It’s not the most athletic team Izzo’s ever had. Not the flashiest. Definitely not the most star-studded. But it might be the smartest, most cooperative, and most internally organized unit he’s ever coached.

They don’t just play together. They think together.

They pass before a cutter even signals. They close out like a pack of wolves, not a collection of individuals. And when you watch them long enough, you start to realize—it’s not just talent. It’s structure. It’s literally science.

Let me explain.

I’m what you might call an academic descendant of Elinor Ostrom, the first (and still only) woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. She cracked a problem economists had been chewing on for decades—how groups manage shared resources without falling into chaos. The classic example: too many fishermen, not enough fish. But Ostrom found that cooperation didn’t need to be enforced from the top-down. Groups—when prudently structured—could govern themselves just fine.

She outlined a set of what she called the Core Design Principles—eight universal elements that all strong groups tend to share, regardless of cultural context. These principles work for neighborhood associations, small tribes, global cooperatives, corporations—and, as it turns out, college basketball teams.

Let’s walk through them.

(1) Clear Group Identity and Shared Purpose

This MSU squad knows who they are. There’s no superstar ball-hogging for scouts. No Instagram highlight-hunters. Their identity is collective. Their purpose isn’t individual glory—it’s winning together. You see it in the way they celebrate a loose-ball recovery like a game-winner. You see it in the way the bench erupts for an assist, not a dunk. No locker room divides between vets and freshmen. The identity is clear: team-first, ego-last.

Take Jaden Akins, now a senior. He could easily try to headline this team in his final year, but instead he plays within the system, picks his spots, and leads by example. Jase Richardson, the highly touted freshman (and yes, son of Spartan legend Jason Richardson), could be tempted to play hero ball. But he’s slotted himself neatly into a supportive role—more Bruce Bowen than Allen Iverson. That’s not humility—it’s group alignment.

And look at Tre Holloman—he could start on most Big Ten teams, but accepts his role as a spark plug off the bench without ego. They all buy into one identity: the team is the star.

(2) Fair Distribution of Costs and Benefits

Everyone eats—and everyone sweats for it. You’ll see Carson Cooper diving on the floor for loose balls just as often as you’ll see him dunking. You’ll see Coen Carr, a walking highlight reel, running decoy cuts to free someone else.

Even Frankie Fidler, the new senior transfer, has slotted in without disrupting the rhythm. He scores when needed, but never hijacks the offense. The benefits—points, minutes, accolades—are spread as evenly as the defensive assignments.

(3) Participatory Decision-Making

Izzo’s not micromanaging this team. He doesn’t need to: “I don’t really need to coach this group much. They coach themselves.” That’s not modesty. That’s structure. The team has built a self-regulating culture. Players correct each other mid-game, mid-huddle, even mid-free throw. Not with finger-pointing, but with mutual accountability.

On the floor, Tre Holloman is practically a second coach—calling out defensive adjustments before the bench even twitches. And Jeremy Fears Jr., back from injury and playing like he never left, has a presence that belies his age. He’s often the one barking out rotations, settling nerves, and acting as the go-between when Izzo starts lighting someone up. Think of him as the translator—fluent in both basketball and Izzo, with the latter being quite an evolved skill.

This is what social scientists call self-governance—and it’s rarer in sports than a drama-free postgame press conference between Michigan State and their little brother, Michigan.

(4) Monitoring Behavior Internally

This squad is held together by a kind of peer-pressure harmony. Miss a switch, and it’s not Izzo screaming from the sideline—it’s Akins clapping you on the back, not in celebration, but as a coded message: “Lock in.”

(5) Graduated Consequences for Missteps

Izzo has always believed in second chances, but this team polices itself first. You can spot it during timeouts: veterans pulling younger players aside, correcting calmly but firmly.
When Freshmen Gehrig Normand took a quick, ill-advised three early in the season, he found himself stuck in the corner for the next few possessions—teammates simply didn’t look his way. Message received. And when he returned to form, so did the ball.

(6) Quick, Constructive Conflict Resolution

Conflict will always exist—just don’t let it linger.

During the December road game at Illinois, Fidler and Akins got tangled in a heated exchange after a defensive breakdown. By the next possession, they were fist-bumping and laughing. That’s the difference between fragile chemistry and durable trust.

(7) Earned Authority

Izzo still steers the ship, but he’s less a dictator than a tribal elder. He guides. He nudges. But he doesn’t micromanage. And that trust flows both ways—he’s created a space where leadership rotates fluidly. One game it’s the senior forward giving speeches. The next, it’s a freshmen guard calling out defensive switches. It works because respect isn’t a birthright—it’s behavior.

Hierarchy here isn’t based on class year or seniority. It’s about effort, cohesion, and game IQ. Jase Richardson, despite his age, often quarterbacked entire stretches late in the season because his game commands trust.

(8) Collaborative Relations with External Stakeholders

You’ll find the team eating in the same campus dining halls as other students. They talk with fans, not above them. When Izzo brings former players into practices—Draymond Green, Mateen Cleaves—it’s not for show. It’s a dialogue across generations.

This is a program that treats its community not as an audience, but as part of the team’s shared identity. There’s a wholeness to their ecosystem. Everyone feels like part of the machine, and that cohesion ripples outward. That’s not an accident—it’s part of the social glue at work.

All of this—every pass, every box-out, every chest bump—speaks to something deeper in the culture Izzo has built over the years. I’ve seen it with Barcelona under Guardiola. I saw it in Brady’s Patriots during their dynasty years. And oddly enough, I see it here too—in a college basketball team from East Lansing. It’s not just chemistry. It’s something biological. When a group functions like a single organism—coordinated, self-regulating, and unified in purpose—you’re watching evolution at work.

