Epstein and the end of alloparental civilization
Why is pedophilia so common among the rich and powerful?
The Department of Justice’s latest release of files from its Epstein archive certainly raises all kinds of disturbing political questions, but it also poses a question that is sociologically vexing. As the scope of this conspiracy becomes clearer, it seems that pedophilia is much more common in our ruling class than it is in the broader population. How is this happening?
In the discourse, the standard explanation — even among socialists — has been that the rich are evil. And this is advanced not just as a description of their behavior, but as a point about their personal character or psychology. At its most elaborate, this theory holds that capitalism tends to systematically elevate evil people by rewarding sociopathic behavior.
But while there is some truth to this, I don’t think this is a very useful theory. On one hand, because “capitalism elevates evil people” seems to have become a kind of analytical crutch in popular left thought, effectively handwaving away any destructive or antisocial behavior the ruling class engages in as the expression of their vague inner evilness. This mode of explanation can cause us to miss more important dynamics; for example, as Marx teaches us, the bourgeoisie exploits the working class not out of some inner sadism, but rather in pursuit of profit. And in fact, if an employer were exclusively committed to making people suffer, his business would almost certainly fail.
In that light, I do think there is a better explanation — one that relies on material factors rather than vague forces like “evil.” And it begins with a look at the evolution of mating strategies.
The K-R spectrum
Though the mating and parenting behavior of sexual organisms is extraordinarily diverse, it can all, from an evolutionary perspective, be positioned on a spectrum between two simple strategies. This is because of two universally applicable points:
Your genes are more likely to survive if you invest a lot into parenting and if you have a lot of offspring. But
The more offspring you have, the less you can invest into parenting any given individual.
For this reason, all sexual organisms make a tradeoff. Some of them, like many insects and fish, spawn a large number of offspring but do little to no parenting. Others, like apes and elephants, sire a small number of offspring and do a lot of parenting. And others, like birds and dogs, pursue a mixed strategy somewhere in the middle of the spectrum: they lay a half dozen eggs or a litter of puppies, and then invest a moderate amount of parenting into each. But everywhere you find sexual reproduction in nature, you will find something between two strategies: what scientists call a K-selected strategy (lots of parenting and few offspring) and an R-selected strategy (lots of offspring and little parenting).
To understand where humans sit on this spectrum, it helps to begin by looking at primates in general. Primates, in comparison with other species, require a fairly large minimal investment in parenting. Since they are usually produced individually and spend a long time in gestation, simply birthing a single primate usually takes at least five months. On top of that, young primates always require several more months of intensive parenting before they can survive with relative autonomy. Thus, primates always require a minimum year investment of time, energy, and resources to pass on their genetic material. For comparison with other mammals, some mice require less than two months, and can be born a dozen at a time, which means that the per-mouse investment is only about 5 days.
So far we have only talked about the lower primates, like marmosets. Among higher primates, the investment is even higher. This is mostly because of their brains, which take much longer to mature outside of the womb — not just physiologically, but cognitively. Chimpanzees for example rely on extremely complex behaviors to survive and compete for mates, so it takes them over a decade to learn them and fully mature.
For this reason, primates rely on highly K-selected reproductive strategies. Each child they raise requires such a massive investment that they simply cannot afford to pursue the quantity-over-quality strategies you see among other organisms. From the standpoint of species-survival, each primate is thus extremely valuable for two reasons: because so much energy has been invested into them, and because there are so few of them.
The alloparenting threshold
So far we have talked about parenting as if it is necessarily provided by an individual’s biological parent, but this isn’t necessarily true. Since any given organism can only make a finite investment into parenting its offspring, it is always possible for the parenting requirements of any given species to reach the limit of what individual biological parents can provide. And the more K-selected a species becomes, the more likely it is to hit that limit.
From here, a species has two conceivable ways to adapt. On one hand, it can become more R-selected, lowering its parenting investments so that it can afford to spawn more offspring. On the other hand, it can try to find a way to enhance its parenting capacity by changing its behavior.
This is the evolutionary origin of collective parenting, also known as alloparenting. When a species approaches the threshold of the R-K spectrum where the genetic value of each offspring exceeds the parenting capacity of any individual organism, that species is more likely to survive if the parent gets some help. Over time this can lead to extremely complex parenting behavior that spreads the burden over the group.
Higher primates, it seems, have adopted this strategy more aggressively than any other species. Their defining approach to reproduction has been to become as K-selected as possible, and then, when they hit the limit of what their parenting capacity allows for, to grow larger brains that can coordinate more sophisticated and effective parenting strategies. In this way they have become better and better at providing for and defending their high-value offspring, arriving around 300,000 years ago at the apex of this strategy: humans.
Humans are by far the most k-selected species in the animal kingdom: their pregnanies take about nine months, and while they reach sexual maturity and quasi-indepenence a bit earlier, their brains take more than two decades to finish developing. This, as the anthopological record makes clear, is because humans rely on their unusually robust intelligence to engage in extremely complicated behavior to defend and provide for their babies. We can create and wield all kinds of sophisticated tools to produce and secure food for our offspring, and to protect them; we can also coordinate with each other in all kinds of complicated ways to do this collectively. One can find less intelligent variations on this behavior in other species, and particularly in other primates; but none of it relies on brains that require as much care as ours.
