Parallels between politics and evolution
It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change. Leon C. Megginson
There are many parallels between politics and evolution. To understand equivalence, first a brief introduction to evolution.
Evolution is a change in the characteristics of living things over time. It’s the process through which populations and species change. It is a process that led to longer necks for giraffes.
The driving mechanism behind evolution is natural selection. It is the process where organisms with traits that favor survival and reproduction tend to leave more offspring than their peers, causing these advantageous traits to increase in frequency over generations. The mechanism of natural selection is an elegant concept and has a far-reaching explanatory (and predictive) power. Its sweep is so wide that it may sound like a triviality in that if something does not exist then it must not have the advantageous trait to fit the environment.
Passing along of the advantageous traits to a larger pool of offsprings leads to the evolution of different species, a process known as speciation (the process by which populations evolve to become distinct species).
To summarize, natural selection resulting in evolution of species is like a game played in an arena where different species, and sub-species within a species, are vying for a limited amount of resources and the ones that have the right traits to garner the available resources are best suited to survive and reproduce. As a result, such traits become slowly speciated and a new species evolves.
One such advantageous trait is discounting the future (also known as temporal discounting). It is the tendency of humans and animals to value immediate rewards more highly than future rewards.
Take two species in the arena that has limited resources to offer. One species is short sighted and focuses on immediate gains while the other is a planner and tries to anticipate the future and plans for that. The mechanism of natural selection favors the first because the future is uncertain, and what one prepares may not occur.
Now let us return to another game played in the arena, i.e., politics.
In the game of politics
· limited resources are the limited voting pool that different politicians are fighting for.
· advantageous traits are winning strategies that garner those votes.
· Lastly, equivalent to survival and reproduction is getting elected.
Strategies that succeed in cornering larger fraction of voting pool help in getting elected (and reelected). The advantageous strategies might also become speciated among the other, or in the next generation of politicians. For example, Trump using unique brand of politics, if continues to be successful, may become a widely followed strategy.
Extending this parallel between the game of evolution and politics is also the notion of discounting the future.
Similar to the fact that discounting the future is an advantageous trait for natural selection and evolution, it is also an advantageous strategy in the game of politics. In politics it is not advisable to appeal to the voters for the good of humanity 50 years from the present and hope to win. The advantageous strategies for winning the vote, by discounting the future, focus on the present good for the voting pool. [Note — it is only when the voting pool itself has the betterment of generation to come in their psyche that politicians will think about not discounting the future]
The consequence of discounting the future in politics, however, can be devastating. Living in the present, however, we do not realize how.
The consequences include runaway climate change because appealing to the good of the future at the expense of the current populace is not a winning strategy. The social security trust fund in the United States may be declining and may be only 10-years away from running short of pay off, and yet, since the solution for the future population may involve a sacrifice from the current generation, no politician wants to propose a solution on their watch.
And yet, while discounting the future, we keep debating about trivialities like abortion rights, legalizing pot etc. and keep going in circles. It is hard to realize that discounting the future may bring us to a dystopian future where current debate and conflicts would not even matter.
And so, although the game of politics and evolution have lots of parallels, discounting the future in the game of politics is a terrible strategy for the future of humanity.
Ciao.