In evolutionary biology, we call this idea Multilevel Selection—the idea that groups, not just individuals, can be units of natural selection. Sometimes, oftentimes in sports, the most cooperative groups outcompete the most selfish individuals. And that’s exactly what we’re watching this year at Michigan State. They don’t out-talent their opponents. They out-cooperate them.

So yes, Izzo’s still pacing the sideline and losing his voice as always. But the real coaching—the quiet, constant, peer-to-peer instruction—is happening between passes, in defensive switches, in locker room moments we’ll never see.

Maybe this will end up being just another tournament run. But maybe—just maybe—it’s also a glimpse into something bigger. A blueprint, even, on how to build a winning culture, in sports and beyond.

Because if a dozen college kids can build a cooperative system with no egos, no hierarchy worship, and no drama—maybe there’s hope for the rest of us.

Or as Izzo might yell until he’s hoarse: pass the damn ball!

I say this not as a Republican, nor a libertarian, nor a technophile—but as a lifelong progressive who has grown disillusioned by how out of touch the Democratic Party has become with the everyday lives of the common American.

My wife and I are now in year three of an excruciating legal immigration process that has cost us more than $10,000 (which, speaking as a scientist recently out of grad school, is an exorbitant sum to us) and robbed us of the most formative years of our life together. We should be building a home, raising children, starting a family. Instead, our lives are frozen by the senseless bureaucracy of the U.S. government. I now fully understand why people immigrate illegally. When love and family are on the line, arbitrary laws and borders start to feel like moral absurdities. Bureaucracy doesn’t feel like law and order—it feels like violence by a thousand paper cuts.

And here’s the deeper truth: the system isn’t just broken—it was never built right to begin with. The architecture of modern federal bureaucracy is fundamentally misaligned with how humans evolved to live, relate, and govern. It clashes with our deepest biological instincts as a eusocial species—wired for cooperation, mutual care, and reciprocity within tightly knit communities, not anonymous, heavily-individualized megastructures. For 99% of our evolutionary history, humans lived in small, interdependent, egalitarian groups, embedded in their ecosystems and guided by direct social relationships—not by distant authorities or abstract rules meant to benefit the ruling class. As Jared Diamond points out in Guns, Germs, and Steel, even as recently as 500 years ago, only about 20% of the world was organized into the kind of centralized, bureaucratic states that now dominate the globe. In evolutionary terms, the modern state is not the norm but rather the exception—and we’re paying the price for this evolutionary mismatch every day.

Dismantle the System—But Do It Intelligently

So here’s my radical suggestion to Democrats: lean into it. Stop defending the monolithic, centralized state apparatus. Let Trump and his cronies scream about “draining the swamp”—even though we all know they’re just pumping in more elitist sewage. Instead of reflexively propping up a broken system, offer something better. Something human. Something actually functional. Let them stumble over themselves trying to destroy federal agencies. Instead of clinging to the old machinery, offer a better alternative: a rebirth of decentralized, local, polycentric governance.

Decentralization isn’t a right-wing idea. It’s a fundamentally human idea, founded in the latest science. And ironically, the left is far better positioned to do it well.

Political scientist Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, spent her life studying how people actually manage resources and govern themselves—not in theory, but in practice. Her work shattered the long-standing myth of The Tragedy of The Commons: that only centralized authorities or privatized markets can effectively manage shared resources. What she found, time and again, was that local, participatory, and self-organizing systems often perform better than top-down bureaucracies or market-driven solutions.

Ostrom didn’t draw her insights from Ivory tower abstractions—she drew them from real communities, many of them Indigenous and traditional societies, who had preserved humanity’s oldest and most enduring forms of governance. These communities had not only sustained forests, fisheries, and farmlands over centuries—they had preserved something deeper: our evolutionary cultural heritage. They had kept alive the ancient human wisdom of how to live in reciprocal relationship with one another and with the ecosystems that support life.

Her research demonstrated that when people are given ownership over their own commons—whether it’s a water system, a local school, or a communal grazing field—they tend to manage it responsibly. Why? Because that’s how we evolved to live. Our ancestors didn’t survive by deferring to distant, faceless, bureaucratic institutions. They survived—need I say thrived—through networks of trust, cooperation, and mutual obligation within tightly knit egalitarian communities. Such social dynamics are not vestiges of some primitive form; they are the biological and social substrates that support human flourishing, in all its forms.

Ostrom’s Core Design Principles capture this ancestral logic in modern terms. They show how small, self-governing groups—when empowered with a strong social identity, autonomy, inclusive decision-making, equitable distribution of benefits, and mechanisms for accountability—can manage even the most complex collective challenges without resorting to heavy-handed central authority. The CDPs are so much more than just a theory of how to govern effectively; it’s a rediscovery of how we are wired to live. Think of them as a kind of social technology, grounded in the latest science, that offers an evolutionary blueprint for how we can begin restructuring our social systems and institutions once again.

If we want a democracy that actually works, we don’t need to scale bigger—we need to scale smarter. We need to return to the principles that have always sustained human life: cooperation, community, and stewardship rooted in place. Ostrom didn’t just offer a critique of centralized governance—she offered a blueprint for a new (or rather, ancient) way forward.

What Dunbar’s Number Tells Us About Human Social Organization

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar arrived at a remarkably similar insight, but from a very different angle. His research into primate and human social behavior led to what’s now famously known as Dunbar’s Number—the cognitive limit to the number of stable, meaningful relationships a person can maintain, which hovers around 150. This number isn’t arbitrarily concocted—it’s rooted in the evolution of our neocortex and reflects the group sizes within which our ancestors lived for the vast majority of our species’ history.

For tens of thousands of years, humans lived in intimate, interdependent, and largely egalitarian bands and small tribes—typically composed of around 150 individuals, but sometimes expanding into loosely connected groups that rarely exceeded a few thousand. In these communities, the core principles later formalized in Ostrom’s Core Design Principles—trust, cooperation, shared norms, and mutual accountability—weren’t lofty ideals; they were essential tools for survival. Everyone had a role. Everyone had a name and place. Everyone was known. Social cohesion wasn’t a luxury or a moral aspiration—it was the foundation of human life. It was the glue that held the group together, the invisible thread that made everything else possible.

