The Biological Reason Socialism Always Fails — Nicholas Wade (Transcript)

Can you share that with our viewers and listeners?

NICHOLAS WADE: Yeah. So the root of that is that men had to compete very hard to survive. So in early societies, it wasn’t sort of one man, one woman. It was the chief guy got most of the wives and many men were left without a wife at all. So unless you competed like hell, you had no chance of having a family and leaving any descendants. So your Darwinian fitness was zero.

Men — and we are the descendants of the men who survived this system — by being highly competitive with each other for women, then they had to turn around and be very cooperative with the other men in their society for the society’s defense.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So that another tribe wouldn’t come and kill all of you and take all of your women.

NICHOLAS WADE: Right. Which is what happened if you failed to defend your country — the men would be killed and the women and the children as well sometimes, and the women would become the property of the conquerors. So it was a really bad thing to be defeated.

So that’s why men have these two very strong drives in them — to compete with each other and yet to cooperate for reasons of defense. And this, to answer your question, I think this comes back to why an equal pay system goes so against the grain of human nature. People don’t want to just have a system where their efforts aren’t rewarded. They are sort of programmed to fight as hard as they can for the means to sustain and protect their family.

The Problem of the Skiver

FRANCIS FOSTER: And Nicholas, the thing that — I mean, there’s lots of things that are interesting about your book, and I’m going to use colloquial English language to describe this, but I found your theory about this fascinating. It is the theory of the skiver. And how essentially skivers — and for our American audience and listeners, that means people who shirk their responsibilities and don’t work very hard — that was one of the main problems with the kibbutz system, and actually probably one of the main issues with the Soviet Union as well, wasn’t it?

NICHOLAS WADE: That’s right, because the system is set up for freeloading. You come into a kibbutz, if you get into a kibbutz, then you don’t have to work anymore. Or you can slack off. The only thing that stops you, I guess, is public disapproval. But nonetheless, that can go only so far. So it’s a very dangerous system when you don’t reward people on the basis of their merit.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And that also leads to resentment as well, doesn’t it? Which also means that the harmony within the kibbutz is disrupted.

NICHOLAS WADE: Yeah, it’s very destabilizing for a society, I think. Because people have a strong sense of whether they’re being fairly treated or not. And if you work your heart out but get the same pay as the skiver next to you, then you feel wronged. And indeed you have been wronged.

FRANCIS FOSTER: So the kibbutz went through this phase of, basically, this is a socialist utopia, everybody is going to get on great. And what were the reasons why it started to — let’s say — become, how shall I put it, more realistic in its outlook? Was it just because of the skiver? Was it because of resentments within the actual kibbutz ecosystem, or were there other things going on?

NICHOLAS WADE: I think it was partly the passing of generations. So the guys who’d grown up in the kibbutz didn’t have the same sort of zeal as their parents who’d founded the kibbutz. A second thing was that the kibbutzim was somewhat protected from the outside environment as long as the Israeli economy remained poor. They weren’t too much affected in a general way by skivers because they recognized the danger and they screened people very carefully before they were let into the kibbutz.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But once you have a generation of children, you can’t control that anymore. And that’s part of the generational impact, right?

NICHOLAS WADE: Right. So the next generation insisted that things become more normal, as it were, and less idealistic. They wanted to reconstitute themselves as families, they wanted to be paid according to how much they worked.

Men, Women, and Evolutionary Differences

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, and coming back to the discussion we started about competitiveness versus cooperation, you talked about men, and while you and Francis were talking, it sort of became quite obvious to me that there’s probably quite a big difference between the way men and women have evolved to think about these things. Is that fair to say?

NICHOLAS WADE: Yes, it’s very fair. And there’s a current movement, on the left, to say that men and women are no different, that apart from a few minor physiological differences with reproduction, they are exactly the same thing. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Their minds are as different as their bodies because evolution has shaped them for very different roles.

You gain a lot by specialization, and evolution hasn’t specialized us to the extent it has done, say, with ant societies, because we haven’t been around as long as they have. But it has taken every chance to specialize men and women. So women are specialized for bearing and raising children and for sort of relationships within the family and the neighborhood. And men are specialized essentially for defense, for fighting and for organizing the larger scale institutions of society.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And would it be fair to say that — stereotypically speaking — the female role, in addition to raising children, is also to manage the conflict orientation of men within the tribe? Because if all the men are killing each other, when the other tribe comes along, you’re in a bad place. So are they a natural regulator of male competitiveness and violence in that way?

NICHOLAS WADE: That’s certainly the case among chimpanzees, who are uncannily similar to us in their societies. You see female chimps sort of prizing the stones away from male chimps who are about to batter their skulls in because they know that if the males kill each other, the community will be so weak that the chimps next door will come in and invade them and kill all their children. So I can imagine the same instinct being there in women, but I haven’t thought to what extent it may operate because at least in early societies, women didn’t have a lot of political power.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, I know, but women don’t exert political power only through politics, as we all know, if we’re married, right? Like, my wife is not remotely political, but she exerts a lot of power on me.

