What evolutionary advantages are there to a conservative viewpoint?
Well, your conservative soul is hesitant to leave home, or to accept members from outside his clan or tribe. So he’s not so likely to take one for his mate. This avoids inbreeding; where a recessive gene that causes an undesirable trait–such as sickle cell anemia–has a higher chance of joining fwith another copy of the recessive gene, and thus dominating to express the bad trait.
The insular society willl be more susceptible to a reduction in genetic variation, making it more vulnerable to pathogens, diseases, that it hasn’t encountered before, within the group.
Within inbreeding groups, there is a higher rate of death among newbors, til the age of five. So eventually the inbreeding group will tend to die out, unless a greater degree of fecundity is achieved in the female population, but this doesn’t seem to occur; the inbreeders have a lower rate of conception and inplantation. (p. 142). Inbreeding is marrying with your first cousin, or closer.
Outbreeding, on the other hand (exsanguinuity), will bring resistant genes into the population.
“Embodied cognition” is the concept of your mental state being affected by your physical state, in subtle ways that you’re not aware of. For instance, if you’re holding a warm drink, you’re likely to express positive feelings about others–whereas holding a cold drink gives you negative feelings. A disgusting smell in the room will cause you to be negative to ideas that are presented to you. Using a heavy clipboard makes you more serious about your answers to polls. Drinking a bitter liquid makes you harshly judgemental.
Voting in a church produces more conservative voting patterns.
Just about all the polling places in South Carolina are in church buildings.
200,000 years of evolutionary development as human beings, and 200,000 years of language evolution! Our language changes with the changes that devlope in our social relationships. There are those who say that language could develop only when there was a level of trust among people: words are symbols, referents, mere sounds that point to an external reality that is not necessarily present at the time of speaking those words. As trust develops, society changes, too; trust leads to openness, which allows us to welcome strangers in our midst. Welcoming strangers is a liberal trait.
Why is it the case that first-born children have the propensity to be conservative? Conservative in dress, in taste, in music, in politics?
According to Avi Tuschman in his book Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us, the first offspring is born with all the attention of the parents directed at him; and it is incumbent upon him to keep that attention by catering to the demands of his parents. The first-born will be responsible, will obey the rules.
When another offspring comes along, staying loyal to the parental authority figure is the first-born’s method of trying to maintain the beneficence that had been flowing toward him alone, but which now is being split with a younger sibling. So remaining true to the old ways is the first-born’s best tactic for self preservation.
The younger sibling, though, can’t use that same tactic as well, but is forced to develop new tactics for getting attention: crying helps at first, but gets annoying; better to develop skills and interests that haven’t been tried before within the family, and so get attention and affection. Going outside the family, for new interests, becomes the preferred modus operandi. This leads to the development of an openness to the novel, to the original, to the world outside the family, and perhaps to leaving for parts of the world far from the place of birth.
The first-born, however, is much more likely to stay by his mother’s side, to develop a distaste for things different, to prefer the same old same old to the dangers of the novel.
Human beings, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, has been around for some 200,000 years now. But we (assuming you are human, as am I) didn’t just spring up from nowhere. The precursor to Homo Sapiens was Homo Eructus–specifically, the south-east African branch called Homo Ergaster, or Homo Rodesiensis. We are told the story of how humans came into the world from out of Africa some 150,000 years ago. But when we did leave Africa, we found that there were already out in the world other species, all very much like us, and all descendents our our common ancestor Erectus: Homo Neanderthalis, Heidelbergensis, Atecessor, Denisovan…spread all over the Eurasian continent. Humans lived beside, fought against, and sometimes mated with these other groups, and eventurally humans out-survived them.
All this time, we humans were forming families, grouping ourselves into tribes, co-operating in hunting groups, foraging together, and also fighting amongt ourselves. In short, we were engaging in the formation of societies. Just as humans evolved over these years–developing lactose toleration, adding to or subtracting from the melanin in our skin, getting taller or shorter–so also our societies were evolving.
Is it any wonder, then, that we cannot, within one generation or less, move ourselves away from the stultifying bifurcation in our political (social) thought between conservative and liberal?