This is why massive, centralized systems often fail at the human level. They overwhelm our cognitive and emotional capacity for sociospiritual connection. When decisions are made by distant institutions or faceless bureaucracies, trust erodes. Alienation grows. Corruption creeps in—not always because of bad actors, but because the very structure exceeds what our social minds were built to handle. In short, centralized bureaucracy is a profound evolutionary mismatch.

And here’s where the insights of Dunbar and Ostrom come together in profound harmony. Ostrom’s work with small-scale traditional societies revealed how they intuitively matched the scale of governance to the scale of social connection and ecological carrying capacities. These communities didn’t need complex theories of evolutionary psychology—they simply preserved the commonsense wisdom of living within naturally-imposed human limits.

In fact, you can still see this logic alive today in communities like the Amish. While not often thought of as a model of political innovation, the Amish get something right that modern society so often gets wrong. Most Amish settlements tend to hover around—surprise—150 people. When a community grows beyond this threshold, they simply split off and form a new one. There’s no centralized bureaucracy, no masterplan, no grand philosophical treatise about Dunbar’s Number. They likely don’t believe in the underlying science at all. But they live it, implicitly and organically.

There’s a certain irony here: secular scientists labor for decades to uncover the cognitive architecture of human social organization, while communities like the Amish have quietly been living by those principles all along. They don’t need a theory to know that small is beautiful, and that community only works when people can actually know and care for one another. It’s not ideological—it’s ecological.

Meanwhile, the modern world keeps pushing us toward scale, speed, and abstraction—toward bigger governments, larger institutions, and denser populations. But what if real progress means going the other way? Not toward more complexity, but toward intelligent simplicity—toward right-sized communities, resilient local systems, and nested governance that actually fits the grain of human nature.

If Democrats truly want to build a society rooted in justice, equity, and belonging, they need to start from this fundamental truth: humans evolved for community, not higher-level state-run bureaucracy. What’s needed now isn’t nostalgia for the past or naïve utopianism, but a radical reimagining of governance that draws on both cutting-edge science and the ancestral Indigenous wisdom that’s been hiding in plain sight.

The Future Is Polycentric

A healthy society doesn’t need to choose between chaos and control. It needs polycentricity: a system of overlapping, semi-autonomous networks of governance that allows decisions to be made at the most local level possible, while still maintaining coordination across broader scales when necessary. It’s not about abolishing higher-order governance altogether—it’s about aligning authority with proximity, trust, and context. And it’s the only kind of system that truly fits the way human beings are wired to live and cooperate.

Elinor Ostrom spent her life proving that polycentric governance isn’t some fringe theory—it’s how real people, in real communities, have successfully managed shared resources for centuries. Her research showed that when communities are given meaningful autonomy, they tend to produce better outcomes than centralized bureaucracies. And not just better outcomes in economic terms—but better outcomes in terms of social trust and cohesion, long-term ecological sustainability, and human dignity.

In other words, Ostrom didn’t just describe a form of governance—she described a living system. A network of communities organized like ecosystems: distributed, diverse, adaptive, and interdependent. Like nature itself, polycentric societies thrive not through monoculture and central control, but through pluralism and relationality.

And Robin Dunbar’s research gives us the biological rationale for why this works so well. Human beings are not designed to function as anonymous cogs in megasystems. We are evolutionarily adapted to face-to-face networks of trust and reciprocity. Dunbar’s Number is a map of our social architecture. It defines the boundaries of our emotional bandwidth. When political systems ignore that bandwidth—when decisions are made in distant capitals by people we’ll never meet—the result is predictable: alienation, resentment, disconnection, and decline in civic engagement.

Polycentricity, by contrast, grounds political power within the scale of meaningful relationships. It reflects the intuitive wisdom you see in communities like the Amish—who, despite rejecting modern science, have organically preserved the exact social scale that science now tells us is optimal. There is no bureaucracy, no master algorithm—just embodied knowledge passed through generations about how to live well together.

This is the kind of thinking the Democratic Party should be championing—not defending broken bureaucracies or doubling down on abstract technocratic fixes. Instead of propping up lifeless institutions like the DMV, DoD, DoE, or the IRS, Democrats should be asking: what comes after it?

They should be building the next generation of governance—one rooted in community empowerment, ecological balance, and evolutionary logic. That means investing in and scaling what works: local cooperatives, community land trusts, municipal broadband, local food systems, participatory budgeting, neighborhood councils, community-led education, and citizens’ assemblies. It means crafting policies that empower local governance while ensuring equity and coordination across regions—not through federal micromanagement, but through federated cooperation.

In a truly polycentric system, schools are shaped by the communities they serve. Health initiatives are locally driven and culturally attuned. Immigration policies are guided by regional realities and grounded in human empathy. Housing decisions are made not by distant corporate developers, but by the people who actually live in the neighborhoods affected. And most importantly, people begin to feel connected—to each other, to their communities, and to the decisions that shape their lives. They stop feeling like passive subjects of a distant, indifferent system, and start becoming active co-creators of a society that reflects their values, needs, and hopes.

A truly polycentric system isn’t just one political philosophy among many—it’s the only kind of system that aligns with how humans are fundamentally wired to live and govern. Why? Because it reflects a deep evolutionary truth: human beings are inherently pluralistic. We differ in our cultures, values, needs, and ways of life, and any attempt to impose a uniform structure from the top down inevitably breeds inefficiency, resistance, and alienation. There is no one-size-fits-all model that can govern effectively beyond the scale of the community. Our political lives don’t fit neatly along a one-dimensional spectrum—or even a two-dimensional grid. Real societies are more complex, more adaptive, and more context-dependent than any rigid ideological model can account for. Polycentricity, for comparison, embraces this diversity—nay, it encourages such diversity. It empowers communities to shape their own futures while remaining connected to a broader, cooperative whole.