I guess the reason I’m asking this — we just had this lady on called Helen Andrews who wrote an article about, her thesis is the feminization of society has caused the woke explosion that we’ve seen for the last 10 years. And we had a back and forth — I don’t know that I agree with everything that she puts forward, but it’s a perspective that made me think about how some of the recent cultural trends are to do with the fact that men and women evolved and were optimized for different roles. And as the ratios of these two groups change in different institutions, it is quite likely and natural that those institutions will see things differently and operate in different ways.

The Role of Women in Institutions

NICHOLAS WADE: Yes, I think this is a tremendously important issue because the two roles I was describing to you are what evolution has shaped. But of course, culture is enormously strong in our society. So culture can sort of reshape and modulate what evolution has done.

And one of the most notable aspects of human societies is that women have been liberated from the home. And in fact, they’re now sort of better educated than men. More of them go to universities so they can, they have no problem getting jobs and they are no longer dependent on men. And most seriously, the most serious side effect of that is they no longer bear as many children. So our societies are in fact headed for extinction unless women somehow are persuaded to go back to bearing more children.

But another aspect of this is the running of institutions. So I think I might say all institutions historically have been set up and designed by men. So are women going to do as good a job as they demand to take over institutions or be represented 50% on corporate boards?

I think the jury is still out on that, but I don’t think really it’s a very promising experiment. If you look, for example, at the way American higher education has been taken over by women presidents, and they are not all of them terrible, but Claudine Gay, for example, who Harvard chose to be their president, has a very small bibliography as a scholar, and much of it is ridden with plagiarism. She’s not a good poster child for women running institutions.

One shouldn’t generalize from that. It doesn’t mean that women cannot run institutions. There are many fine women business leaders and politicians. It’s just, I suspect, when the dust settles down and we’re sort of mature enough as a society to let everyone be appointed on merit, I suspect we will find that there will be more men running institutions than women. It won’t be a 50-50 ratio.

Stress-Testing the Argument

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’m just going to stress test that argument because obviously a lot of people are going to be triggered by this. The show’s called Trigonometry for a reason. But I guess the stress test of that would be, why do you talk about it as merit? Because the question I posed to you was more about value systems, right?

What I was asking more is, are women likely to bring a different set of values to an institution? Or do you believe that actually, collectively speaking at the population level, the big institutions, women didn’t evolve to operate things like that, and so they’re just not going to be as good? Or is it a question of they’ll just bring a different value set and the institutions will produce a different set of outcomes? It’s not about better or worse, it’s about imposing their kind of default value set on the world. Do you see what I’m getting at?

NICHOLAS WADE: Yes, I mean, I think it’s probably fair to say women do have a slightly different value set and that it’s sort of less aggressive than men. Men’s more oriented toward peaceful solutions, to softer approaches. But that is a separate question from how well do you run an institution. So I think the way evolution has equipped us is that men are more used to sort of long-range relationships, to relationships outside the family. And I think it will turn out that they are generally better at managing them than women are. But there’s no hard data on that. We’re in the middle of this sort of grand experiment, and we’re going to find out.

Chimpanzees and Human Behavior

FRANCIS FOSTER: Nicholas, there’s a really illuminating chapter in your book where you talk about chimpanzees. You talk about the male chimpanzee, you talk about the female chimpanzee, you talk about the difference in behaviors and aggressiveness and all the rest of it. Why is it that we can talk about female and male chimpanzees in this way, yet when it comes to female and male human beings, we pretend as if there’s no difference?

NICHOLAS WADE: Well, it’s because there’s a strong tradition, particularly on the left, to deny that evolution has anything to do with human behavior. They assert that the mind is a blank slate at birth and that everything that we know is learned from culture and that nothing comes from genetics. But it seems to me this is a very foolish view for the reason you allude to.

If you look at chimp societies, and chimps are our sort of closest living cousins, there clearly is a genetic basis for what they do. All chimp societies have the same organization. All chimps will behave in much the same way. And female chimps behave in a very different way from male chimps. And chimp societies have a very specific structure. All of which—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Tell us about that. What are chimp societies like and how do they operate?

NICHOLAS WADE: Well, they are very hierarchical. There’s a male hierarchy and beneath that there’s a female hierarchy. So all females are subordinate to all males.

FRANCIS FOSTER: As it should be.

NICHOLAS WADE: Absolutely.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Someone’s going to clip that.

The Chimp Hierarchy and the Origins of Politics

NICHOLAS WADE: The male hierarchy is established by pure intimidation. As a young male, you sort of work your way up. You first intimidate all the females and then you start with the males. They’re basically sort of trials of strength, but outright hostilities are avoided by sort of substitute effects. There are lots of vocalizations. There are lots of sort of fascinating chimp behaviors, but basically when one male chimp meets another, the degree of dominance has to be established. So the inferior chimp will sort of kowtow or make a sort of particular pant-hooting noise or sort of present his rear to show he’s sort of vulnerable to the male. And so the hierarchy, however horrible it sounds to our ears, is good in the sense that it creates a stable society. There aren’t permanent fights, because everyone knows who is boss.

So once you get to the top of the hierarchy, then something very important happens. As alpha male, you get to score most of the matings. Now you can’t do this yourself, you need a coalition. So this is the beginning of politics, that the alpha male distributes mating opportunities to the guys in his coalition. And human societies are just the same. The autocrat in an early human society was to distribute land and wealth to his followers, which of course are the means to attract females. So it’s not sort of direct sexual reward, it’s an indirect sexual reward, but toward the same end.

