How Can Leftists Be Mutants if They Are More Intelligent than Conservatives?

I’ve become quite well known for arguing that leftists are “mutants;” that they are higher in mutational load than conservatives. Leftists, in general though not always, are, in my view, the descendants of those who would have died under the harsh Darwinian conditions of high child mortality that were prevalent until around 1800. However, it is perfectly possible that I am wrong. Unlike the Woke ideologues who have taken over Western universities, I am open to the possibility that I may be wrong, because I am interested in the empirical truth. A recent article in Aporia Magazine has raised the possibility that my theory might be incorrect, but I don’t think it is. The nub of the issue is that intelligent people, in Western societies, tend to be left-wing and intelligence is associated with low mutational load.

Dr Noah Carl and Dr Bo Winegard, both “cancelled” academics, have highlighted a fundamental problem with the theory that I, and, more technically, a young scholar called Joseph Bronski, have espoused [Can mutation load explain the rise of leftism?, By Noah Carl and Bo Winegard, Aporia Magazine, April 26, 2024].

As I explain my book Breeding the Human Herd: Eugenics, Dysgenics and the Future of the Species, my argument is that under harsh Darwinian conditions of 50% child mortality,  there was selection for physical health, mental health, conservatism, pro-sociality, and religiousness. We were selecting for that the latter two traits because they were under conditions of harsh group-selection – we were battling other groups – and the group which is high in positive and negative ethnocentrism tends to triumph according to computer models. Conservatism involves being fundamentally oriented toward group values, especially obedience to authority, ingroup loyalty and the sanctity of tradition and order. Religion promotes these as the will of God and also makes people more pro-social, as God is sitting on their shoulder, and reduces anxiety by giving people a sense of eternal meaning. Hence, all of these traits became bundled together – pleiotropically related – into a “fitness factor.” The genetic component of conservatism may be about 60%, demonstrating that it is an adaptation.

Every generation, high child mortality was purging mutant genes from the population, keeping it genetically fit. With the breakdown of harsh Darwinian selection, due to the Industrial Revolution and its advancements it medicine, we would expect a massive build-up of mutation and we would expect it to be associated with a deviation from the pre-industrial norm of conservatism and traditional religiosity involving the collective worship of a moral god.

Consistent with this, liberalism is associated with a number of markers of mutational load. Liberal males are less muscular and they are shorter while liberal males and females have less attractive and less symmetrical faces. These traits imply that, being genetically sick, they have fewer bio-energetic resources left over to accrue muscle, reach their phenotypic maximum height and maintain a symmetrical phenotype. Atheists are more likely to be left-handed, which implies, among other problems, a particularly asymmetrical brain. Leftists and atheists are higher in mental illness, atheists are less likely to recover from cancer, atheists and liberals are less fertile and they are lower in pro-social personality traits. Also, as Bronski has shown, liberals have older fathers. Paternal age is an accepted marker of mutational load. Older males are more likely to have de novo mutations on their sperm [Evidence for a Paternal Age Effect on Leftism, By Joseph Bronski, Open Psych, 2023]. 

My argument is that, across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was, due to relaxed selection, a build-up of mutational load and, thus, a build-up favoring leftism. Eventually, a “tipping point” was reached—an experiment indicated that 20% of a group is enough for this to happen [Experimental evidence for tipping points in social convention, By D. Centola et al., Science, 2018]. Western societies tipped over very quickly, focussing on the liberal values of equality and harm avoidance; individualistic values that, in essence, put the individual over the good of the group.

It is here that the point made by Carl and Winegard becomes germane. Intelligence is also a marker of low mutational load. We were selecting for intelligence up until the Industrial Revolution, as I observe in Breeding the Human Herd. Carl and Winegard observe that, even today, intelligence is genetically correlated with mental and physical health. Yet it is also genetically predicts leftism: carrying alleles that are associated with very high education levels—and thus with high intelligence—and it predicts being left-wing. Not only that but there is evidence that intelligent people have changed, within their own lifetimes, from being left-wing to right-wing: So, this being the case, how can the change to a leftist society be mainly or even partly genetic in origin?

A possible reason for the broader anomaly may be that intelligence is associated with social conformity; it is associated with norm-mapping and the effortful control necessary to force yourself to believe that which it is socially useful to believe. Once you have adopt socially useful values, you attain social status by competitively signalling your conformity to these social norms. In a conservative society, this may signal runaway purity-signalling, until eventually, illegitimacy is so unacceptable that illegitimate children are put up for adoption. In a liberal society, this runaway concern with equality and harm avoidance leads us to Wokeness. It is the more intelligent who tend to direct the culture, helping to explain why intelligence is so central to this process. Consistent with this, in right-wing societies, that have not yet tipped over, intelligence is associated with conservatism [Political orientations, intelligence and education, By H. Rindermann et al, Intelligence, 2012]. Intelligence, when combined with mental illness, which it sometimes will be, will weaponize mental illness and selfishness: such people will be restless Machiavellians, pushing things in an ever more left-wing direction.

But, of course, what this means is that intelligence has a paradoxical relationship with other markers of mutational load. When mutational load builds-up and makes the environment left-wing, intelligent people will become the vanguard of the new dispensation, despite, ironically, being relatively low in mutational load. The result – and my research has shown that this happening – is a selection event among the more intelligent. Among the more intelligent, the big predictor of fertility is religiousness and conservatism, as I have shown in my co-authored book The Past is a Future Country: The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution.

Intelligent people seem to be more environmentally sensitive, which makes sense because solving cognitive problems involves rising above your instincts, so you should be lower in “instinct.” This means that you are more reliant on being placed on an evolutionarily adaptive road map of life, where you are told to have children and behave in an adaptive way—and, in general, behave in a way that matches your evolved predispositions—the ecology which you are evolved to. If you are placed on a maladaptive road map – which Wokeness places you on – then your intelligence (your marker of low mutational load) will be your un-doing, unless it goes together with genetic conservatism, which makes you resistant to Wokeness.

In addition, the long documented weak negative relationship between religiousness and intelligence would be explicable by the fact that religiousness is an instinct (hence it increases at times of stress and mortality salience), intelligent people are lower in instinct and we are in an evolutionary mismatch of low mortality salience in which are instincts are less likely to be induced. Likewise, ethnocentrism increases at times of stress and mortality salience, implying that it is an instinct and that it is less likely to be induced, in easy conditions, in more intelligent people [Terror Management in a Multicultural Society: Effects of Mortality Salience on Attitudes to Multiculturalism Are Moderated by National Identification and Self-Esteem Among Native Dutch People, By M Sin & S. Koole, Frontiers in Psychology, 2018]. Intelligence, in summary, presents a paradox in terms of the mutational load model of our leftward shift, but it is a paradox that can be solved.