And here’s what the science tells us: when people feel rooted in place, when they experience real belonging in vibrant local communities and live in a reciprocal relationship within their ecosystems, an extraordinary thing happens. Social pathology begins to dissipate. Alienation recedes. Violence declines. Ecological destruction slows. Mental health improves. I predict—and the evidence increasingly supports—that simply reconnecting people to one another and to the land they live on will do more to address issues like mass shootings, rising depression and anxiety, and environmental degradation than any top-down policy ever could. This is what I refer to as “a spiritual society”.

This isn’t a retreat from progressive values—it’s a radical renewal of them. Real equity doesn’t come from scale; it comes from access, voice, and agency. Justice doesn’t live in bureaucracy—it lives in relationships. Democracy doesn’t thrive in abstract theory or centralized bureaucratic structures—it thrives in local practice, in local communities, in local ecosystems.

So let Trump scream about draining the swamp all he wants. Let Musk try to replace public governance with stupid private algorithms. The left doesn’t need to defend the old order—it needs to outgrow it. The future isn’t centralized—it’s polycentric and local. And if Democrats have the courage to lean into that future, they might not just win elections—they might actually start building a society that works for all.

Local Doesn’t Mean Libertarian

This isn’t about abandoning social responsibility—it’s about reimagining how we deliver it. Local doesn’t mean libertarian. It means relational. It means giving people real, tangible power over the institutions that shape their daily lives. It means shifting governance from distant bureaucrats in D.C. to neighbors, networks, and nested systems of trust. It’s about anchoring democracy in community—not abstraction. It’s about reorganizing society in a way that mirrors how our ancestors lived for millennia—how we, as a deeply social and interdependent species, were designed to live: in connection with one another and in a deep relationship with the land.

Democrats have long stood for justice, equity, and solidarity. But those values can’t thrive in a society where people feel powerless and unheard. If the left wants to win hearts—not just elections—it has to stop defending broken institutions and start building systems people actually believe in.

Let Trump try to burn it all down. Let Musk meme his way to Mars. The real political revolution won’t come from billionaires or bureaucrats.

It will come from the ground up.

So let’s lean into it.

But natural selection is more than just a cornerstone of biology. It is the most powerful explanatory tool humanity has ever wielded, with tendrils that extend far beyond genetics and adaptation. It informs everything from medicine to economics, artificial intelligence to climate science. Unlike theories of gravity or quantum mechanics, which explain narrow slices of existence, natural selection is the grand unifying thread that stitches together the story of life. It explains why peacocks have elaborate tails, why antibiotic resistance is a growing crisis, and why humans—even with all our intelligence—are still subject to the same evolutionary pressures as any other creature that ever lived.

And yet, for all its power, natural selection remains widely misunderstood. The average person may recognize Darwin’s name and may even recall the phrase “survival of the fittest.” But press them for details, and the answers become murky. Even among scientists, confusion abounds. Natural selection is often reduced to a mere mechanism of adaptation when, in truth, it is a relentless sculptor of life itself, shaping not only individual species but entire ecosystems, civilizations, and even ideas.

This lack of understanding is not just an academic concern. It is a serious issue with profound consequences. If we fail to grasp how natural selection works, we fail to understand ourselves. If we do not see how evolutionary forces shape our psychology, our societies, and our relationship with the environment, we cannot hope to address the existential challenges of our time—climate change, pandemics, even the threat of war. These crises are not isolated events. They are products of a species that evolved under one set of conditions and now finds itself in another. Without an appreciation of natural selection, we are like a ship adrift, charting our course without knowledge of the currents beneath us.

At its core, natural selection is disarmingly simple: organisms with traits that confer an advantage in survival and reproduction are more likely to pass those traits on. Over generations, these traits become more common, sculpting the endless variation of life. Consider the finches of the Galápagos Islands, with their beaks precisely shaped by the demands of their environments. The process is elegant in its simplicity, yet profound in its implications.

But natural selection is not just a matter of biology textbooks and dusty museum exhibits. It is the reason why cancer remains a formidable opponent, constantly evolving resistance to treatments. It is why the flu vaccine must change every year, as viruses adapt to our defenses. It is why, in the face of modern technology and medicine, human psychology still bears the fingerprints of a past where scarcity, tribalism, and immediate survival dictated our behaviors. Our bodies and minds were honed for a world that no longer exists, and the consequences of that mismatch shape everything from our dietary habits to our political divisions.

Misunderstanding natural selection has led to some of history’s gravest errors. It has been twisted to justify racism, eugenics, and economic exploitation. The misinterpretation known as Social Darwinism took a brilliant scientific insight and mangled it into a political weapon. But natural selection is not a moral code. It does not dictate what should be—only what is. Evolution does not care for human ideals of justice, fairness, or kindness. It is indifferent, an impassive force shaping life without intent or foresight.

And yet, understanding it allows us to rise above it. Knowing that we evolved to be tribal does not mean we must forever be divided. Recognizing that our instincts were shaped for an environment of scarcity does not mean we must resign ourselves to overconsumption and environmental destruction. Awareness is the first step toward transcendence. By understanding the forces that shaped us, we gain the power to shape our future.

Darwin was the first to shatter the illusion of human exceptionalism, to show that we are not separate from nature but part of it. His work was the beginning of a grand Copernican shift, one that continues to this day. Just as Copernicus displaced Earth from the center of the universe, Darwin displaced humanity from the pedestal of divine creation. But the revolution remains incomplete. We still struggle with the implications of our evolutionary heritage, still resist the full weight of what it means to be a product of natural selection.

