost offensively modest. Where the minimum obligatory investment differs—gestation, lactation, extended childcare—selection pressures diverge. Those pressures shape probabilistic biases in attention, motivation, and valuation. They do not dictate outcomes. They bias the mass of behavioral probabilities. Natural selection starts with probabilistic variation, and therefore a bias in the mass of probabilities creates predictable shifts in evolution of organisms' instincts.

Nowhere is this clearer—almost embarrassingly so—than in the reliability with which Hamilton’s Rule predicts kin selection across species and cultures, to the point that a diligent middle-school student could reproduce the basic pattern in a couple of weeks. The claim, of course, is not that humans consciously calculate coefficients of relatedness, but that natural selection favored psychological mechanisms that make altruism toward kin feel right, intuitive, and emotionally compelling. That intuition does not dissolve simply because we adopt ideologies of universal brotherhood. It coexists with them—sometimes productively, often uneasily.

Yet much of contemporary “critical social theory” is built on an almost principled refusal to acknowledge such biological regularities. Instead, behavior is endlessly redescribed as sui generis, irreducible, historically unique— every generation blames the one before, as that old rock ballad goes, with no causal account that reaches deeper than discourse itself. Biology is excluded by fiat, not refuted. The result is an infinite regress of explanation without explanation: nurture theorizing endlessly about nurture, while treating stable patterns of human behavior as ideological hallucinations. Whether this framework meaningfully changes anything is almost beside the point. What it does reliably produce is an ever-renewable class of professional interpreters—perpetually diagnosing, perpetually reeducating, and perpetually insulated from the inconvenience of being wrong.

And this is where Robert Trivers becomes indispensable.

In Natural Selection and Social Theory, Trivers did something the modern Left still refuses to do: he took moral psychology seriously because he took evolution seriously. His work on reciprocal altruism, parental investment, and especially self-deception was never about justifying inequality. It was about understanding why moral life is so tragically fragile. If deception is useful, then self-deception will also be favored. If coalitions matter, then ideological blindness will be rewarded.

Trivers’s student Huey P. Newton — yes, The Huey P. Newton, founder and president of the Black Panther Party — grasped that this is one of the great forgotten ironies of intellectual history. Newton's PhD dissertation on the evolved mechanisms of Self Deception understood that revolutionary politics without a theory of human nature collapses into fantasy. His engagement with self-deception was not a retreat from radicalism but a deepening of it. Power, after all, does not only corrupt institutions; it exploits evolved weaknesses in perception, loyalty, and identity.

Yet modern social theory recoils from this insight. To admit that humans evolved in an environment of evolutionary adaptedness—small, kin-structured groups marked by repeated interactions, fragile alliances, and persistent status competition—is treated as capitulation rather than explanation. Again, this is precisely what Tooby and Cosmides meant by “Stone Age minds in modern skulls”: evolved psychological systems -- i.e. all psychological systems, unless there be some that were divine gifts-- shaped to solve recurrent problems in ancestral hunter-gatherer environments, now operating in social worlds for which they were never designed. These instincts once served clear survival functions; today they often misfire, producing biases and reflexes that make little sense in modern moral or political terms. But this mismatch does not invalidate the theory, nor does it justify the biases. Evolution works on geological timescales, not electoral ones. To acknowledge this is not to excuse our failures, but to begin addressing them honestly. To deny it is to live in a fool’s paradise, imagining that moral aspiration alone can overwrite biology. Nature has no obligation to be just, egalitarian, or kind. But by understanding what nature has actually shaped us to be, we may—just possibly—learn how to restrain the worst demons of our inheritance and cultivate something better in their place.

Even critiques from within biology—Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin’s warnings against adaptationist excess—have been flattened into a license to deny biological explanation altogether. Their actual point was about rigor, not blank slates. But nuance is expensive; slogans are cheap. Though perhaps here some of the blame must lie with Lewontin and Gould themselves. Their most cited work, at least in the domain of the social sciences, The Spandrels of San Marco , is a wonderful read! It really is, and every student of the science and the arts should read the book once. I wish I could write with the grace and poise with which Gould and Lewontin pontificate about biology and architecture. Unfortunately, however, beyond its graceful writing the book offers little of any scientific value. And trust me, it breaks my heart to write this. It broke my heart the day I first understood this, because it genuinely was... is... one of the main works that made me fall in love with science. For the uninitiated, a spandrel is an arc-based triangular shape that is formed as the result of mounting a dome on arches. In the famous San Marco basilica these spandrels are adorned with carefully crafted sculptures in the centre, and these spandrels are what make the basilica an architectural masterpiece. Gould and Lewontin argue, rightly, that the spandrels were not explicitly designed for. The architect did not design the basilica around the spandrels. The spandrels were a byproduct of mounting the dome on the arches.

