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Punctuated Equilibrium and Political Evolution

Punctuated Equilibrium and Political Evolution

Last updated on: May 21, 2017 at 6:57 pm by Tom Swiss

Punctuated Equilibrium and Political Evolution 2017-05-21T18:57:09-04:00 Tom Swiss

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One of my Facebook friends-slash-political sparring partners is (poor fellow!) a Democratic partisan, of the sort who keeps insisting that voters must stay within the system and choose the lesser of two evils rather than pressing to break open the system itself.

Several times now he has used the metaphor of evolution in his arguments, most recently calling it “a consistent force always selecting between two nearly identical choices, but persistently choosing the better one”. He claims that this models how we can evolve our national politics by iteratively choosing the lesser of evils,

For the sake of argument I will stipulate that Democrats are, as a party and at the moment, the lesser evil than the Republicans. But does that mean that lesser evil voting is a path to political evolution?

To twist a phrase, “You keep using that metaphor. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

First of all, the most striking thing about life on Earth is its diversity. There are an estimated 8,700,000 species — and that’s just the eukaryotes. Add in the bacteria and archaea and you have millions more. Evolution is never picking from just two options!

And evolution is not a teleological, progressive process. It doesn’t care whether one species is “more evolved” than another. The jellyfish has been around for 500,000,000 years, while modern humans have only been around for about 200,000. Heck, cyanobacteria have been around 2,000,000,000 years; by the numbers, evolution loves blue-green algae ten thousand times more than it loves us.

As far as evolution is concerned, if you find a solution that’s good enough to let you survive that’s all you need. Unless circumstances change there is not any need for progress. And any change that does happen is the result of a random walking “hill climbing” search. There is no intelligent design at work that lets you find a fundamentally different way. It’s why we humans suffer so many knee and back problems; evolution had to hack up the quadrupedal frame we inherited from lobe-finned fishes, it couldn’t apply fresh design to the problem.

So it’s inherently problematic for a progressive to appeal to evolution as a model for politics.

Indeed evolution is not only unconcerned with progress, it is satisfied to allow regression and atrophy. My interlocutor specifically cites the evolution of the eye and how it does not emerge fully formed in the evolutionary record but develops from more primitive light-sensitive structures. Yet the manner in which a species like the blind cavefish lost its eyes illustrates how a species can lose an evolved ability when pressures change.

No eyes? Think of it as evolution in action. Photo by JohnstonDJ via Wikimedia Commons. CC-
BY-SA 3.0

To apply that metaphorically to political situation, we might (again, for the sake of argument) stipulate that the Democratic Party started to evolve a rudimentary social conscience between the 1930s through 1980s — as, indeed, the Republican Party also did in the Eisenhower years, with GOP support for civil rights and social welfare programs, and Ike’s famous warning about the military-industrial complex. But with the Nixon and then the Reagan years, as the Republican Party turned more and more culture warring and advocating unrestrained greed, and with other parties effectively kept out of the picture by decades of collusion between the big two, there was no evolutionary pressure on the Democrats to prevent that rudimentary conscience from atrophying.

And so the Democrats went from Jimmy Carter, a man widely regarded as having a strong moral compass, who as governor of Georgia worked to reduce the prison population and who is is proud that during his term “We never went to war. We never dropped a bomb”; to Bill Clinton, a man accused of sexual assault or harassment by multiple women, who interrupted his 1992 campaign to return to Arkansas to kill a profoundly mentally ill man, who during his time in the White House helped accelerate mass incarceration and conducted illegal attacks on Iraq and Yugoslavia.

(I don’t want to be hagiolatrous about Carter here; in saying that he stands morally head and shoulders above every other President of my lifetime, I am damning with faint praise. Still, I am reminded of this Saturday Night Live skit from 1977, where the joke is how intelligent and compassionate the President of the United States is. It seems incredible today, doesn’t it?)

With the atrophy of compassion and reason in both major parties, it’s little wonder that we have now reached a point where independents outnumber both Republicans and Democrats. And since 2010, Americans have given higher unfavorable than favorable ratings to both major parties.

We are in a time of catastrophe for both parties.

That takes us to another important feature of evolution. It is not a process of slow, consistent change. It is a bursty process of punctuated equilibrium, often occurring in the wake of catastrophe that wipes out the old status quo.

And that is precisely where we are, politically, as a nation: at a time of catastrophe. And I don’t just mean since the election of Trump, this is not something we can fix by removing him. The hollowing-out of our political and social institutions goes back decades, and Trump is (to mix metaphors) just that final straw that broke the camel’s back.

Painting by Donald E. Davis, public domain image via Wikimedia Commons

To put it another way, my interlocutor demands that we pick the best dinosaur. Shall Tyrannosaurus rex be the Lizard King, or should we back Triceratops? But the asteroid has already hit, and though the earth still shakes under their feet as they stomp out their death throes, the dinosaurs are doomed. The age of mammals is at hand, and it’s time for progressives to start paying more attention to those little creatures scurrying underfoot.

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