Denying Biology and Human Misery

FRANCIS FOSTER: Nicholas, it seems to me, and correct me if I’m wrong, that we’re denying our fundamental biology which means that — doesn’t that make us more miserable? Doesn’t that make us more prone to illnesses, depression, etc., if we’re trying to be something that we’re not? For instance, females, human females trying to appear more masculine, and also vice versa as well.

NICHOLAS WADE: Well, I think this is where culture comes in, because our culture is so rich that we live primarily in a world created by our culture and the genetic framework is invisible to us. I think where we get into trouble is where we violate some of these genetic structures that nature has put in place. So I think the kibbutzim are a good example of what happens when you destroy the family. It simply doesn’t work.

And there are lots of ways in which you can successfully modulate human nature, it seems to be. I mean, it’s like remodeling a house. You can change a lot of things around as long as you don’t touch the load-bearing walls. So you need to know what the load-bearing walls are.

Monogamy as a Successful Modulation of Human Nature

And there are very interesting examples in our history of where we have successfully modulated our innate instincts. So one good example is monogamy. So most early societies were polygamists. The top guy got the most girls. But we changed that to monogamy, I think essentially because it’s a very unstable situation to have a lot of young men who have no prospect of getting a wife. They become very disaffected. So what do you do with them? The traditional policy is to send them off to fight the neighbor and have them die in battle. But if you start wars, it doesn’t always turn out the way you hope. So it’s much more stable, in fact, to distribute women equally, which is what monogamy does for you.

So Europe became monogamous essentially under the influence of the church. And then in quite recent times, monogamy sort of spread, presumably by example, to India and China. So now almost all the world is monogamous. And all this represents a sort of great big constraint on the natural male impulse to have as many wives and children as possible.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And you also talk in your book about how this monogamy that has been imposed or implemented, however you want to describe it, on societies — it leads to a flourishing of society, both in terms of culture and economically, etc.

Tribalism and the Role of the Church

NICHOLAS WADE: That’s right. And this is one way in which we have transcended our evolution to great advantage. These monogamous societies are much more stable and more productive. And another major example of the same thing is tribalism. So the whole world used to be tribal in between when hunter-gatherers settled down at the beginning of agriculture some 10,000 years ago to 1 or 2 millennia ago now, all human societies were tribal.

And tribalism is a very successful and effective way of running a society because it sort of keeps law and order without any police force or courts or laws. And it’s very good at defense and it has many superb advantages such that it is very hard to get rid of.

So there’s a wonderful book by Francis Fukuyama, the political scientist, in which he describes how the major civilizations of the world in different ways got rid of their tribal structure and instituted a single ruler with a sort of state bureaucracy. In Europe, it was done by the church. So the early Europeans were all tribal and in those days it was often quite hard to produce a male heir because people died very young. So you very much needed to keep the wealth inside the tribe. So there are stratagems like adoption or marrying your cousin for keeping wealth inside the tribe.

So the church came along and said, “No, all that is incestuous and absolutely forbidden.” And so when people were on their deathbeds, the church would say, “Well, you should leave all your money to the poor,” meaning the church. And the church became fantastically wealthy. At one stage, it owned like half of Germany and a third of France. But the net result of this policy was that the tribes lost all their money and just disappeared.

Modern Tribalism and Nepotism

FRANCIS FOSTER: You know, that’s so interesting because we’re talking about tribes now and how the power of the tribe was essentially taken away. But you look at America today, I mean, it feels like we’re more tribal than ever, not only in America but right the way through the Western world.

NICHOLAS WADE: Well, these basic instincts don’t go away, they just get sort of modulated. So tribalism no longer exists. And if you ask an American what his tribe was, unless he was an American Indian, he would have no idea what you meant. But you can still see tribalism operate in the form of nepotism. So people will do anything to help their families, give them a leg up. And wherever possible, people will arrange that as much of their wealth as possible goes to their surviving relatives so that they maximize the number of children they put in the next generation.

The Nation-State as an Extended Tribe

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, it’s interesting because there clearly are some pretty healthy adaptations to fill these voids. For example, it’s not just Americans, as you well know. British people are very tribal about sport as well. But that seems like one way of channeling those instincts that’s quite healthy. What’s interesting is I think perhaps due to social media, but maybe due to other things, I’d be curious to hear your opinion. Politics has now become very, very tribal in the way that I just don’t feel it was 20 years ago.

NICHOLAS WADE: You mean based on race or just based on ideology?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Just based on ideology. Like, people now treat their political party as their football team, whereas it felt to me like in the late ’90s, early 2000s, yeah, people had some kind of political allegiance. But it’s in the same way that, like, if you’re a fan of the Green Bay Packers, you’re not going to hate Patriots fans. It was like, well, look, I’m a Democrat, he’s a Republican, but we sort of are going to be able to get on. Now it’s become tribal in the sense of like, this is warfare almost, is what it feels like to me.

NICHOLAS WADE: Yeah, I think tribalism can sort of break out in almost any context because it’s so inbuilt in our system. You embrace your friends and you hate or despise or kill your enemies. And tribalism itself hasn’t really gone away. It’s just been transformed into the nation-state.