So it is, Gould and Lewontin claim, with some behavioral and cognitive traits. They are not, allegedly, products of natural selection. Rather, they are byproducts of natural selection, of evolution of entirely unrelated things.Unfortunately, this example rarely rises above the level of a clever anecdote. As the architectural historian and engineer Robert Marks pointed out years ago, there is more than one way to support a dome on four arches—and the solution adopted at St. Mark’s Basilica was not an arbitrary byproduct, but the only method then known that could safely bear a dome of that scale. In that sense, the so-called spandrels of San Marco are not architectural accidents at all; they are functional necessities. And even if one were to grant, purely for the sake of argument, that the bare triangular spaces emerged as structural byproducts, Trivers’s point still cuts through the confusion: what, then, of the elaborate mosaics that fill them? It strains credulity to suggest that such organized, symbolically rich complexity simply arose as a side effect of architectural constraint. The same reasoning applies, with even greater force, to biological systems—whether physical or cognitive. Natural selection remains the only mechanism ever discovered that can generate sustained, cumulative complexity in living forms. Everything else is commentary. Spandrels surely do exist -- Darwin called them pre-adaptations -- but they are always devoid of complex functions. The human chin, for instance, is a good candidate. It offers no functional value, its shape and size neither help in speaking nor in chewing, existing solely becaues of facial shortening and jaw restructuring in homo sapien sapien.

Nevertheless, Gould and Lewontin do insist, and repeatedly so, that they have no intention of claiming that biological organisms and their behavioral and cognitive traits are anything but evolved traits. For all their ideological biases, Gould and Lewontin are clearly no social constructivists. The problem, which recurs throughout Gould and Lewontin's dialectical work, is also not that spandrels don't exist nor that natural selection is beyond improvement as a theory. It is one of ideological bias creating epistemic drift in the most famous work of arguably two of the most famous evolutionary biologists in the public eye. It's that Gould and Lewontin don't have much to say about how complex spandrels could come about if natural selection is not to be invoked.

The Sokal affair, breaking into the public view a few decades or so after Gould and Lewontin's book, clearly revealed where such epistemic drift leads. When nonsense can pass as scholarship so long as it flatters political sensibilities, the problem is no longer principled scientific, or for that matter ideological, disagreement. It is the total absence of constraint. Evolutionary biology, for all its disagreements, never lost that constraint. Hypotheses live or die. Nature does not negotiate.

What makes this all genuinely sad—rather than merely infuriating—is that the Left once knew better. There was a time when materialism meant something. When understanding human behavior biologically was seen as a prerequisite for changing social conditions, not a betrayal of them. When universals were not feared, but interrogated.

Meera Nanda’s work is suffused with this loss. Her critique of postmodernism is not reactionary nostalgia; it is an attempt to salvage the Enlightenment without romanticizing it. Without realism, critique devours itself. Without science, politics floats free of consequence.

I did not leave the Left because I stopped caring about equality. I left because I could no longer pretend that denying human nature was a radical act. Evolution is not the enemy of emancipation. Ignorance is.

The blank slate is comforting because it promises infinite malleability. But it is also infantilizing. Humans are not clay. We are evolved systems—cooperative, competitive, moral, self-deceiving—shaped by selection pressures we ignore at our peril.

To take that seriously is not to surrender to fate. It is to begin, finally, from reality.

And reality, perhaps inconveniently, still exists.

I left "The Left" because "The Left" has long since left behind everything it was supposed to defend - - rationality, constrained skeptical inquiry and the willingness to face harsh reality. Oscar Wilde once wrote, "The tragedy of the youth is they spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever". This is what "The Left" today tries to do with the human condition; make the uncertainties and doubts last forever. I would rather spend my time with that incurable romance of science... those slowly but steadily shrinking spheres of uncertainty, till there is none left at all. And that is a good thing. It's what makes a romance romantic.

