The Origin of Politics

How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations

De: Nicholas Wade

Narrado por: Charles Constant

Societies that ignore social disintegration and collapsing birth rates are putting their future in peril. So why are we ignoring the signs?

In The Origin Of Politics, Nicholas Wade explains how our political systems compete with a more ancient set of rules for organizing society—those developed by evolution. Modern ideologies are in constant tension with structures inherent in human social behavior, such as the family, the tribe, and male-dominated institutions.

This tension plays out in various ways. Sometimes nature prevails over politics, as in the proposal by Marx and Engels to eliminate the family, the basic unit of society. The founders of the kibbutz movement put this radical idea into practice, only to find that the conflict with human nature was unsustainable. In other cases, culture has successfully modified evolutionary behaviors, replacing polygamy with monogamy and dissolving the bonds of tribalism to make way for modern states.

But the evolutionary framework of human societies is not infinitely flexible. The nation-state, especially in the case of the United States, is prone to disintegration if disruptive ideologies are allowed to undermine the cohesive affinities that hold its disparate cultures together.

The worldwide decline in fertility in most countries except those in Africa signals a severe derangement in the behaviors evolution has devised for ensuring that a population will maintain itself. If the causes of this disruption cannot be understood and reversed, human societies will embark on an unsought path to extinction.

Other fraught issues in which human biology and politics conflict include the innate specializations of the sexes, the stratification of society by ability, and the mismatch between the inequalities of wealth-creating societies and the egalitarian ethic inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

We live in an iridescent bubble, the intoxicating richness of modern culture. Shielded from the natural world, we have lost our awareness of the evolutionary forces that still guide our motivations and shape the foundations of our societies. The Origin of Politics explores the risks of underestimating evolution’s fundamental role in human affairs.

©2025 Nicholas Wade (P)2025 HarperCollins Publishers

Really good except the part about foreign policy

While this is not groundbreaking for people familiar with evolutionary approaches applied to the analysis of society and politics, it’s an excellent synthesis and will certainly benefit many curious and intelligent readers (as was the Blank Slate by Steven Pinker 25 years ago). I can’t give it 5 stars though because the last chapters on foreign policy are way too shallow and uninformed. Like other American intellectuals with a similar profile (Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire come to mind), Wade seems to think of foreign policy like a boomer who watches too much Fox News. The USA is seen as a benevolent hegemon trying to ensure peace and stability in the world but thwarted by the nefarious Chinese, Russians and Iranians. And unfortunately the average American voter trends towards isolationism and is no longer willing to take on the burden of Empire. If you take this seriously, you either have been living in a cave for 30 years or know the world exclusively through US news channels.