So the nation-state, I think, has emerged as the most effective way for humans to organize themselves. And yet it really is just an extended tribe, it’s got everything except kinship. And kinship is the glue of tribes. A nation-state has various surrogates like — people usually have a common language, a common religion, a common ethnicity, a common sort of founding narrative of how their nation came to be.

And these things are very effective because nations are so effective. Their problem often is not that they’re too weak, but they’re too strong. So they will make war against their neighbors. I definitely think though that nations are the best way we have yet evolved of organizing ourselves. And it seems to me a great shame that the sinews of nationhood are often ignored or rejected or repudiated, particularly by the left.

So this is a particularly serious problem, I would think, for the US because many, many countries are sort of natural nations. And if you look at the little Scandinavian democracies, they all speak the same language, they have the same religion, they have contiguous borders. So the US used to be like that when it was primarily settled by English Protestants. Very early on, because of its wonderfully flexible constitution, it was then able to embrace lots of other nations, mostly Christian nations, mostly Europeans, while retaining its cohesiveness.

But if you look at it now, many of the sinews of nationhood are fading. Americans used to be very religious. They’re not so religious now. They’re following Europe in that pattern. The ethnicity is quite mixed and changing. It’s sort of stable at the moment. We never know how long that’s going to last for. There used to be a common language, but now there’s sort of Spanish-speaking enclaves that resist adopting English.

You have to ask, well, what is it that holds Americans together? It seems to be money right now. It seems to be prosperity. Prosperity holds everyone together. No need to sort of rock the boat if everyone is reasonably prosperous, as at least in relative terms they are. But if that should fade for any reason, what would happen? I don’t know. I don’t see the natural bonds of a nation-state being so cohesive that one needn’t worry about them. I think we should start to worry about them.

Immigration, Integration, and the Bonds of Trust

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, well, it makes a lot of sense. Although interestingly, I would’ve thought in many ways Europe is in a worse place in relation to all of this, because at least in America, you have a history of immigration. It’s kind of understood that this is a nation of people who’ve come from different parts of the world, different cultures, who’ve come here and bought into the American dream, which as you say is kind of — I mean, that American dream is we all get to come here and be prosperous effectively, right? If you boil it down to its basics.

Whereas in Europe, and I said this as someone who myself immigrated to Europe from outside, you had a society which was very monocultural, very cohesive in terms of all the things that you talk about — language, ethnicity, etc. — that now doesn’t even have any structure to explain what a nation-state is, because it used to be based on common heritage and common culture and common religion. So now you have lots and lots of people come from other parts of the world who do not buy into that, but they also don’t have any story that they tell, that they are being told, or their children are being told at school. Like, they don’t stand for the national anthem, they don’t salute the flag, whatever it is that Americans are taught to do. And that seems to me like an even bigger challenge, I would argue.

NICHOLAS WADE: Yeah, I think Europe has definitely mishandled immigration in that, as you say, the American rule was to integrate everyone and it worked. I think it still works. Whereas in Europe, there’s been a general failure of integration. You have large Muslim communities and there’s nothing wrong with Islam, but here you have a community that doesn’t buy into the current ethos.

And religion is extremely important in sort of shaping a nation and interpersonal relations. And these large Muslim enclaves, I think, are not well integrated, are not happy, and they’re too large for the country to handle easily. I think the thing about immigration is it needs to be done on a more trickle basis than a sort of great big flow, because otherwise you don’t give people time to adjust. Immigrants become sort of threatening if people think they’re taking their jobs, or all the usual sort of anti-immigrant feelings that are always latent will get stirred up the larger the immigrant population is.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And what is the biological and evolutionary source of those concerns?

NICHOLAS WADE: Well, it’s simply sort of the inside-outside dichotomy. I mean, anyone who’s not like you is an outsider. So the best kind of person is someone sort of related to you because you know you can trust them.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But the more people become — you haven’t met my family.

NICHOLAS WADE: The more people become sort of different, of different religion, different language, different ethnicity, the harder it is to establish the bond of trust, which is the essential glue of human societies.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But you talked about culture being a very powerful force. Are there not cultural adaptations that can help us overcome these things? Or is it just something that you feel is one of the load-bearing walls of human society?

NICHOLAS WADE: No, I think there are cultural adaptations and there are multiracial societies that work very well. Now, Singapore leaps to mind, but I think you have to recognize that you have one ethnicity, the Chinese, that essentially are in control. I have to be careful in phrasing this, but it’s definitely — one doesn’t want a situation in which any one ethnicity claims to be superior to others. But it’s also the case that if you have one ethnicity able to sort of govern, then that ethnicity can make things safe for everyone else. And you don’t have vicious intercommunal warfare as you do, for example, in multiethnic states like Afghanistan or Lebanon. So states work best when you have a dominant ethnicity that treats everyone justly, which is the case in the US and in many European countries.

Elites, Human Nature, and the Dangers of Ignoring Tribalism

FRANCIS FOSTER: Nicholas, it seems to me that our elites, so the people in charge, the politicians, they have become more and more alienated from the very things that make us human. The fact that we have tribalism clearly imprinted into us. We are tribal creatures. Yet they don’t seem to understand that if you import millions of people into a particular country, that’s going to have a profound destabilizing effect, even if every single person who comes in is a net positive to society, which they’re not.