The final step in this revolution is to integrate this understanding into how we see ourselves, our societies, and our future. To accept that natural selection is not just an arcane concept in biology but a fundamental truth about existence. To recognize that in its cold, indifferent mechanism lies a profound beauty—a beauty that reveals our deepest connections to all life that has ever been and all life that will ever be.

Natural selection is the story of life. And if we listen carefully, it tells us the story of ourselves.

If you sat through Biology 101, you know that species are shaped by their environments. Humans are no exception. My rural family, nestled among rolling farmland and tight-knit communities, values self-reliance and neighborly cooperation because that’s what their world demands. My urban relatives, who navigate the daily swirl of diverse interactions, champion inclusivity and social justice—values that emerge from their constant exposure to different cultures, beliefs, and lived realities. Neither perspective is superior. They are both shaped by distinct pressures, just as a desert lizard and an arctic fox develop different survival strategies.

But here’s the rub: The Democratic Party increasingly speaks the language of one environment while ignoring the other. It’s not that rural voters are allergic to progress. It’s that they don’t hear their concerns reflected in the party’s messaging. When Democratic leaders champion causes steeped in academic jargon or focus exclusively on identity-based grievances, they inadvertently signal to rural voters that their struggles—the rising cost of living, dwindling job opportunities, and an opioid crisis ravaging their communities—are secondary. That’s how you lose elections.

Take identity politics. A movement originally meant to highlight structural inequalities has, in some instances, become a litmus test for ideological purity. Many Americans, even those who support progressive social policies, recoil when they feel pressured to toe an increasingly rigid ideological line. When your average Midwestern voter hears sweeping generalizations about privilege, systemic oppression, and cultural appropriation, they often feel talked down to, not invited into a conversation. That’s a problem.

Then there’s immigration. Instead of engaging in a pragmatic, nuanced discussion about sustainable policy—one that balances compassion with the carrying capacity of social and economic systems—the Democrats have often defaulted to a moral absolutism that dismisses legitimate concerns. If you tell working-class Americans struggling with wage stagnation that their unease over unchecked immigration is simply bigotry, you lose them. Worse, you drive them into the arms of a party eager to weaponize that resentment.

And let’s talk about the economy, the supposed bread and butter of the Democratic Party. Somewhere along the way, the messaging got muddled, weighed down by complexity and a lack of visceral appeal. Voters don’t want white papers on economic policy; they want to know how you’ll keep their grocery bills from skyrocketing and whether their children will have job opportunities that don’t require moving across the country. The Democrats have let Republicans position themselves as the party of economic pragmatism, despite abundant evidence that their policies primarily benefit the ultra-wealthy. The irony would be hilarious if it weren’t so politically catastrophic.

And finally, there’s the rural-urban divide. Republicans have capitalized on a cultural mythology that paints small-town life as the heart of “real America,” while Democrats often seem hesitant to engage with rural voters beyond occasional pandering. Rural America isn’t just farms and church picnics; it’s also a place where the collapse of local economies has led to profound social despair. If Democrats want to win, they need to stop seeing rural voters as a lost cause and start making a populist argument that speaks to their economic struggles, not just their cultural grievances.

So, how do the Democrats claw their way back? First, they need a message that unites rather than divides. The most effective way to do this is through universal issues—economic fairness, healthcare access, and a government that works for the people rather than corporations. This isn’t just a feel-good idea; it’s backed by science. Humans evolved as cooperative, communal beings. Societies that thrive are those that maintain strong local networks of mutual support. The Democrats should be hammering home the reality that the true fight isn’t between red states and blue states—it’s between the billionaire class and everyone else.

Second, they need an immigration policy that reflects both compassion and sustainability. A functioning nation requires borders and a coherent strategy for integrating new arrivals. The solution isn’t draconian crackdowns or open borders; it’s a rational system that acknowledges economic and social limits while maintaining America’s legacy as a land of opportunity.

Third, they must reclaim the populist mantle. Republicans have somehow convinced rural voters that they are their champions, despite gutting labor protections, dismantling social safety nets, and handing tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. Democrats need to become the party of local economies, small businesses, and antitrust enforcement. This isn’t about moving right—it’s about moving local. People trust governance that feels close to home. The Democrats should be arguing for more power at the community level, not just in Washington.

Most critically, they need to reconnect with the fundamental truth of human sociality: We are meant to govern ourselves at a local level. Anthropologists, sociologists, and evolutionary scientists all point to the same conclusion—humans thrive in small, cooperative groups with localized decision-making. Elinor Ostrom’s research on Core Design Principles shows that communities that manage their own resources are more effective and resilient. If Democrats embraced this idea, they could position themselves as the true party of self-governance—not the Republicans, who talk about small government while centralizing power in corporate boardrooms and political elites.

The path forward isn’t about adopting conservative values or diluting progressive ideals. It’s about speaking to people in a way that makes them feel seen. The Democratic Party, at its best, has always been a coalition of working people, visionaries, and pragmatists. To win again, it needs to stop speaking to America as if it’s a monolith and start addressing it as the diverse, evolving landscape that it truly is.

“I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.”

But here we are in 2025, staring down the barrel of history’s loaded gun, and it seems the chain Adams envisioned has snapped somewhere along the way. The luxury of stepping back—assuming the world will be steered by some unseen hand of reason—has landed us in a precarious place. The idea that scientists can afford to be passive, cloistered figures scribbling away in obscurity, trusting that knowledge alone will illuminate the path forward, now seems like a dangerous delusion.

Darwin changed the world not because he simply understood the mechanics of natural selection, but because he put his own skin in the game. He absorbed the blowback. He braved the storms of his time. He laid out the facts, piece by painstaking piece, for a world that was not eager to listen. And yet, listen they did. Not immediately, not without resistance, but the ideas took root. They outlived him. That is the long game of intellectual revolution.

