How the fight for evolution prepared us to fight for democracy

Atheists of a certain era are no strangers to language games. We face them often when it comes to creationists playing fast and loose with key terms for the material world, which creationists often do to try to catch out an unsuspecting person whose scientific literacy might not be the sharpest.

But have we considered how those same skills, forged in tedious conversation with people dead-set on believing that evolution isn’t real, might now help us to focus our efforts politically, with respect to defending a given idea of democracy against rising autocratic threats around the world?

The key, in both realms, is teaching care with language—which we can all improve upon. Just as I often use the word “democracy” too broadly, so too do many others when trying to articulate reasonable fears that it’s now under an extreme test.

In reality, there are many versions, or “species,” of democracy, which exist on a spectrum of sociopolitical factors. No two worldly instances of democracy are exactly the same, and many are also utterly incompatible. You can’t easily merge most states because their political “morphologies” have grown too far apart after years of distinct constitutional parameters, jurisprudence, and the development of subsidiary agencies around their respective checks and balances on power.

Nevertheless, just as people have a gut feeling that they know what a biological species is, so too do people know when something is and isn’t democratic.

And that imprecision invites political illiteracy, just as it does scientific illiteracy.

Fortunately, there are plenty of junk arguments from creationism that highlight how we might take back political literacy, too.

On speciation, and so-called 'macro' evolution

Creationists routinely misunderstand or misrepresent what a species even is, but so too do many average citizens, for whom “Science” is often a vague ideal of aggregated knowledge and investigative best practices.

It’s easy for us to forget that the term is a human construct, a tool we use to group certain organisms in contrast with their surroundings, and in relation to a history. Before genetic testing, we grouped many lifeforms based on visible characteristics, location, and relationship to other lifeforms in the region. Sometimes we discovered larger field ranges for these groupings, and merged categories. Sometimes a clearer way to organize lifeforms by morphology emerged, and naming systems were adjusted. Sometimes two populations, living apart for some time, never had a chance to interbreed, until the environment changed and their procreative compatibility emerged. And of course, with genetic testing, whole new kinship relationships through branching genetic markers transformed our classification system anew.

The first thing a creationist will sometimes try to do is pretend that a species is a fixed, real thing, instead of a name given by humans to differentiate between characteristics clusters. They will do this so that they can act as though there’s a difference between evolutionary processes on a small scale and on a big scale, when the latter is simply the cumulative impact of the former. They might argue that, fine, fine, variation happens, but only small-scale. Micro, not macro. It’s not like abiogenesis is happening every day, to spring a whole new species into being.

Except… no one is talking about abiogenesis, the emergence of life from non-life, when they’re talking about speciation. That’s a conversation about the beginning of this planet’s long lineages. We might be more than willing to talk about that with creationists, too, but when explaining evolution by natural selection, it’s important not to let anyone derail us from the topic at hand.

These long lineages of life on Earth started some 3.7 billion years ago, with microbes that fed off carbon compounds around hydrothermal vents, and later developed forms capable of synthesizing the Sun’s energy directly.

What we all forget sometimes, in our shorthand use of related vocabulary, is that everything scientists do to discuss those 3.7 billion years of life begetting life, and variation begetting variation, is essentially drawing a circle around certain geo-temporal groups of organisms that share similar characteristics and show no strong signs of crossbreeding, and saying that’s a species, and that is, too. (Through extensive processes of data gathering, analysis, and peer review, of course.)

When an early group of organisms goes about its business, unaware that future humans will look back one day and call it a distinct species, its environment might change quickly, killing off certain variations and granting others a stronger role in the genetic makeup of the next generation. Alternately, even if the environment doesn’t change for a while, some variations in the group might yield better opportunities to propagate. Over time, less useful variations might drop off, however incompletely, and in millions of years the whole morphology of one group’s ancestors might have given away to different structures entirely.

Scientists tracing this long journey through the fossil and genetic record will then circle that group of descendants, who now look so different from their ancient ancestors, and say “Oh, yes, that’s a new species.”

These researchers will also note that not all ancestors are alike: one parent group of ancient organisms often yields many different, diversely situated descendants. Hippos and whales, for instance, share a land-based, four-legged, hoofed ancestor, as evidenced in vestigial anatomy and genetics today. But a hippo doesn’t care what we call it, any more than a whale does, or their common ancestor.

They’re just different groups of organisms, unwittingly carrying on a long family line.

The democratic extension

One of the easiest traps to fall into, in political discourse, is also definitional. All the political systems that exist in the world today have their origins in older systems, sometimes from the same source. We exist on a spectrum of political enterprise that has carried through human time, and which manifests in a rich diversity of state “organisms” today: some compatible with one another, but the majority not.