NICHOLAS WADE: Yeah, I mean, this is one of the big problems of not taking human nature seriously and not accepting the fact that we have certain behaviors written into our genome by evolution because of our survival value. So acting like a member of a tribe is one of them. So if you ignore that as a politician, then you’re going to run into trouble.

If you say, “Well, all people are alike, all people are equal or should be equal, and what we want is a global society with no national borders and everyone loving each other,” that’s fine. But our nature won’t let us operate a society like that. We need to live in sort of smaller definable systems such as a nation. We’re not ready for one global society because there’s no way of organizing it that is written into our genome.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And it also shows a fundamental ignorance of history, because if you look at history, it doesn’t matter what period of history, it’s mainly defined by wars.

Genocide, Culture, and the Pax Americana

NICHOLAS WADE: Yes, that’s right. Pursuant to the fact that our instinct is entirely warlike. I mean, we have genocide written into our genes. We and chimpanzees are the only species smart enough to figure out that the way to sort of finally solve the problem of the enemy is to eliminate him. So we are basically genocidal.

But this is another example, I think, where culture has successfully sort of curbed and restrained our instincts. And it does so on quite a wide level. If you think of the sort of Westphalian peace that ended the religious wars in Europe, and there were sort of schemes that succeeded it — the Congress of Vienna again reestablished peace after Napoleon’s wars. You had the Pax Britannica that sort of kept European countries from war. And since the Second World War, we’ve essentially had the Pax Americana.

So America doesn’t really like playing this role, but it really helps to have someone who polices a sort of world order in which states accept they do not fight each other or invade each other’s countries. So this is a great example of a sort of cultural curb on natural human instincts. And again, is vastly for the better.

FRANCIS FOSTER: But it also strikes me that we’ve become arrogant about human nature because it really does appear that we’ve kind of been lulled into this false sense of security. The last couple of years have certainly disproved this, but there was, you know, we found a way to transcend war. There’s going to be no war if we trade with each other. We’re more enlightened now. We have diplomacy. And you go, yeah, but deep down we’re just primates. We’re glorified chimpanzees. We’ve got — if we can express ourselves a little bit more articulately and we’re not going to start flinging excrement at each other, but we’re not that far away, are we?

NICHOLAS WADE: No, we’re not. You’re right, we are basically primates. But I think there’s a reason for a little more optimism than you suggest.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Sorry, I’ve just — I’ve come from South London.

The Fertility Crisis and the Decline of Violence

NICHOLAS WADE: And over the big sweep of history, we’ve become less violent. I mean, within societies, we don’t treat each other so horribly cruelly as we used to. We didn’t have public hangings or debtors’ prisons or child labor. So the level of violence within societies has gone down. I don’t think anyone really knows why, but there could be a genetic explanation, which is simply that people who are very violent are sort of ostracized. People don’t want to be around them. And maybe people who are very violent have fewer children than people who are peacefully inclined.

Looking outside societies, we have far fewer wars than we used to have, or rather we have far fewer men as a proportion of the population killed in wars. I mean, in primitive societies, people used to go to war every day. They didn’t have mass casualties. But if you lost one guy a week, then pretty soon men over the course of their lives — it was like a 30% chance of dying in battle in hunter-gatherer societies. So our chances of dying in battle, thankfully, are very small.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And it appears that we kind of need this balance, don’t we, when we’re talking about the human being and our societies. On the one hand, we need to be pragmatic and accept that we’re tribal and we still have these instincts and impulses to go to war, for example, for resources. We’re still hierarchical in nature, but we still need perhaps that progressive element, which is, look, we’re not as violent as we used to be, we’re maybe not as tribal as we used to be. So we can work on the human being whilst also accepting that there’s going to be some fundamental aspects of our biology that can never be changed.

NICHOLAS WADE: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. We should understand and acknowledge what is there and sort of work with it rather than against it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And what does that look like in our society today? What would that look like in terms of changes to how we think about things?

Undermining the Human Family

NICHOLAS WADE: I think there are two big ways in which we are running into trouble. One is the fertility crisis. We have undermined the human family and the way evolution organized it to produce, nurture, and raise children. And it’s been for a good reason. It was sort of to free women from all the duties of the home and looking after children. And it’s true, looking after children is a great chore. I mean, whatever joy they may be, it requires a lot of effort to bring them up. And many women are deciding not to do it. Fine. But that road does lead to extinction and it’s very hard to reverse.

And you might think it’s easy to make more babies if more babies were needed. But in fact, many governments have had strong pronatalist policies. The Soviet Union for most of its existence had strong pronatalist policies, so banned abortion and contraceptives. And nothing that any government has found has reversed this trend, with one exception, which is the former Soviet Republic of Georgia that has an archbishop. He’s called Ilia II. And he announced that for any couple married in the Orthodox church who had two children and had a third child, he personally would baptize it and be its godfather. He said this in 2005, and the next year the birth rate took off like a rocket. Everyone started having children. This is the only known example of a government policy that has reversed the declining birth rate.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s really interesting. I’ve been to Georgia a number of times. People in Georgia are very — they’re not aggressively religious, but they’re very faithful. And it’s a big part of their lives. I imagine in America, that would be like, I don’t know, LeBron James sending you a signed something for every third child.