As I sit here reflecting on this most sacred of days, I can’t help but ask: WWDD—What Would Darwin Do? (And yes, we absolutely need to make WWDD bracelets.)

Would he quietly publish papers, hoping truth alone would steer society toward reason? Or would he recognize what should now be obvious to us—that truth, without power, is like a tree falling in an empty forest? I suspect that if Darwin were alive today, he would see the existential threats before us—climate collapse, the unraveling of biodiversity, the erosion of evidence-based policy, and the wildfire spread of scientific illiteracy—and conclude that science must do more than explain the world. It must shape it.

And who better to lead that charge than those of us who have spent our lives studying nature’s playbook? Who understands the stakes more intimately than the scientists, conservationists, and educators who see the slow-motion train wreck unfolding in real time? Who better to inject reason into the decision-making process than the very people who have devoted themselves to understanding how reality actually works?

And let’s be clear—I’m not talking about activism in its modern, often diluted, performative sense. I’m talking about direct engagement in the political process. About fighting for what we know to be right: the preservation of nature, the pursuit of objective truth, the defense of policies rooted in evidence, and the rejection of the shortsighted, self-serving nonsense that passes for governance in far too many places.

So, on this Darwin Day, I pose a challenge to all of us: How do we evolve from passive observers in the sociopolitical process to active participants? How do we step into the rooms where decisions are made and ensure that reason, not rhetoric, carries the day?

Because if we don’t do it, who the hell will?

The reason for the red wave wasn’t so much to do with Trump’s brilliant strategy, or rather, lack thereof. Instead, it was the Democrats’ chronic inability to resonate with the concerns of everyday Americans that ultimately led to their defeat, which has been a common theme in recent years. A deeper look at these issues shows how the Democrats’ explicit missteps opened the door to a decisive Republican victory, revealing critical gaps in the party’s ability to reach the average American voter.

A Party Divided by Identity Politics

The Democratic Party has increasingly focused on identity-based politics, centering issues around race, gender, and social justice. While vital to their platform, this approach often feels exclusionary to some, especially to moderates or voters outside urban centers. I don’t know who needs to hear this over at the DNC headquarters, but an election is never won by excluding potential voting members. It’s not rocket science. But it is behavioral science.

The science of building a cohesive group identity teaches that unity is best achieved not by amplifying our differences but by promoting a sense of shared purpose and shared identity. The Core Design Principles, drawn from the economist Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning research and recently updated by the non-profit Prosocial World, provide a roadmap for creating strong, inclusive groups that can address complex situations such as resource management—a model the Democrats would do well to consider.

At the heart of these principles lies inclusive decision-making and a clear, shared mission. For Democrats, this means widening their net to engage a full spectrum of voices, from urban progressives to rural moderates, in an open dialogue that transcends identity-based divisions. By focusing on issues that resonate widely—such as economic stability, healthcare, the environment, and education—the party can forge a flexible yet robust identity structure that welcomes diverse perspectives without alienating those who may feel overlooked.

This identity-first approach has left the Democrats vulnerable, creating an image of a party more focused on segmenting than uniting. Republicans, on the other hand, have seized the chance to present themselves as defenders of “American values,” framing Democrats as out of touch with voters’ common experiences. In a sociopolitical climate where many crave shared purpose, the Democratic message feels lost and fragmented, while the Republican message, regardless of its oversimplifications, strikes a chord with voters longing for unity.

The LGBTQ+ Conversation and Growing Backlash

I am unquestionably pro-LGBTQ+, but I am also invariably anti-authoritarianism. Holding these stances puts me in a precarious and often paradoxical relationship with the current Democratic party. While the Democratic party has rightfully advocated for inclusion and equality for LGBTQ+ members, an intensifying focus on transgender issues, especially in areas like sports and youth healthcare, has created tension even within the LGBTQ+ community and beyond. Many Americans, including some members of the gay and lesbian community, feel alienated by what they perceive as a one-size-fits-all stance that doesn’t allow room for differing views or nuanced debate.

There is a growing sentiment that certain aspects of the transgender rights movement are enforced with a kind of rigidity that feels authoritarian to many. Policies around language, education, and youth healthcare have often been met with resistance by those who feel that the discourse demands total adherence, rather than fostering understanding and nuance. This perceived “totalitarian” approach has driven some voters toward the Republicans, who have argued for a broader freedom of expression and differing perspectives within the LGBTQ+ conversation. In failing to allow space for this debate, the Democrats have alienated potential allies and ceded ground to Republicans on an issue traditionally seen as their stronghold.

The Problem of Immigration

Immigration, for me, has absolutely nothing to do with race. It has everything to do with the carrying capacity of our social systems—how many new people our strained and often under-resourced social infrastructure can reliably support.

While living in Poland over the past few years as my wife and I navigated the long, expensive process of her legal immigration to the U.S., I witnessed firsthand the limits of even the most resilient social systems. When nearly 10 million Ukrainian refugees sought safety in Poland following the Russian invasion, Poland’s social infrastructure—its healthcare, housing, and education—was suddenly stretched to the breaking point. Compassion for new Ukrainian refugees was palpable and remained high, but the hard reality was that even a system with the best intentions has its limits. Poland now faces an internal immigration crisis, driving more people further to the right than ever before.

The United States faces a similar challenge. To remain a nation that offers refuge and opportunity, we must confront the realities of what our current infrastructure can sustain. Without pragmatic policies ensuring our social systems can accommodate new and established residents, we risk undermining the very promise that makes this country a beacon for so many. Compassionate immigration policy must be paired with sustainable planning, ensuring resources and stability for all who call America home.