The material boundaries of economics
So far, this discussion may seem far afield from the question we began with — but it is crucial for understanding the material basis of what follows. When we talk about economic behavior, we usually begin with the assumption that humans will inevitably coordinate production, trade with each other, and so on; in other words, that they will behave socially rather than survive in isolation. What the evolution of reproductive strategies tells us is why and in what sense that is the case. Humans engage in economic behavior because our reproductive strategy has been to create a few babies that we cannot reliably defend and provide for on our own.
For most of human history, we met this challenge in a simple but elegant way: what Marx called “primitive communism.” Humans were organized into very small bands that worked together to hunt and gather, and that distributed the fruits of their labor equally among everyone. It is not entirely clear why we settled on this production strategy in particular, but there may be a clue in the fact that our primate ancestors were not egalitarian. And to understand why, all you have to do is look at modern ape hierarchies to notice that they emerge from a widely variable capacity for violence. Large, powerful, and unusually aggressive apes can impose their will on smaller and more docile apes so decisively and consistently that they can maintain relatively stable arrangements of dominance.
Humans, in order to adequately provide for their babies, became even deadlier than apes — but this had a dramatic social consequence. The ability of humans to cooperate with each other and to develop weapons overwhelmingly collapsed the disparities in physical power that governed the social lives of their ancestors. Even the weakest human in a band, if he caught someone off guard with a spear or ganged up on him with allies, had a good chance of subduing the strongest.
So it was this early balance of power, rather than some inherent virtue or docility among early humans, that likely created an egalitarian detente in their bands. And if the historical record is any indication, this detente lasted for hundreds of thousands of years.
Over just the last few thousand years, however, a few adaptations have upset this detente. First and foremost, the domestication and industrialization of agriculture expanded our capacity to produce offspring so radically that the human reproductive strategy became slightly more R-shifted, growing the population. This seems to have had an inevitably destabilizing effect on the balance of power in populations: as human populations grow from small bands to city-sized populations, they become more likely to develop internal hierarchies of domination.
The explanation for this that I find most plausible depends on three internal dynamics. First, as the size of a local population grows, it becomes capable of hosting larger and larger internal factions. Second, as the disparity in size between internal factions grow, the largest becomes capable of greater violence against the smallest. Third, as factions become capable of greater violence against each other, they become increasingly capable of imposing exploitative arrangements and institutions on the smaller that enhance their own power. In this way, as local populations become larger, a self-reinforcing cycle becomes more likely to form which increasingly empowers a single faction to dominate the others.
Regardless of how it happens, in any case, the effect is well attested: the larger a group of humans gets, the more likely it is to develop an internal hierarchy. This fact explains how humans eventually moved out of the stable equillibrium of small egalitarian bands into the dynamic process of large societies divided by class.
Since class society imparts extraordinary competitive advantages upon some humans against others, it is tempting to imagine that the economic structure of a society will have extraordinary consequences for evolution. In fact, however, three factors have likely muted this effect. First, hierarchy only became a widespread and stable feature of human societies around 15,000 years ago — not nearly long enough to have a significant evolutionary impact. Second, the structure of class societies has varied so widely over time and space that species-level effects have had even less of an opportunity to take root. Having the physical strength to pull a plough, for example, is much less of a competitive advantage today than it used to be. Third, since class society has always relied on an enormous working class capable of reproducing itself, its outsized presence in the gene pool has usually washed out any reproductive advantages that other classes may have.
As a consequence, the evolutionary story of class society has mostly just been a story about the working class. And while the expanded productive capacity of the human economy has allowed the working class to become slightly more r-selected than it used to be, the high cost of childraising coupled with economic scarcity has meant that humans have remained, by far, the most k-selected species on earth. Emile Zola’s Germinal remains the classic account of this dynamic, as we see for example when a miner’s wife reflects on how many children she’s had:
One doesn’t think about it at all, they come quite naturally. And then, when they grow up they bring something in, and that makes the household go…It was necessary, all the same, to feed the little ones who brought nothing in.
In other words, even though poor families could conceivably raise their income by having more children, the high initial cost of childraising imposes severe limits on this strategy.
The evolutionary meaning of class
The ruling class, meanwhile, has often faced very different incentives. Intuitively, it might seem like their wealth would give them a much greater capacity to defend and provide for more offspring. Quite often, however, membership in the ruling class has imposed other constraints that have limited this advantage. Historically, for example, the ruling class has often adhered to extremely rigid mating norms, like monogamous marriage, meant to stabilize the high-stakes family alliances they came with. Inheritance norms have also mattered; societies where children split the estates of their parents, for example, disincentivize large families since having more children means that each inherits less. The economic structure of production matters, too: in the modern US, for example, having a two-income household means you’ll earn more money, but it also means that parents will be less available to provide childcare. Finally, the ruling class has historically tended to make much larger investments in raising their children. This has meant everything from hiring nurses and tutors to sending them to elite schools to showering them with much more expensive gifts.