NICHOLAS WADE: That might work.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You know, something like that. This is a question that we’ve dealt with a lot on the show. We’ve interviewed all sorts of people about the fertility crisis. And there are different perspectives on it. Young people like us — well, what?

FRANCIS FOSTER: No, no, young. We’re young. We’re young.

The Cost of Living and the Fertility Decline

KONSTANTIN KISIN: We used to be young. There was a time when we could say young people like us, but people of our generation and below will say housing is so expensive. We’re sitting here in New York. You look around at the property prices here as a young person, you know, someone under 30, like you are so screwed unless you’ve got millionaire parents. So how are you going to pair up and have kids if you are living 4 to a tiny apartment and you’re spending 50% of your income on rent.

There are other people who will say, well, as society declines in religiosity, people have fewer children. There are other people who will say — Louise Perry, for example, who we’ve had on the show a couple of times, she wrote a book called “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution” in which she basically said, look, once you invent the abortion pill and washing machines and all this other stuff, women are free and they go into the workplace, which might be great, but then they don’t have kids. Then this is the inevitable product of this. There are the people who say it’s actually the education of women that caused it. All of these things are going on and that’s maybe why it’s so hard to turn around. But is it your thesis that fundamentally — sounds like a weird question to ask, but I think it’s worth asking if it’s true — if women participate in the labor force more, this is the inevitable consequence, rightly or wrongly?

NICHOLAS WADE: Well, all those things you mentioned are definitely important factors. I think that the most important way of looking at this problem is that the one thing that in one country after another correlates with the fertility rate is what women want — the number of children women in each country say they want. So that is a perfect correlation. So that, it seems to me, is the sort of place to start looking for answers. And that is something that’s very hard to change. I mean, women are not taking this decision lightly, I assume, but for all the reasons in any society, this is what they decide. And no one knows how you make them change their minds on this.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, I’m not sure you can. I’ve tried to change many a woman’s mind. It’s never happened. But the reason I think there’s maybe some optimism — a lot of people I talk to now are sort of going, all right, we should do this, we should have kids, men and women. And so there will be, you know, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, maybe on the one hand.

On the other hand, I worry about — you know, there was this myth of like runaway climate change for a long time. So it’s like runaway infertility or lack of fertility. Because if you’re not constantly surrounded by young children, you get further and further distance from that experience. And then you only imagine — you just look on Instagram and you see yet another parent complaining about how hard it is. And what you don’t know is, well, actually being a parent is great but also very, very hard. So yeah, you go on Instagram to complain about it, but you’ve got all these moments and days and weeks of joy that stays in the background. So I just wonder how all of this is ultimately going to get resolved. But I guess we’ll find out.

NICHOLAS WADE: Yeah, if people will start to recognize it as a true crisis, which I think it is. The problem is it’s a slow-moving crisis and we’re not going to go extinct tomorrow. It’s just that things will get steadily worse. We’ll have an ever-dwindling workforce supporting an ever larger group of old people and we won’t be able to have the soldiers to defend our borders. It’s a very slippery slope and very insidious to recover from.

Meaning, Purpose, and the Drive to Have Children

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, the thing is, I don’t think people are ever going to have kids to save the country. I think what people might discover — and we’ve had lots of conversations on this trip around the US with people, women in particular, our generation, sort of late 30s, early 40s, who just feel like they’ve missed out on something important. And I think as we move forward in society and people increasingly lack meaning and purpose in their lives, that might be actually the reason that people do think about this differently over time, right?

NICHOLAS WADE: That’s very interesting.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Might be, or we could be completely screwed.

NICHOLAS WADE: Well, this of course is the purpose that evolution has created for us — to breed and have children. I mean, we don’t like to admit it. We look in our culture for all other kinds of purposes, but this is the root purpose.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But the thing is, it’s hardwired into us. So when you — like, I have a 3-year-old — when you have kids, all these little things that have been built into us for millennia activate that. And this is really the core of your book. That’s what you’re really saying is all of this, all of our politics — it goes back to the basic fundamental instinct, which is to have children and to have them live into adulthood and to reproduce. And the way we think about everything ultimately boils down to that original source. Isn’t that right?

NICHOLAS WADE: That’s exactly right. That’s a very good thing, I would think, for politicians to focus on. They should try and make each stage of life easier for people who are having children. As you mentioned, reducing the cost of education would be a very good thing to do. And housing and so forth. There are lots of tweaks you can make. None of them have worked in the past, maybe because they haven’t been applied in a wholesale and systematic way. But if this were recognized as an important function of government, then we might be able to turn it around.

Women, Voting, and Political Leanings

FRANCIS FOSTER: And we talk about genetics, the origin of politics. There’s been a discussion that’s been happening online, which I’d love to get your opinion on, which is ever since women have got the vote, we tend to vote for, as a nation or as a society, for more left-leaning politicians, more left-leaning parties. Is that something that you would agree with broadly, or do you think it’s far more complex than Reddit would like it to appear?

NICHOLAS WADE: I don’t have any empirical data. I don’t know if women do in fact vote more often to the left.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s not women. That was much cruder than I think. I think married women and unmarried young women vote very, very differently. And men too. I think it’s much more about that. I think people become more conservative as they have something to protect, which comes back to the conversation we were having.