All good things must end. Fighting that is only going to make it hurt more.

References

• Nanda, M. Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism
• Nanda, M. The God Market
• Chomsky, N. Language and Mind
• Chomsky, N. Rationality/Science
• Trivers, R. Natural Selection and Social Theory
• Trivers, R. Social Evolution
• Newton, H. P. Revolutionary Suicide
• Hamilton, W. D. “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour”
• Wilson, E. O. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis
• Gould, S. J. The Panda’s Thumb
• Lewontin, R. Biology as Ideology
• Sokal, A., & Bricmont, J. Fashionable Nonsense
• Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. “The Psychological Foundations of Culture”

Progressing Backwards: The Modern Left’s Denial of Evolution and Human Nature

In recent decades, a significant transformation has taken place within large parts of progressive social thought. Explanatory frameworks that once took material constraints seriously—economic incentives, institutional structures, demographic pressures—have increasingly yielded to approaches that treat human behaviour as almost indefinitely malleable. Culture, discourse, and power are now expected to explain nearly every human pattern. Biology, when it enters the conversation at all, is often handled defensively or dismissed as politically inconvenient.

This shift has consequences beyond academic debate. A social science that denies constraint struggles to explain why certain behavioural patterns—hierarchy, kin bias, sexual competition, coalitional conflict—recur with remarkable regularity across societies that otherwise differ radically in norms and institutions. When explanation falters, moralisation fills the gap. Persistent social phenomena are no longer analysed in causal terms but interpreted as failures of will, education, or ideological commitment.

Meera Nanda has been among the clearest voices warning against this intellectual drift, particularly in postcolonial contexts, and her concerns echo an older line of critique articulated by Noam Chomsky. Neither has argued that science is culturally innocent or politically neutral. Rather, both have insisted that abandoning objectivity as a regulative ideal leaves progressive politics epistemically defenceless. Once scientific explanations are dismissed as merely “Western” or “male” narratives, they lose their capacity to constrain belief. In the vacuum that follows, myth, revelation, and civilisational essentialism acquire equal standing with evidence-based inquiry. Anti-science radicalism, intended as resistance, thus risks becoming an inadvertent ally of religious nationalism. A Left that cannot defend universal standards of evidence cannot coherently oppose truth claims grounded in faith, ancestry, or inherited authority.

This tension is especially visible in India, where postcolonial scepticism toward science has increasingly intersected with religious majoritarianism. When rational critique itself is relativised, power determines which narratives prevail. The rejection of universality does not weaken authority; it redistributes it.

A similar problem emerges in how evolutionary explanations are treated within much contemporary social theory. The difficulty is less outright hostility than a persistent mismatch of explanatory scales—sometimes accompanied by an outright refusal to acknowledge that such scales exist at all. Evolutionary theory operates at a fine grain, describing probabilistic biases in cognition and behaviour shaped by natural selection to solve recurrent problems. Social constructivist critique, by contrast, often treats these claims as if they were coarse political assertions about inevitability or legitimacy. Political meanings are imposed on models designed to answer very different questions.

Some of this confusion has a respectable intellectual pedigree, traceable to debates within evolutionary biology itself. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin’s 1979 essay, The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme, remains beautifully written and influential, though it rarely ascends beyond carefully crafted anecdote. Using the architectural spandrels—arc-based triangular spaces formed by mounting a dome on four arches—of the Basilica of San Marco as an analogy, Gould and Lewontin argued that some biological traits may arise as byproducts rather than direct products of natural selection. The caution against adaptationist excess was well taken. Yet the example never quite advances beyond its titular metaphor. As the architectural historian and engineer Robert Marks later observed, the solution adopted at San Marco was not an arbitrary accident but the only method then known capable of supporting a dome of that scale, making the spandrels structural necessities rather than incidental leftovers.