While the Democratic party has consistently pushed for more inclusive immigration policies, it has often avoided addressing logistical concerns, such as strains on housing, healthcare, and education. Many voters – including immigrant communities – seek balanced policies that welcome newcomers but ensure public services can handle population growth. Republicans have seized on this concern, framing it as a matter of safety and resource management. By failing to engage in a candid dialogue on the realities of immigration, the Democrats have left this issue vulnerable to Republican narratives of control and security.

Failing to Reach the Rural Voter

For decades, rural America has increasingly shifted away from the Democratic Party. This election only underscored the importance of reconnecting with rural communities. Many rural Americans prioritize issues like agriculture, local job stability, and less governmental oversight. Still, Democratic policies often appear focused on urban problems, creating a perception that the party doesn’t understand or value rural life. Republicans have leveraged this disconnection, casting themselves as protectors of “real” American values. Rebuilding this trust requires Democrats to recognize the unique challenges of rural communities and address them directly.

Losing the Economic Message

Economic issues have been a weak spot for Democrats this cycle. In a year defined by inflation, rising costs, and financial uncertainty, the Democratic response felt overly complex, leaving many voters feeling that the party was out of touch with their immediate needs. While Trump’s solutions may lack substance, his simple and direct messaging resonated with voters struggling to make ends meet.

In contrast, the Democrats seemed to get bogged down in policy nuances and lost the narrative in the process. Republicans, on the other hand, didn’t need intricate plans. They merely needed to project a sense of listening and responsiveness to their base, something the Democrats struggled to convey.

A Final Reckoning

This election cycle revealed a fundamental truth: the Republicans didn’t need to sway masses of new voters, they simply required the Democrats to lose them. In a time when Americans are yearning for unity, pragmatic solutions, and strong economic leadership, the Democratic Party’s platform has lost its touch. As many voters search for shared values and solutions to everyday concerns, the Democrats’ loss appears more a matter of failing to meet their own base’s expectations than any great Republican victory.

Chapter Summary:

Advances in the empirical sectors of biology are beginning to reveal evolvability as a major evolutionary process. Yet evolvability’s theoretical role is still intensely debated. Since its inception nearly 30 years ago, the evolvability research front has put a strong emphasis on the non-genetic mechanisms that influence the short-term evolvability of individuals within populations by causing phenotypic heterogeneity, such as developmental trait plasticity, phenotypic plasticity, modularity, the G-P map, robustness, and/or epigenetic variation. However, genetic evolvability mechanisms such as mutation or recombination have a deeper history in evolutionary thought that is often overlooked by those in the evolvability research front, with recent evidence suggesting that species switch to genetic evolvability mechanisms when short-term evolvability strategies fail to relieve selective pressures. For this reason, a causal distinction must be made between genetic evolvability and the more recently emphasized non-genetic (or evo-devo) evolvability to allow for its maturation as a central explanatory concept. I conclude by arguing that the anachronisms of the scientific process are the main culprit behind recent divisions in biology and likely beyond. To streamline theoretical progress, we need to build a new science with new underlying philosophies like restricted pluralism.

For those of us immersed in evolutionary biology, Speth’s realization rings true. Modern society has severed its relationship with the natural world, operating under a philosophy of mechanistic reductionism that fails to account for the complex, interdependent nature of life. But this was not always the case. Indigenous societies—rooted in kinship with the land—have long organized themselves around principles that modern evolutionary science is only now beginning to validate.

Multilevel Selection (MLS) Theory, a framework pioneered by biologist David Sloan Wilson and others, argues that evolution operates at multiple levels of organization—genes, individuals, and groups—depending on which level best fosters survival. In doing so, MLS challenges the hyper-individualistic dogma of modern Western thought, which treats competition as the primary evolutionary driver. Instead, MLS suggests that cooperation is not just a social nicety—it’s an evolutionary necessity. And here’s where things get interesting: Indigenous worldviews have been making this argument for thousands of years.

A Selfhood Beyond the Self

Indigenous ontologies often conceptualize identity as extending beyond the individual. This isn’t just poetic abstraction—it has real consequences for social organization and ecological sustainability. Many Indigenous traditions recognize a tripartite selfhood: an individual identity, a communal identity, and an ecological identity.

Among the Ojibwe, for instance, the concept of ‘kincentric ecology’ frames all living beings as relatives. This isn’t metaphor; it’s a mode of existence. It mirrors the evolutionary insight that selection can favor cooperative behaviors when individuals see their survival as bound up with that of their community or ecosystem. Biologists now understand that many cooperative species—including humans—have evolved through a process of selection at the group level. Simply put: groups that worked together survived, while those that prioritized individual gain collapsed.

This perspective is a far cry from the social structures that dominate modern industrialized societies, where selfhood is often reduced to the individual alone. Paul Shepard, an anthropologist and ecopsychologist, once argued that Western identity structures are historically flimsy, leading to social fragmentation, escapism, and a pathological relationship with nature. He wasn’t wrong.

The Evolutionary Mismatch of Modernity

For 95% of our species’ history, humans lived in small, cooperative groups where social bonds were reinforced by shared responsibilities and mutual dependence. This wasn’t utopian—it was pragmatic. If you alienated your group, you starved.

Then came agriculture, urbanization, and, eventually, the nation-state. While these advancements brought undeniable material progress, they also eroded the small-scale social structures that had long acted as a filter for moral behavior. Without intimate, interdependent communities, prosocial behaviors are no longer reinforced, and individualism runs rampant. The result? A society that elevates competition over cooperation, economic gain over communal well-being, and mechanistic control over ecological balance.

MLS Theory provides a scientific framework to understand this shift. When selection pressures act primarily at the individual level—as they do in competitive, atomized societies—self-serving behaviors outcompete cooperative ones. But when selection occurs at the group level, cooperation is rewarded because it enhances collective survival.

