Introduction: No Conspiracy Required
Critiques of evolutionary psychology are often met with a familiar defence. Whatever its flaws, the argument goes, the field is scientific, not political. Its practitioners are not ideologues, and its claims are not prescriptions.
This defence is partly correct—and deeply misleading.
The problem with evolutionary psychology is not that it secretly smuggles in a political programme. It is that its ontological commitments reliably stabilise particular political effects, regardless of intention.
This post advances a careful but firm claim:
Evolutionary psychology need not be ideologically motivated to function ideologically.
No villains are required.
1. From Ontology to Politics
Ontologies do political work.
They determine what kinds of things are taken to exist, where causes are located, and what forms of change appear possible or impossible. Once these commitments are in place, downstream interpretations follow with remarkable consistency.
Evolutionary psychology commits itself to:
inner traits as explanatory units,
ancestral history as primary cause,
behavioural regularities as evidence of necessity.
These commitments do not dictate a political stance. But they structure the space in which political interpretations become natural.
2. The Naturalisation of Hierarchy
When behavioural differences are explained as evolved traits, hierarchies acquire a distinctive gloss: they appear natural.
Differences in status, power, gendered roles, or social outcomes are no longer primarily questions of institutional design or relational organisation. They become expressions of biological endowment shaped by selection.
This move does not require anyone to endorse inequality. It simply renders inequality intelligible as expected.
What is naturalised becomes resistant to critique.
3. The Individualisation of Responsibility
At the same time, evolutionary psychology individualises explanation.
If behaviour flows from inner dispositions, responsibility attaches to persons rather than relations. Structural conditions fade into background constraint. Institutions become stage-setting rather than constitutive.
Social outcomes are thus framed as:
the aggregation of individual tendencies,
the playing-out of evolved preferences,
the result of differential traits.
This framing quietly aligns with political narratives that emphasise personal responsibility while minimising structural accountability.
Again, no intention is required.
4. Stability Masquerading as Truth
Because evolutionary explanations reach far into the past, they lend present arrangements a sense of inevitability.
If things are this way because they evolved this way, then radical change appears naïve at best, dangerous at worst. The future is framed as constrained repetition rather than open possibility.
This does not mandate conservatism. But it privileges stability over transformation, adjustment over reconfiguration.
Ontology does the work ideology need not.
5. Why Motives Miss the Point
Focusing on the personal politics of evolutionary psychologists—whether they are progressive, conservative, or apolitical—misses the structural issue.
Ideology is not primarily a matter of belief. It is a matter of what explanations make easy, and what they make hard.
Evolutionary psychology makes it easy to explain behaviour without interrogating relations, institutions, or meanings. It makes it hard to imagine alternatives that are not already constrained by an inherited nature.
That asymmetry has political consequences regardless of motive.
Conclusion: Ideology as Effect, Not Intent
The ideological impact of evolutionary psychology does not arise from bad actors or hidden agendas. It arises from the cumulative effect of its ontological commitments.
By naturalising hierarchy, individualising responsibility, and privileging stability, it quietly aligns with conservative outcomes—even when its practitioners explicitly reject them.
From a relational perspective:
Politics enters not through intention, but through ontology.
In the final post of this series, we will turn away from critique and ask what a genuinely relational orientation to explanation would make possible instead.
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