And we love our names for things, especially when new labels help to avoid bad press. Are you a libertarian or an anarcho-capitalist? Social democrat or democratic socialist? Lefty or liberal? Fascist, neofascist, or religious nationalist?

The problem, in politics as in evolutionary theory, is not simply that we have bad actors who will try to conflate surface language to distract from the underlying material reality. It’s also that most of us are so used to the shorthand that we too forget that our words are not as important as the ideas for which they stand.

The idea of democracy, for instance, represents a whole family of outcomes in state politics. Some “species” rely on a rigid system where elections are called after the same number of years every time. Some might glorify an ancient constitution, and celebrate a system of checks and balances between branches of government. Others use a parliamentary model, where elections for the leader can be called at any time based on a vote of no confidence, and constitutions are more often rewritten.

Some species use forms of proportional representation in the voting system. Others use first-past-the-post, or plurality voting. Some make voting mandatory, registration automatic, and voting opportunities easy to come by. Some celebrate protest culture, and foster the idea that political action goes well beyond one’s presence for election days. Others do not. Some even make a contest out of which party can eliminate the most eligible voters by restricting access to the polls, requiring citizens to register themselves, passing laws to block classes of citizen from voting for life, and gerrymandering to make a person’s vote irrelevant anyway.

And some, for all their affections of reflecting the will of the people, are ultimately run by the lobbies with the deepest pockets and most access to sitting politicians.

When we talk about “democracy” being in peril, we’re loosely alluding to a few endangered species of democracy in our current world. And we need to get better at talking in those narrower terms, so that our concerns aren’t weaponized, then dismissed, as a “macro” threat that might not follow as imminently from all the “micro” variations in democratic practice seen in the world today.

Luckily, we have a robust vocabulary from species recovery efforts to lean upon.

Restoration projects in nature as in politics

If we manage to kill ourselves off due to gross incompetence, through nuclear winter or climate change or another pandemic, the planet will not care. The planet, with life in many other forms, will go on. The beetles and the cockroaches will continue apace. Most plantlife will not notice our absence. Salps, plastic-eating bacteria, and other species presently thriving on our destruction of current ecosystems might decline again, but others will rise to take their place.

With our current conservation efforts, which include significant commitments to strengthening biodiversity and repopulating endangered species, we are trying to forestall the destruction of our ecological niche. Biodiversity improves the resilience of our food chain, enriches our natural carbon sinks, and can even act as a defence against zoonotic transfer events escalated by habitat loss and species migration.

We humans are trying to sustain an environmental bubble that we know allows us to thrive, because we also know that any lineage of organisms, no matter how much it might be well-adapted to its current biogeography, can be wiped out in a heartbeat by a drastic change in geological and climate circumstances.

What we’re striving for in our political realms is similar. We are all trying to preserve a bubble of political practice that we perceive to serve us best.

The problem in many countries right now, including the United States, is that citizens are widely divided on what those “best practices” might be. Many may very well prefer to live in a more autocratic state, so long as it’s run by someone they see as on “their” side: their slice of a large, diverse faith tradition; their part of a wide range of racialized identities; their notion of what the local culture is and should be.

Just as the shared ancestor of today’s hippos and whales didn’t give a hoot about what would happen when one group of organisms first separated from another group of organisms millions of years ago, to occupy different ecological niches with compounding consequences over time, many who advocate for more autocratic societies today don’t care if the result will be a world of less choice for their descendants. They’re just doing what organisms have done since the beginning of this whole journey of life on Earth: getting theirs, or trying to.

The more striking project, which reminds us of humanity’s one striking difference from other species, is that some of us are trying to create less volatile world for ourselves and those who come after. We are planning beyond evolutionary processes, to dream up other ways that we might live and grow better together.

In the process, many of us are taking stock of the endangered facets of society that we don’t want to lose—like strong checks and balances between branches of government, a firm line between religious and secular state action, enough journalistic freedom and accountability to support an informed electorate, voting rights for all, the socioeconomic security for people to vote proactively instead of out of fear, and an electoral process that maximizes the impact of their vote at all.

And we should emphasize these sociopolitical pillars specifically, when advocating for systems better suited to human thriving. We should talk more about the actual features of the “species” of democracy that we feel are currently being eroded.

Because let’s face it: humanity’s long line of political organisms will continue no matter what happens this year, if in a very different form. We might experience a swifter transformation from one loose grouping of characteristics to another within a given species, but the overarching “family” of democracies will continue apace somewhere, somehow, for a long while yet.

What we’re doing is trying to save ourselves.

So if we want to preserve the political environment that we think is best suited to maximizing human agency now and in the future, we need to take a page out of the book of biological conservation. We need to create concrete plans for the rehabilitation of endangered facets of our current democratic societies, and we need to avoid the word games that bad faith actors, in politics as in the fight for scientific literacy around evolution, love to play to divert us from our goals.