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Consider applying the r/K Selection Theory to politics. Makes a disturbing amount of sense: http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/the-theory/rk-selection-th

Consider applying the r/K Selection Theory to politics. Makes a disturbing amount of sense: http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/the-theory/rk-selection-theory/ http://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/the-theory/rk-sele...

skorgu 13y ago
It lines up in some ways, not in others. Liberals are known for their high fertility rate as well as their opposition to abortion to ensure the highest number of offspring. Likewise the conservative obsession with childhood nutrition, education and welfare lines up well with their high-investment child-rearing instinct. Sarcasm aside the infinite/scarce resource division seems like an interesting one to observe. See also the forager/farmer distinction[0]. [0] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/two-types-of-people.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/two-types-of-people.ht...
sliverstorm 13y ago
An interesting article, but a little politically charged. The repeated emotionally loaded descriptions of liberals and conservatives cannot have been accidental.
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
That blog entry is a load of crap. Firstly, he doesn't actually define r/K selection theory and then map it onto politics by showing an actual mapping. He simply defines r-selection according to his disfavored strawman of "liberalism" and K-selection according to his favored strawman of "conservatism". "The theory was popular in the 1970s and 1980s when it was used as a heuristic device, but lost importance in the early 1990s as it was criticized by several empirical studies."[1] Emphasis mine. Furthermore: if we actually try to make a mapping, we find exactly the reverse of what your blogger describes: it's the highly-educated, urban-dwelling, blue-state "liberals" (as alluded to in the Atlantic article) who are actually observed to have fewer children and invest more in each child, while the less-educated, rural-dwelling, red-state "conservatives" produce more children with less investment in each. It's really, really amazing just how wrong your blogger has managed to get his ecology, how completely backwards. For one thing, if we look at Wikipedia, we find that human beings simply are not considered an r-strategist species at all, at least not modern humans. But hey, let's go ahead and extend the analogy, because I'm feeling particularly evil today and thus see no reason not to map between evolutionary/ecological behaviorism and actual moral philosophy for real people as if such a thing isn't outright blasphemous to the very concept of human dignity. An r-strategist population is held in check from becoming K-selected by... what? Well, some form of external population culling, something that kills off the less-fit in large numbers and thus ensures the population as a whole has no need to evolve more complex behaviors or lifestyles. What, in conservative politics, is the culling agent? Well, capitalism. It's an r-strategist economic system: produce lots of low-human-capital proletarians and then just work them until they either drop dead or manage to reproduce. What, in left-wing politics, follows K-selection strategies? Well, the entire emphasis on social investment in individual lives, actually. And yet half the population feigns moral offense at the notion that human beings, a K-selected species in the first place, should shift further in the direction of K-strategizing by going from capitalism to socialism! And in the face of a slow-motion planetary-level ecological collapse driven by human overpopulation in the most conservative, r-strategist societies, nonetheless! [1] -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_theory How much of the above is at all accurate or precise? Well, probably not very much, but more than that godawful "Anonymous Conservative" blog entry, most likely. Do I care? Not entirely, the point was more to rant and to show that you can easily argue either "side" of the so-called political "spectrum" (which is actually far more complex than "liberal versus conservative", a dichotomy produced entirely by the idiocy of First Past the Post voting systems) based on any given ecological/evolutionary theory, because real scientific theories are not moral or ethical arguments!
whyenot 13y ago
This makes about as much sense as applying continental drift to explain the series finale of Breaking Bad.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Well I don't know. The possible analogies are interesting: a social system is a reproductive strategy, it's a way of breeding and educating your population to serve some defined purpose (the objective of the system). Being able to characterize those systems broadly would be helpful.

skorgu 13y ago

It lines up in some ways, not in others. Liberals are known for their high fertility rate as well as their opposition to abortion to ensure the highest number of offspring. Likewise the conservative obsession with childhood nutrition, education and welfare lines up well with their high-investment child-rearing instinct. Sarcasm aside the infinite/scarce resource division seems like an interesting one to observe. See also the forager/farmer distinction[0]. [0] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/two-types-of-people.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/two-types-of-people.ht...

sliverstorm 13y ago

An interesting article, but a little politically charged. The repeated emotionally loaded descriptions of liberals and conservatives cannot have been accidental.

eli_gottlieb 13y ago

That blog entry is a load of crap. Firstly, he doesn't actually define r/K selection theory and then map it onto politics by showing an actual mapping. He simply defines r-selection according to his disfavored strawman of "liberalism" and K-selection according to his favored strawman of "conservatism". "The theory was popular in the 1970s and 1980s when it was used as a heuristic device, but lost importance in the early 1990s as it was criticized by several empirical studies."[1] Emphasis mine. Furthermore: if we actually try to make a mapping, we find exactly the reverse of what your blogger describes: it's the highly-educated, urban-dwelling, blue-state "liberals" (as alluded to in the Atlantic article) who are actually observed to have fewer children and invest more in each child, while the less-educated, rural-dwelling, red-state "conservatives" produce more children with less investment in each. It's really, really amazing just how wrong your blogger has managed to get his ecology, how completely backwards. For one thing, if we look at Wikipedia, we find that human beings simply are not considered an r-strategist species at all, at least not modern humans. But hey, let's go ahead and extend the analogy, because I'm feeling particularly evil today and thus see no reason not to map between evolutionary/ecological behaviorism and actual moral philosophy for real people as if such a thing isn't outright blasphemous to the very concept of human dignity. An r-strategist population is held in check from becoming K-selected by... what? Well, some form of external population culling, something that kills off the less-fit in large numbers and thus ensures the population as a whole has no need to evolve more complex behaviors or lifestyles. What, in conservative politics, is the culling agent? Well, capitalism. It's an r-strategist economic system: produce lots of low-human-capital proletarians and then just work them until they either drop dead or manage to reproduce. What, in left-wing politics, follows K-selection strategies? Well, the entire emphasis on social investment in individual lives, actually. And yet half the population feigns moral offense at the notion that human beings, a K-selected species in the first place, should shift further in the direction of K-strategizing by going from capitalism to socialism! And in the face of a slow-motion planetary-level ecological collapse driven by human overpopulation in the most conservative, r-strategist societies, nonetheless! [1] -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_theory How much of the above is at all accurate or precise? Well, probably not very much, but more than that godawful "Anonymous Conservative" blog entry, most likely. Do I care? Not entirely, the point was more to rant and to show that you can easily argue either "side" of the so-called political "spectrum" (which is actually far more complex than "liberal versus conservative", a dichotomy produced entirely by the idiocy of First Past the Post voting systems) based on any given ecological/evolutionary theory, because real scientific theories are not moral or ethical arguments!

whyenot 13y ago

This makes about as much sense as applying continental drift to explain the series finale of Breaking Bad.

eli_gottlieb 13y ago
Well I don't know. The possible analogies are interesting: a social system is a reproductive strategy, it's a way of breeding and educating your population to serve some defined purpose (the objective of the system). Being able to characterize those systems broadly would be helpful.