David Barash illuminates the “EvoPolitics” of Darwin’s time

The Chronicle of Higher Education “EvoPolitics”

I really appreciate Barash’s reinforcement of the “is-ought” distinction: it is amazing to me how many people still commit the naturalistic fallacy.

This is a really enlightening historical review, but I think that it gets the present-day implications wrong. The defining question about the political implications of evolutionary theory is “what level matters?”. Are we still a species that sorts out based on competition between individuals, or are larger group affiliations important? This question is the only one that will get at whose Darwinist interpretation of human beings is correct.