More importantly, even if one grants that the bare triangular spaces arose as byproducts, the elaborate mosaics that fill them clearly did not. Their organised, symbolically rich complexity demands explanation beyond structural constraint. The same logic applies with greater force to biological systems. While spandrels certainly exist—Darwin himself described pre-adaptations—they are typically simple and devoid of complex functions, as in the human chin, which appears to result from facial shortening and jaw restructuring rather than selection for any specific function. What remains unresolved in Gould and Lewontin’s account is how complex, information-rich traits could arise as mere byproducts if natural selection is not invoked. That explanatory gap, rather than the existence of spandrels themselves, is what later social theory would exploit, mistaking a warning against bad adaptationism for a licence to avoid explanation altogether.

This habit of projection has a clear precedent. In Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, mathematical physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont documented how prominent theorists repeatedly invoked scientific concepts in ways that were either meaningless or plainly incorrect.

“Human life could be defined as a calculus in which zero was irrational… the square root of minus one… must be conserved, along with its full function.”

This is not merely obscure but mathematically false: zero cannot be irrational, and the square root of minus one is an imaginary number distinct from it. Such passages are not accidental slips; they exemplify a pattern in which scientific language is stripped of meaning and redeployed to create an illusion of rigour.

Another striking case involves Luce Irigaray’s assertion that “E = mc² is a ‘sexed equation’ because it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us,” or her claim that fluid mechanics has been neglected because science privileges rigid “masculine” bodies over “feminine” fluids. These are not subtle theoretical disagreements but tactical deployments of erudite jargon to create the appearance of scientific seriousness.

Sokal and Bricmont’s critique is not a rejection of social theory. It is a targeted challenge to the political misuse of scientific terminology—the attempt to borrow the authority of science without engaging its content. Their concern resonates with arguments from evolutionary psychology: once scientific vocabulary is detached from explanation, it ceases to function as a guide to understanding behaviour.

Evolutionary theory does not permit vague, domain-general capacities. It favours specialisation—mechanisms that solve recurring adaptive problems. Cognitive systems evolve to handle challenges such as mate choice, kin recognition, alliance formation, threat detection, and parental investment. A formless “general intelligence” untethered from content is not a plausible product of natural selection, the only known mechanism capable of producing cumulative biological complexity.

Such mechanisms do not deny culture or learning; they structure and ground them. Beliefs are shaped not by evidence alone but by how evidence is filtered through evolved motivational systems. As Jerry Coyne has noted, genetic endowments chart the course along which epigenetic development proceeds in broadly predictable ways, delimiting an organism’s ecological niche. The honeybee’s waggle dance or the recursive structure of natural language are not products of social conditioning. They are evolved computational constraints.

Social constructivist approaches that treat behaviour as entirely constructed struggle to explain why hierarchy, sexual competition, and coalitional conflict recur across societies. Evolutionary models explain this recurrence by showing how psychological predispositions are activated across diverse environments because they were selected in ancestral ones.

Sexual selection illustrates this clearly. Evolutionary accounts do not specify culturally fixed ideals of beauty. They identify recurrent cognitive sensitivities—to indicators of fertility, health, symmetry, and status. Cultural expression varies; the underlying regularities remain.

Kinship and altruism reveal the same architecture. Universal moral philosophies do not erase the intuitive tendency to favour close kin. Kin selection theory explains why humans favour relatives emotionally and behaviourally.

Self-deception presents an even sharper challenge. Robert Trivers, in collaboration with Huey P. Newton, showed how biased self-beliefs can be adaptive. Newton’s engagement with these ideas in Revolutionary Suicide remains one of the rare attempts to integrate evolutionary reasoning with radical moral critique.

The political implications are stark. A Left that denies human nature is poorly equipped to understand why its own institutions drift toward conformity and symbolic moralism. Moral aspiration without explanatory depth collapses into ritual.

Nature has no obligation to be just or egalitarian. Politics does. But politics that refuses to understand what human beings are—how they evolved, what motivates them, where their intuitions come from—will repeatedly mistake rhetoric for remedy. Understanding human nature is not a conservative project. It is the minimum condition for serious social change.

References

• Gould, S. J., & Lewontin, R. C. (1979)
• Nanda, M. (2003)
• Sokal, A., & Bricmont, J. (1998)
• Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1992)
• Trivers, R. (1985, 2011)
• Hamilton, W. D. (1964)
• Buss, D. (1994)
• Pinker, S. (2002)
• Honeycutt et al. (2023)
• Chomsky, N. (1968, 1987)
• Newton, H. P. (1973)