Controversy Over the Book on Race

I was wondering — you know, we always are extra interested in people who seem sensible but have been embroiled in some sort of controversy or been canceled or whatever, because that was an area that I found very interesting but also confusing for a long time. And you had that with the previous book, did you not?

NICHOLAS WADE: My book on the evolution of race was attacked by a bunch of geneticists. They didn’t find any error in the book, so I didn’t pay any particularly serious attention to them. It did me no harm because the book had already been out for a year and a half by that stage. It may have increased sales a little, and I retired from the Times, so there were no repercussions at work since I didn’t have any work.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And what was it that — what was your central argument of that book, and why did people disagree with it as strongly as they did?

Race, Science, and the Politics of Biological Differences

NICHOLAS WADE: Well, the central argument was simply that if you’re interested in human evolution, nothing is more fascinating than seeing how the population adapts to different localities as it spreads out from Africa, as any species will. So the book gave you a biological explanation of race sometimes in very great detail, which was then becoming possible.

Like for example, we know that both Chinese and Europeans have pale skin, but they do so for entirely different genetic reasons. There’s one set of genes that produces pale skin in Europeans and a mostly different set that produces pale skin in Chinese. So if you look at all these genes, often you can sort of tell their history when they sort of developed. So you can sort of put a date on when we acquired pale skin and blue eyes.

Just from the point of view of natural history, which was really all my book was concerned about, I didn’t — I had no interest in the politics of race and didn’t touch it. And all this was, my job at the time was to cover the human genome. So this was one of the first, these are one of the first results that came flowing out of the human genome, how the different variations on the genome that have occurred throughout history. So that’s when I started writing it up.

Also because I found that academics were petrified of discussing these fascinating results. There was a great taboo in talking about race. Well, here we were generating all this information. Shouldn’t someone report to the public what it says? So that was the only motivation of my book. It was just a sort of straight, as I viewed it, it was just a straightforward science book saying, this is what we know.

However, it’s remained unique in the field because no one has since dared write about it. There’s a complete taboo on saying anything about race. And the reason it annoyed people was that it went to the heart of the left’s position, which is that there is no biological basis to race or indeed to sex. Both race and sex are cultural concepts, not biological in the view of the left. So this is a profoundly evolutionary, utterly nutty position. But my book was a direct challenge to it because, well, here is the biological basis of race and, down to the nearest nucleotide, this is why Chinese are different from Europeans.

The Historical Dangers of Racial Science

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Do you think that it’s not — I wonder if it’s just that, because I understand your argument, if the political worldview that you advocate for relies on pretending there are no differences between population groups, then it’s very advantageous to you to shut down any evidence to the contrary.

But do you think there’s also quite a reasonable concern based on history that quite on a number of occasions in the last 150 years, but probably prior to that as well, people have come along and said, well, the science says that this group of people is superior to that group of people, therefore here’s a bunch of discriminatory policies that often lead to very, very negative and unpleasant outcomes. And then we later learn actually that wasn’t scientifically accurate at all. We have a new theory that explains certain things that people were claiming at the time.

NICHOLAS WADE: That’s certainly a real danger. But what do you do about it? You just suppress the scientific knowledge you’re gaining? Surely what you should try and do is let everyone know what the science says so that people can then make informed views as to what implications they should draw from it. I mean, just because we have races that differ in various aspects, that gives you no basis for saying one race is superior to another.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Is that really true, though? Because if you say Black people are better at basketball, I mean, they are superior at basketball. So if you make claims about other metrics that determine people’s success in various aspects of life, you can very easily see how when you get to things like intelligence or other things, it becomes very easy to use that as a discriminatory piece of information. And there are lots of people who would.

NICHOLAS WADE: Well, it’s true. And you could — Tibetans are adapted to living at high altitude. So you could say Tibetans are genetically better than lowlanders living at high altitudes. Yeah, but it’s a pretty useless observation. The thing is, you can’t prevent people going around making claims like this. But should that mean you don’t discuss these things at all? I think you can get into difficulties if you don’t discuss racial differences that may be relevant in some aspects of social policy.

FRANCIS FOSTER: What do you mean by that, Nicholas?

NICHOLAS WADE: Well, I don’t want to get too far into this because I’m really not an expert in the politics of race and have no real interest in it. But I assume, for example, if you look at education, it’s very important to give everyone the best educational experience you can so that everyone has a sort of fair chance of living day to night.

Now, if some people are less educable than others, you surely need to recognize that and give them a different and appropriate treatment to the ones who are more easily educable. Now, this lack of educability can come from a lot of causes, many of them environmental. You have parents who don’t make the kids do their homework, who neglect their kids, kids live in poverty and so on and so forth. And there can be a genetic element. It doesn’t really matter. You’ve still got two groups, say, that require different treatment if you are going to make the best use of your educational facilities.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, I can see why this is controversial.

Race, Civil Rights, and the Fear of Discrimination

FRANCIS FOSTER: I think the thing that will worry people and will worry particularly Black people in the US and in the UK, but more so in the US, is, look, if we start pointing out racial differences, we fought long and hard to get equality, and this is just going to be used as a cudgel to beat us with.