Indigenous societies understood this intuitively. Many traditional communities operate through consensus decision-making, elder councils, and systems of reciprocal exchange—mechanisms that prevent power from concentrating in the hands of a few. These social structures align remarkably well with Elinor Ostrom’s Core Design Principles (CDPs) for sustainable governance, which Wilson and others have argued mirror the evolutionary conditions that foster prosociality.

Toward a New Conception of Humanity

Perhaps the most profound implication of MLS Theory is that it introduces a new layer to human identity: a species-level selfhood. We now know that certain evolutionary pressures—like the maintenance of sexual reproduction—operate at the species level, shaping our shared genetic heritage. This insight has the potential to reframe human ethics. If we recognize ourselves not just as individuals or even as members of particular nations or tribes, but as an interdependent species with a collective evolutionary trajectory, we may be able to construct a global ethics aligned with our biological reality.

This, I believe, is where the real challenge lies. How do we resurrect the wisdom of Indigenous worldviews, reintroducing communal and ecological identity structures that have been eroded by modernity? And how do we integrate those insights with cutting-edge evolutionary science to forge a new ethical paradigm for the future?

The answer is neither regression nor nostalgia. We can’t simply return to pre-industrial lifeways, nor should we idealize the past. But we can learn from the deep time-tested social structures of our ancestors—structures that MLS Theory, in many ways, is only now beginning to understand.

If Speth was right, and our greatest problems are spiritual and cultural, then the way forward is not merely technological. It is, as Indigenous traditions have long argued, relational. It requires us to redefine our conceptions of selfhood, governance, and survival—not as atomized individuals battling for resources, but as kin, woven into the fabric of life itself.

A recent Guardian article, “America’s Premier Pronatalists on Having ‘Tons of Kids’ to Save the World,” lays bare the absurdity of these ideas. The movement—championed by billionaires like Elon Musk and backed by a cadre of wealthy, self-proclaimed “genius breeders”—rests on the laughable idea that they alone hold the genetic keys to humanity’s future. Their worldview is a cocktail of biological illiteracy, techno-fascist arrogance, and an utter blindness to the most pressing existential threats of our time. This isn’t just bad science—it’s eugenics in a cheap disguise.

The Delusions of Individualism Run Amok

We live in an era where personal ambition is not just tolerated but encouraged at the expense of collective well-being. David Sloan Wilson describes this phenomenon through multilevel selection theory: individual gains at lower levels of organization often come at the expense of higher-order stability. In other words, unchecked individualism disrupts the very structures that make civilization possible. Pronatalists epitomize this pathology. Their narcissistic obsession with perpetuating their bloodlines disregards the broader needs of society, the environment, and future generations. It’s scientific illiteracy at its finest.

Let’s be clear: more people is not a good thing. Not now. Not ever in the foreseeable future.

The Science Is Unambiguous: Mo’ People, Mo’ Problems

Let’s cut through the nonsense: adding more people to a burning building doesn’t put out the fire. It just guarantees more casualties. The data is overwhelming—our greatest crises, from climate change to public health disasters, are exacerbated by overpopulation.

Take COVID-19. Global travel and overcrowded cities created an express lane for the virus to spread, yet pronatalists act as though pandemics are an unfortunate side effect rather than a direct consequence of overpopulation, and this is just the beginning. More people mean more pandemics, more public health emergencies, and a greater strain on fragile medical systems.

The ecological consequences are even more dire. The Malthusian dilemma—briefly staved off by the Green Revolution—looms larger than ever. More mouths to feed means intensified industrial agriculture, soil depletion, water shortages, and a deepening reliance on synthetic fertilizers that poison ecosystems. We are not “thriving” under modernity—we are devouring the biosphere at an accelerating pace. The only viable solution isn’t more children but fewer. Drastically fewer.

And let’s talk waste. More people generate more sewage. More plastic. More pollution. More pointless consumer goods manufactured, used briefly, and discarded into overflowing landfills or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The math is simple: infinite growth on a finite planet is a death spiral. We are not suffering from a lack of humans. We are suffering from too many.

A Weird Point of Agreement: Societies, Like Ecosystems, Have Limits

I believe in building a bigger table, not kicking people away from it. But every table has a limit—there comes a point when the structure collapses under its own weight. That’s not bigotry. That’s social physics. Even the most well-intentioned social systems have a breaking point.

This is where I find myself in an unusual, begrudging sphere of agreement with people like Elon Musk, though I suspect for very different reasons. He sees civilization as a tech startup—scalable and endlessly expandable. I see it as an ecosystem, governed by limits. The unfortunate truth is that we are already at a breaking point. Housing shortages, overwhelmed hospitals, and underfunded schools aren’t products of xenophobia; they are material realities exacerbated by unchecked population growth. And right now, we are well past our sustainable threshold. This is where liberals tend to miss the mark. Immigration isn’t a question of race. It’s a question of social carrying capacity.

I saw this firsthand while living in Poland as my wife and I endured the grueling, expensive, and exasperating process of legal immigration to the U.S. When Russia invaded Ukraine, nearly ten million refugees flooded into Poland. Despite widespread solidarity, the nation’s healthcare, education, and housing sectors buckled under the strain. This isn’t a theoretical debate—it’s what happens when a well-intentioned system meets the hard limits of reality.

Final Thought: Pronatalism Is a Death Cult

Elon Musk and his billionaire breeding enthusiasts are not visionaries. They are not saviors. They are deluded aristocrats trying to construct an ideological justification for their genetic vanity projects. The idea that they, rather than the millions of starving, displaced, and suffering people around the world, are the “solution” to our problems is not just wrong—it’s utterly grotesque.

The future will not be saved by billionaire eugenicists producing dynasties of nepotistic elites. It will be saved by those willing to recognize that the most responsible decision we can make for our planet, our societies, and our descendants is to stop feeding the infernal engine of unchecked population growth. It’s a fundamental acknowledgment of modern ecological and biological theory.

The hard truth? We don’t need more people. We need fewer. Hard stop.