> "The male response to war is an evolutionary adaptation that clearly works for our species." > "It's a left-wing version of the Christian right rejecting the

> "The male response to war is an evolutionary adaptation that clearly works for our species." > "It's a left-wing version of the Christian right rejecting the theory of evolution," he says. "I mean the far left is also now rejecting the theory of evolution, which is just insane." The left wing, whatever it's worth, is certainly not rejecting the theory of evolution. Just because men are evolutionarily predisposed to go to war doesn't mean that not wanting them to go to war is rejecting the theory of evolution. Evolution only shows us what is. (In the case of evo-psych, it's usually more like what may have been.) Meanwhile, it's our job to figure out what ought to be, and to defer to evolution on that point is nothing but intellectual laziness. Just because men choose to go to war doesn't mean that they are not also victims of a social order that glorifies war and gives them a warped idea of what it means to be male. These can both be true. Politics always takes advantage of pre-existing psychological propensities, but it also reinforces them and reshapes them to its advantage over many generations. In fact, most questions in the form of "did X cause Y or vice versa?" in politics and sociology can be answered as "duh, it's a feedback loop." Humans are subject to evolutionary pressures like any other life form. But one of the major differences between us and other animals is that we can recognize when our biology predisposes us to participate in evil, and counter it with our intelligence and strength of will. If evolution is taking us places where we don't want to go, we have the intelligence and technology to give the middle finger to evolution and shape our own destinies. That includes telling young men that they no longer need to kill other men in order to be acknowledged as upstanding members of our society. EDIT: An earlier version of this comment included the following rant, which was meant as an aside. But too many people seemed to think that it was my main point, so I'm moving it to the end. > "I don’t put any political agenda into my work. I think the right wing tends to idolize soldiers—you can't talk about them critically in any way. The left wing went from vilifying them in Vietnam to seeing them as victims of a military-industrial complex." He laughs over the phone. "Both views of soldiers are just absurd." It's funny how every time I hear someone say they have no political agenda, or that they are neutral, they almost always go on to devote the vast majority of their effort to criticizing the left wing. Maybe they secretly endorse the right wing, or maybe they think the right wing is not even worth criticizing. In either case, I find this fascinating.