NICHOLAS WADE: That’s a legitimate fear, but surely if you look at the history of civil rights in the US, the trend has gone the other way. The Voting Rights Act enfranchised everyone and discrimination, it may not be a thing of the past, but it’s certain — you can’t discriminate in public in any way. So in fact, Americans have done everything a government reasonably can to lift up its Black population and give them an equal chance and equal opportunities. It hasn’t done so perfectly, but at least you can point to all the efforts it has made. I’m starting with the Civil War to end slavery. So it doesn’t necessarily mean that people are going to make the worst, the most divisive possible use of this information.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, I guess all I’m saying is I think I can see why people are very touchy about the subject.

NICHOLAS WADE: Absolutely.

Inequality: The Defining Challenge of Our Time

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, listen, it’s been great having you on the show. We’re going to ask you some questions from our supporters in a second. But before we do, the last question we always ask is what’s the one thing we are not talking about that you think we really should be as a society?

NICHOLAS WADE: I think the thing we should have talked about if we had time was the very deep problem of inequality. So inequality is very destabilizing society, but if you have an open society, merit-based, particularly in this era of very fast technological advance, very enormous fortunes get made overnight, you are going to have a lot of inequality, and you have to find some way of making that acceptable to a population.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, we have time actually, so if you want to delve further into that, we definitely can. Are you talking about, for example, we’ve just come from San Francisco, talking to people there who work in the AI field, it is very clear to me that even though there’s very high levels of inequality in Western countries already, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

I mean, over time, the majority of new wealth will be created in one small area of one small city, effectively. That has got to be a recipe, A, for disaster, but B, then also, I was sort of saying to one of these guys only half joking, like, I wrote a whole book about how communism is evil, but we might need it if this carries on.

NICHOLAS WADE: Well, we might need a universal basic income if this carries on, if people get put out of jobs, which is not yet clear. I think one aspect of inequality that is important to keep in mind is that you shouldn’t really mind if Bill Gates is a lot richer than you or I are. The question is, do we have enough to eat? And almost everyone in this country has enough to eat. They have a roof over their heads. Most of them have iPhones. So why does inequality matter?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, hold on a second. You are someone who’s an expert in evolution. You know why that matters, because human beings don’t operate on an absolute basis. They operate on a comparative basis.

NICHOLAS WADE: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. So why do we want status? Status is important to people because it gives you a bigger claim on society’s resources, especially in early days when people were living on the edge of starvation. So if you were a big cheese in a small society, you were more likely to survive than if you had very low status. So this I think is the reason why inequality is so jarring to us. There isn’t really a good logical reason in a country that has a decent welfare system why we should be bothered about inequality. It’s our inherent yearning for status and feeling that we are diminishing our chances of survival if we don’t have it.

The Genetics of Social Mobility

Another aspect of inequality, which I have a chapter on in the book, is that it’s much harder to get rid of than you might think for purely genetic reasons. And that is that human societies, I think, are much more mobile, have been much more mobile in the past than we imagined. So even in aristocratic societies, the aristocrats would, half of them would die in battle every generation. So their rank — how did they replace, fulfill their ranks? Well, it was sort of rich commoners could buy a title or marry a duke’s daughter. And so there was new blood constantly infusing into the aristocracy.

So there’s a fascinating series of papers by an economist called Gregory Clarke in which he measures mobility in English societies over the centuries. And it’s very slow. The people at the top do gradually descend in the social scale, presumably because their merit, whatever merit got them to the top, is sort of diluted genetically. But the societies are pretty much stable.

And his basis for this is he follows people who attended Oxford and Cambridge, which are the only places you get educated then. And he looks at people with very rare surnames who, because the surnames are so rare, they’re very likely to be related to each other. So you look at the sort of Shuffledores in the 13th century attending Oxford and lo and behold, in the 17th century, the Shuffledores are still there. So this is a family that has sort of kept itself at the top.

So if that is the case, if our societies are in fact stratified by some kind of genetic merit to a much greater extent than we recognize, then it’s going to be very hard to sort of shuffle them up short of war or revolution.

Social Media, Consumerism, and the Politics of Resentment

FRANCIS FOSTER: Do you think also part of the problem that America is facing is in a society that is as consumerist as this one, and with social media, you judge essentially your status on the acquirement of material possessions? So if you are constantly comparing yourself to other people, that’s going to put you in a place of resentment and anger, which will then lead to destructive impulses and behaviors.

NICHOLAS WADE: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, and your point about social media is so important as well, because 100 years ago you couldn’t go inside the Rockefeller mansion and have a good look around. Now you just open your phone and you’re right there.

NICHOLAS WADE: Right. And if you’re rich, I guess you’re so pleased that you don’t hide your wealth. And you constantly see the rich competing with each other in terms of the size of their yacht or whatever it is. So their wealth is not hidden from the lower orders.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, if you’re a billionaire watching this, put your yacht in the hangar or whatever. There’s probably a different word for a boat hangar, I don’t know. Fantastic, thank you so much for coming on. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where we’re going to ask Nicholas your question.

Neanderthal DNA and Political Thinking

FRANCIS FOSTER: Is there any evidence that our ways of thinking about politics and other social issues is linked to how much genetically we have of other hominid species such as Neanderthals within us?

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