People like me are often flabbergasted by people who deny science like Darwinian evolution when the evidence is basically all around us. There are lots of good books on science deniers and we have a fairly good picture about the psychology of science deniers, but we still know little about the evolutionary origins of this phenomenon. Science deniers tend to be low in openness, have a high need for cognitive closure, hate ambiguity and change and tend to rely on tradition and authority. A lot of researchers have pointed out that they fit the profile of politically and socially conservative people, also termed authoritarian personality.
From the point of view of evolutionary psychology we might assume that such people who are slow to update their view of reality may be evolutionarily disadvantaged as they should drop out in the evolutionary rat race. Actually, the opposite may be true for evolutionary reasons. Before we can resolve this paradox we have to take a look at Homo Sapiens as a cultural species. Anthropologist Joseph Henrich writes in The WEIRDest People in the World (2020):
[...] we do know something about cultural learning among Congo Basin hunter-gatherers and have explored the implications of different learning strategies for cumulative cultural evolution. The evidence suggests that aspiring hunters first learn from their fathers how to make arrow poisons. About a third of these foragers then update their fathers’ recipes with insights from others, probably from the most successful and prestigious hunters. When transmission patterns like these are placed into cultural evolutionary computer simulations, or carefully manipulated in experiments with real people trying to learn new things, the results reveal how cultural evolution can assemble highly adaptive and complex recipes, procedures, and tools over generations without anyone understanding how or why various elements are included.
Cultural transmission is an amazing thing that allows us to create smartphones even though no single person involved may understand how a smartphone works in all its details. We rely a lot on traditional knowledge, knowledge that has been handed down to us that we simply accept as true. We may question a lot about this knowledge (e.g. is the smartphone’s memory enough to guarantee a great user experience), but once we reach a certain level of complexity we can’t simply start questioning everything.
This brings us to the question of when learners should rely on cultural learning over their own experience, personal information, or instincts. The answer is straightforward: when problems are difficult, situations are ambiguous, or individual learning is costly, people should rely more heavily on learning from others. To put these ideas to the test, my favorite experiments manipulate both the difficulty of a task and the size of cash payoffs for correct responses. Participants, for example, might be paid different amounts of money for correctly identifying which of a set of curvy lines is the longest. They can rely on their own direct perception or on cultural learning—on the decisions of others. The harder the task is—i.e., the closer the curvy lines are in length—the more people rely on observing other people’s decisions and aggregating this information into their own judgments.
What Henrich writes about cultural complexity makes total sense from the point of view of evolutionary psychology. What we need now is to spot the relevant selective pressures in order to find out why some people rely more on tradition and authority than on individual learning. I argue that this happened with the transition from foraging (hunting and gathering) to food-production, in particular agriculture. Agricultural technology requires generations and generations to optimise and can never be achieved by a single individual who would rely on personal learning. People who would have relied more on personal learning (and would only have reinvented the wheel) were likely to have been disadvantaged than those who increasingly relied on cultural learning.
The conclusion is that people who have more ancestral farmer than forager heritage are more likely to rely on traditional knowledge and trust authority. Early farming communities would also have been more endogamous and more closely related to each other than foragers who are more exogamous and change bands frequently. Authorities, like a father, uncle or head of the community would therefore have been invested in the survival of its clan and following authority without questioning it too much would have had an evolutionary advantage.The trouble with this instinct is, that nowadays it can be hijacked by populist politicians who do not have a vested interest in the survival of the genes of their voters. People with more forager heritage would in contrast be more wary of authority and less conformist:
Mobile hunter-gatherers, who possess extensive (not intensive) kin-based institutions, are field independent. Consistent with this, anthropologists have long argued that, compared to farmers and herders who have more intensive kin-based institutions, hunter-gatherers emphasise values that focus on independence, achievement, and self-reliance while deemphasizing obedience, conformity, and deference to authority.
This genetic difference is visible from early childhood on, where you have children who are more obedient and conforming on the one hand, and children who are more questioning and rebellious on the other hand. A typical example would be children who keep “nagging” their parents with their many “why?” questions, or students who question the authority of a teacher, as is often the case with neurodiverse children.
Looking at science itself from the perspective of cultural evolution, we can understand it as the product of increased cultural learning (farming type) that tends to be conservative and its antagonistic force, a questioning element based on personal learning (foraging type). I have argued before that hunter-gatherer types are frequently better at self-directed learning (autodidacts) than formal and repetitive learning in the classroom.
The distinction between forager and farmer types resembles very closely that between mappers and packers (or pattern vs rote learners). Mappers are able to update their maps or knowledge webs more quickly in the light of new and conflicting information, whereas packers are more likely not to know how to integrate paradoxical information and just ignore it. Forager types, on the other hand, would be attracted to paradoxes, exactly because they may provide a lot of new information and insight. In our evolutionary history, these two strategies would have been ideal for hunters (tracking animals, updating information on the go) and farmers trying to learn a single optimal method. Forager types are more likely to drop out of formal schooling but more likely to be high achievers when it comes to innovation.
Sometimes we find some geographic clustering of forager or farmer types. In the US the liberal West Coast is very high in innovation, individuality and creativity, whereas the Midwest/South are high on tradition, authority, conformism and hard work, farmer values. As farmer types tend to have more offspring than forager types, we can only expect an increase in resistance to new scientific findings. Indeed, this is what we have been seeing for a while now. Farmer types are not inept at understanding science, though, they are just slower at updating their belief system and as they tend to be conformist this usually happens once a critical threshold of people who have already done so is reached.
For more on the hunter-gatherer neurotribe idea check out my book
https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/B0836LW5QV/
Dedicated to Andrew, who pointed out the relevance of the Joe Henrich chapter on cultural learning for the forager-farmer framework to me
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