Interesting discussion you guys are having. Forgive me for dropping in, but these are some of my favorite intellectual toys too. Did somebody bring up primatology?

ER put forth the idea that human cultural characteristics have arisen naturally and spontaneously, and that phenomena that we see such as a prevalance of "liberal opinions" aren't manipulated into being. You then go on to speculate that they "must meet some social or psychological need", which is, in some sense obvious if one posits that these characteristics arise naturally: They're in our nature, and instincts tend to work by creating tropisms or aversions; in this case, the "need" is a tropism. If evolution has given us needs, they're likely (but not guaranteed) to be pro-survival.

Tom's answer was excellent, and as somebody who's recommended "Guns, Germs, and Steel", and other works by Jared Diamond, I'm pleased that you've been listening, Tom. But I think that your answer fell short of addressing ER's ultimate point about what is the natural state for humans. There is, to my eye, some inconsistency between describing a "ground state of collectivist squalor" on the one hand, while acknowledging that it's the human ability to cooperate, indeed our predilection for it, that brought us this far.

How would we have turned out if the ancestors of the orangutang had prevailed over our common ancestor with the chimpanzees? It's difficult to say, being a member of the winning species, and pridefully prone to attribute our survival to virtue. But since evolution did allow us to win, maybe it's not too presumptious to speculate that "orangutoids" wouldn't have fared as well as hominids. One might wonder if orangutoids might have accomplished great works through a strategy of enslavement and force, except, would the idea of doing anything together, voluntarily or through force, even occur to a member of a solitary, territorial species? I think the question of mode of cooperation has to take a back seat to whether the notion of cooperation itself would even come up.

I think there's a case to be made that innate sociability is a prerequisite for the development of civilization. It's almost a tautology: If a civilization is a society writ large, you need sociable beings who spontaneously create societies before you can build civilizations.

Richard Dawkins coined the term extended phenotype to describe the phenomenon of genes compelling their hosts to build artifacts outside their bodies--birds' nests and beaver dams are the canonical examples. The phenotype is the body the genes build, and the extended phenotype is what the genes build outside the body through the instrument of the body.

Human civilization is unquestionably an extended phenotype of human DNA, and must be the result of evolutionary processes that selected it as survival positive.

Human civilization is generally considered to be about 10,000 years old, defined as the development of agriculture leading to fixed settlements. I define civilization, in turn, as a refinement of human society, and I'd say that human society is about two million years old. That's when we and the other strongly social primates, chimpanzees, split off from our common ancestor, and thus the gene that gave our brains a propensity for sociability must have been present that long ago.

Two million years is evolutionary time, long enough for natural forces to have guided the development of the human brain in a generally positive direction, toward optimum fitness. At the same time, that brain began to manifest an extended phenotype in the form of the abstract, yet nevertheless real, structures of human society; and over time, those structures evolved into ever-more-elaborate and complex forms. All the while, those social structures have been tested against reality, with some being discarded and some retained. Interestingly enough, to me, as those social structures become more complicated, they themselves became an evolutionary force, when humans practicing competing modes come into conflict, and the winning modes tended to survive and spread.

I'd say that, on balance, over evolutionary time, human civilization is working, as nature's optimum, if not ideal, solution to the problem of fitting humans to their environment.

Which brings me to a question for Tom: If your observations about the fundamental human tendency to gravitate toward "collectivism" are correct, how can you assert that that's the wrong way for humans to be? It's worked for two million years, and is the result, so far, of two million years of testing. Why hasn't evolution brought forth more "Libertarian fantasy societies" instead?

A broader question for all people of an ideological persuasion: Before you demand that people change in order to improve themselves, please explain to me why two million years of evolution has produced the wrong answer? Shouldn't Mother Nature always get the benefit of the doubt?

One thing you can say with some confidence about a species that's two million years old is that it's well adapted to its environment. At any given moment in time, we're optimum. Optimum is not the same as ideal, and we can aspire to be more like some ideal we make up, but we're not starting out so bad, either. By definition.

It occurs to me that I'm arguing the really conservative side, putting my two million years' worth of precedent and tradition up against the Conservative's measly century or so. It might even lead to examination of the question of whether Conservatism is, in fact, and ironically so, rather a radical belief system. But only if I want to get dogpiled, so I don't think I'll go there. But as for the rest of it, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.