Can Evolution Explain Our Politics? Nicholas Wade Thinks So

Conversations with Coleman

The Free Press

Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.5 • 610 Ratings

🗓️ 13 October 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Nicholas Wade is a former science writer for The New York Times and author of several books on human evolution, including A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History and his new book, The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations. Today, I invite Wade on to discuss some of the toughest topics in modern science: the controversial territory of race and genetics, and whether there are fundamental genetic differences between right-wingers and left-wingers. We also dig into the fertility crisis. Birth rates across the developed world have collapsed below replacement level, and no country except religious Georgia has figured out how to reverse the trend. Wade explains why modern economic progress makes having children less appealing, and why the breakdown of the family matters. Finally, we talk about how the modern nation-state stamped out tribalism, why the academic establishment refuses to engage honestly with genetics research, what evolutionary psychology tells us about foreign policy, and much more. Whether you find Wade’s evolutionary framework persuasive or not, I hope our conversation raises questions that most political leaders and academics prefer to ignore. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Nicholas Wade.
0:06.5	Nicholas was a staff writer and editor for Nature Magazine, Science Magazine, and a longtime writer
0:11.6	at the Science Section of the New York Times. His new book is called The Origin of Politics,
0:17.5	How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of nations. In this episode, we talk about the
0:23.2	controversial territory of race and genetics. We talk about how the modern nation state stamped out
0:29.0	tribalism. We talk about how, if at all, accepting the theory of evolution by natural selection
0:34.7	should affect one's politics. We talk about whether there are fundamental
0:38.8	genetic differences between right-wingers and left-wingers, and much more. So without further ado,
0:45.4	Nicholas Wade.
0:57.1	Okay, Nicholas Wade, thanks so much for coming on my show.
0:58.4	Thanks for asking me.
1:00.8	So I've been aware of you for a while.
1:04.9	I think some listeners might know who you are.
1:09.1	You've written many books and written many articles.
1:11.4	But if listeners don't know who you are,
1:13.3	can you give them a sense of what's your background?
1:17.6	How did you get into the science of evolutionary psychology and all the related subjects you've written about over the years?
1:21.9	Well, I'm a journalist.
1:23.0	I've worked on the New York Times for about 40 years,
1:26.4	many of them are in the science section.
1:29.7	And as a science reporter, I covered the human genome when it was first being sequenced,
1:37.1	and that got me interested into evolutionary issues.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Free Press, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Free Press and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.