We Shouldn’t Call Them “Woke,” We Should Call Them “Mutants”

Have you ever noticed how physically unattractive Woke people tend to be? Both the males and females are relatively ugly and the males are relatively short and physically weak. Both are clearly high in mental illness. It’s almost like there’s something genetically wrong with them.

Well, your eyes don’t deceive you.  Some fascinating new evidence has come to light that left wing people are, to put it bluntly, more likely to be mutants (something which is almost always a bad thing in evolutionary terms) than right-wing people. It has been presented by a young researcher, a computer scientist called Joseph Bronski. He has provided us with compelling new evidence for a point I have been exploring for many years.

Under the harsh Darwinian conditions that were prevalent until the Industrial Revolution, there was a strong selection pressure to be genetically physically and mentally healthy. There was also strong selection pressure to be group-oriented: pro-social, mentally stable and high in impulse control. Groups that were too low in these internally cooperative traits would be destroyed by those that were higher in them. Individuals that were too low in them would be killed by the group. Consequently all of these traits became bundled together. Supporting this, Zakharin and Bates found that 66 percent of the variation in being generally group-oriented results from genetic differences [Testing heritability of moral foundations: Common pathway models support strong heritability for the five moral foundations, By M. Zakharin and T. Bates, European Journal of Personality, 2023].

Moreover, studies have shown that left-wing people value individually-oriented moral foundations such as harm avoidance and equality over the group-oriented foundations of in-group loyalty and obedience to authority that are valued by conservatives. Accordingly, the moral judgments of leftists are self-interested. Their purpose is to help less talented individuals, such as themselves, ascend the hierarchy of the group [Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations, By J. Graham, J. Haidt and B. Nosek, Personality Processes and Individual Differences, 2009]. The above-cited Zakharin and Bates (2023) found that 49 percent of the variation in individualizing morality was due to genetic variation.

So, taken together, we should not be surprised that people who are less group-oriented and more individualizing are higher in “mutational load” than right-wing people. We were selected to be highly group-oriented and they are a movement away from this. They are more likely to be the descendants of those who would have died as children under a harsher evolutionary regime, in which child mortality was as much as 50 percent, as opposed to less than 1 percent in Western countries today [Is Child Death the Crucible of Human Evolution? By T. Volk and J. Atkinson, Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, 2008].

In my recent book Breeding the Human Herd: Eugenics, Dysgenics and the Future of the Species, I bring together the growing body of evidence that leftism is associated with elevated genetic sickness. Compared to conservatives, liberals have less attractive and less symmetrical faces, liberal males are physically shorter and liberal males are less muscular. These traits imply a poor immune system, due to high mutational load, which has prevented them from maintaining a symmetrical phenotype, reaching their maximum height or accruing muscle because, with a poor immune system, they must invest disproportionately more of their bio-energetic resources in fighting off disease.

As I also note in the book, leftists are also higher in mental illnesses (such as depression) which are strongly genetic, and they are more likely to be atheists—atheism strongly crosses over with leftism; moreover, they are more likely to be left-handed, which implies a significantly asymmetrical brain. The heritability of political viewpoint, as I have discussed in my book The Past is a Future Country: The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution, can be relatively high, so this strongly implies that leftism is partly a function of mutational load.

However, it is true that an element of these relationships could be environmental. Perhaps having these kinds of traits makes people feel excluded or inferior. This makes them bitter about the world, which makes them want to tear down all of its power structures and traditions, causing them to be attracted to leftism in a kind of a symbiotic relationship. What is needed is hard proof that the relationship is genetically mediated. This is exactly what Joseph Bronski appears to have demonstrated.

In a study in the journal Open Psych entitled “Evidence for a Paternal Age Effect on Leftism,” Bronski achieves something that is both important and beautifully simple. He shows that older fathers are not more likely than younger fathers to be left-wing but that the fathers of left-wing children tend to be older. The correlation between paternal age and leftism was relatively weak but it was highly significant statistically, that is, vanishingly unlikely to be a fluke. This finding is vital because as men age they produce more and more de novo mutations in their sperm, meaning that the older your father is the less genetically healthy you are likely to be, on average. The fact that older fathers are not more likely to be left-wing yet they are more likely to produce offspring who are left-wing effectively demonstrates that being left-wing is a function of mutation; a function of poor genetic fitness.

In another study, as yet unpublished and available on Bronski’s website, he argues something that even I—who tends to be sympathetic to genetic explanations—found surprising: The rise in leftism in the West over the last century can be almost entirely explained by rising mutational load; the rise, in other words, of mutants. In The Past is a Future Country: The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution, I argue that rising mutational load is part of the explanation. It led to more and more selfish, individually-oriented people until a tipping point was reached, probably around 1963, causing society to rapidly become left-wing. I aver that a big part of this was environmental. Once the shift began to occur, the more intelligent—i.e., those better at sensing the general mood and better able to conform to it and see the benefits of so-doing—began competitively signalling leftism, causing a kind of runway individualism.

However, in his paper “On Evolutionary Pressure and General Leftism,” Bronski argues that the rise in leftism can be mainly, not just partly, explained by genetic changes in the population. In effect, he notes that there are two competing pressures: conservatives tending to have more children and a rise a mutation, which can be quantified. As Bronski summarises:

Using a narrow-sense heritability estimate of 0.6, we find a selection pressure of 0.076 SDs per generation in the conservative direction. We . . .  compute the mutational pressure as 0.22 SDs in the leftist direction. We find that the sum of these two pressures adequately explains the change in general leftism per generation over that last 70 years (0.15 SD per generation in the leftist direction), indicating that Western political change is solely due to evolutionary pressure. Per Bayesian analysis, there is a 95% chance, given this data, that 70% or more of the observed shift in leftism is due solely to evolutionary pressure, namely mutational pressure.

If this seems extreme, Bronski attempts to allay such a reaction in his Open Psych study, discussed earlier:

It is theoretically plausible that mutational pressure could produce some or all of the leftward shift of the last several generations in the US and other Western nations . . . If the mutational pressure on leftism were 1 in 20, and leftism were treated as binary, then mutational pressure would convert 5% of would-be non-leftists each generation.

If Bronski is right, and his data appears to be sound, the implication is clear: growing leftism is overwhelmingly a function the growth of genetically unfit mutants. You will not fight its growth by critiquing illogical Woke arguments.