Justin’s Notes

The Whole Debate Reduces to One Empirical Question: Did Evolution Stop?

2026-08-02 · AI-generated insight

Derbyshire's taxonomy is cleaner than it first appears, because two of his three theories turn out to disagree about a single fact. Read carefully, the Culturist and Biologian positions share almost everything: both accept that our species "arose, like all other species, from the ordinary processes of evolution." They part company on one clause. The Culturist holds that these processes "ceased in the early history of the species," leaving a human nature "uniform across all populations." The Biologian holds that they "have continued to the present day."

That is not a difference of values or of philosophy. It is a claim about the world that can be checked. And Winegard and Carl supply exactly the check. Their four-step argument—dispersal out of Africa into varied environments, divergent selection pressures, geographic barriers to gene flow, and consequent divergence via drift and selection—is precisely the mechanism by which Derbyshire's "early history" cutoff would have failed to hold. If oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges impeded gene flow for tens of thousands of years while populations faced different temperatures and altitudes, then evolution did not stop 75,000 years ago; it kept running in parallel across separated populations.

So the seemingly grand contest between Culturism and Biologism is, at its crux, an argument about a date. The Culturist needs evolution to have switched off before dispersal so that "psychic unity" can be preserved. Winegard and Carl are arguing that the switch was never thrown.

What's striking is that Derbyshire files the Culturist claim about ceased evolution under the foundation of our essential equality—the moral stakes are loaded onto the empirical premise. This is the load-bearing move worth watching. If equality is made to rest on the factual claim that populations did not diverge, then the moral commitment becomes hostage to whatever the geneticists find. Bastian's "psychic unity of mankind" was offered as a scientific hypothesis, not a moral axiom—which means it can lose. A more durable case for equal treatment would not depend on evolution having conveniently paused.

Woven from these notes

There are three theories of human nature enjoying widespread support at present. For convenience, I’ll tag each one of them with a single adjective. Religious. Our species Homo sapiens is the special creation of God, either as a one-off miracle or by God-guided evolution. Human nature is a mix of attributes, some natural ones arising from plain biology, some supernatural ones inserted by God. We are the Chosen Species. The God-given attributes are unique to our species. They are the same in all human populations, forming the foundation of our essential equality. Their existence is independent of our biological nature, even to the degree that they can continue to exist after our deaths. Being nonbiological, they don’t evolve, even if other features of the living world do, so that our evolution, if it ever took place, ended (except perhaps for some incidental biological features) when God decreed we have these supernatural attributes. These God-given attributes include the moral sense, which accesses transcendent truths—i.e., truths that do not dwell in the world of matter. God rules! Cultural. Our species arose, like all other species, from the ordinary processes of evolution. However, these processes ceased in the early history of the species, leaving us with a human nature uniform across all populations and unchanging over time, forming the foundation of our essential equality. This human nature has very little innate structure and is extremely plastic. By placing it in a suitable environment, or applying suitable pressures, the mind (and therefore the behavior, which issues from the mind) can be shaped in any way at all. “Human nature” does not really exist independent of the environment an individual happens to be in, especially that part of the environment made up of other human beings—“the culture.” Moral standards are arbitrary, and are taken in by the individual from the culture. Culture rules! Biological. Our species arose, like all other species, from the ordinary processes of evolution, which have continued to the present day. Human nature is a collection of characteristics all susceptible to biological explanation. Some characteristics of a person’s nature can be shaped to some degree by “cultural” (i.e., social or environmental) forces; some cannot. Human beings are a part of the living world, and nothing more. Our equality consists in being members of a single species; though our species, like any other with very wide distribution, exhibits regional differences. The characteristics of an individual human being are templated in his genome. They may be somewhat modified by womb events or life experiences; or they may need to be “instantiated” by postpartum environment. (An individual’s genome may, for example, predispose him to be eloquent or tongue-tied when using language; but which language he uses will depend on his childhood environment.) The repertoire of human behaviors, and of ideas, including moral ideas, about behavior, are innate, the result of evolutionary processes acting on our social lives across many generations. Biology rules! For convenience in what follows, I’ll label adherents of these three views with the more or less made-up words “Religionists,” “Culturists,” and “Biologians.” Each point of view has a history. Religionism emerges from core features of human thinking, as described by cognitive scientists like Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained, 2001), Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust, 2002), and Bruce Hood (Supersense, 2009). Culturism has roots in the tabula rasa (“blank slate”) theories of Aristotle and Locke. It was put into its modern form by German anthropologist Adolf Bastian (1826–1905). Bastian coined the phrase “the psychic unity of mankind.” His student Franz Boas brought these ideas to the United States, becoming the most influential American anthropologist of the early twentieth century. Biologism is just ordinary scientific method applied to humanity.
— John Derbyshite We Are Doomed

A more plausible conception of race, one that is consistent with how careful philosophers and geneticists use the term, recognises that: When humans began leaving Africa around 75,000 years ago, they dispersed across a much greater range of environments than they had previously inhabited. The humans that settled in different geographic regions subsequently came under different selection pressures (e.g. temperature, seasonality, altitude). Natural barriers such as oceans (e.g. the Atlantic), deserts (e.g. the Sahara) and mountain ranges (e.g. the Himalayas) impeded gene flow between different populations for substantial periods of time. When there is limited gene flow between populations that have come under different selection pressures, we would expect them to gradually diverge from one another over via the processes of genetic drift and natural selection.

— Bo Winegard, Noah Carl Superior: The Return of Race Science—A Review