Meanwhile, many of the incentives that the working class have to produce more offspring simply don’t exist for the ruling class. For example, ruling classes have always been less dependant on the labor of their children. They’re less reliant on having children to take care of them in their old age. And since they can afford better healthcare for their offspring, they do not need to produce as many to ensure that one reaches adulthood.
As a consequence, insofar as class advantage has conferred any kind of reproductive advantage to elites, it has done so by making them more k-selected. The rich have generally had fewer children than everyone else, but have been able to take much better care of them.
Generally, then, we can say that humans evolved in conditions of relative scarcity to pursue an extremely k-selected strategy. And this has meant that even though our capacity to provide for offspring has grown dramatically, humans still do not spawn like fish; our reproductive rate has increased marginally, but most of our expanded productive capacity has gone into creating complex social systems that are capable of providing enhanced care and protection for our offspring. Historically these systems have all been pyramidal hierarchies relying on a large working class supporting a relatively tiny ruling class. This structure has imposed different selection pressures on both classes: the working class has been slightly more r-selected, while the ruling class has been more k-selected.
An r-selected ruling class
With this framework in mind, let’s consider a complex question: how will capitalism affect human evolution in the long-run?
The real answer, of course, is “no one knows” — but let’s reflect on how our ruling class is thinking about it. As Marx has taught us, the primary interest of the bourgeoisie is to expand profits. This can mean increasing productivity, but it can also mean shrinking payroll. One need only look at how Silicon Valley talks about AI to see what this means in practice: replacing as much of the human workforce as possible with low-cost technology.
Insofar as they accomplish this shift, it would have a dramatic implication for human civilization: for the first time since prehistory, it would lose its pyramidal structure. A society that largely depends on technology rather than human labor for production is one that no longer requires a giant working class to prop up a small elite. Instead, what the ruling class idealizes is a world where everyone can wield a nearly infinite capacity for production through technology.
This gargantuan economic shift would have enormous evolutionary consequences as well. This is because scarcity is what has kept humans committed to a k-selected reproductive strategy. The explosion in our global population that accompanied our improvements in agriculture attests to this point, but so does a more recent development: the reproductive strategy of Elon Musk. As Elizabeth Bruenig documented a while back, Musk seems to be pursing a strategy for producing children that is significantly closer to what a fruit fly does than what most humans do. On one hand, he has fathered at least 12 children, and possibly many, many more. On the other hand, however, he has done so by rejecting the ordinary expectations of human fatherhood, replacing a decades-long commitment of time and attention with huge cash payments.
Musk is not the first human to adopt an unusually r-selected reproductive strategy. Its most famous practitioner was Genghis Khan, who appears to have fathered hundreds of children based on surviving genetic traces throughout Eurasian populations. Like every other sexually reproducing organism, Khan was also bound by the k-r tradeoff; and since the number of offspring he had was much higher, this meant in practice that he dedicated a significant amount of time and resources to fathering almost none of them.
In any case, what allowed both Musk and Khan to pursue a relatively r-selected strategy was their disproportionate hierarchical power. For Khan this just meant the ability to rape hundreds of women and conquered subjects; for Musk, this has meant a level of wealth unseen in human history, which has allowed him to buy his way out of his fatherly responsibilities. Musk has not expressed any embarrassment about this, of course; for him, the ordinary social norms that have often constrained the reproductive strategies of the ruling class simply don’t apply.
One of the most biologically important consequences of capitalism, therefore, may have to do with its consequences for the reproductive strategy of the rich. The working class, of course, is bound by all of the usual economic constraints; but the ruling class has become so wealthy, and so unencumbered by social norms and considerations that have historically moderated their behavior, that most of the selection pressures that have governed primate reproduction strategy for millions of years are now entirely absent. As a consequence, we seem to be seeing the emergence of a relatively r-selected reproductive strategy among the rich characterized by:
Harem behavior, with one male mating with a large number of females who they do not couple or have a significant long-term relationship with;
Minimal financial investments in children, likely accompanied by significant legal measures to limit their personal responsibilities for the child;
A broader asociality reflecting their diminished investment in society to contribute to the care and protection of their children.
A sense of genetic superiority, which justifies leveraging their immense wealth for the sake of eugenic warfare against the working class.
Particularly in Silicon Valley, this sort of person — promiscuous but uncommitted to anyone in particular, interested in eugenics and overly impressed by their own IQ and physical prowess, unusually disinterested in conventional morality — is everywhere.
And so we arrive at the question we began with. Why does the ruling class seem to have an unusual number of pedophiles? The answer, I propose, is that they are increasingly r-selected. The instinct most primates have to empathize with and protect children is less powerful among the rich, who do not need to participate in community parenting in order to pass on their genes. Plainly, the rich do not feel remotely bound by the moral norms that ordinarily deter pedophilia; instead, they think they can act with impunity. And this is particularly true of the norms that have historically acted as a check on their sexual urges.
This may seem like an unusually elaborate explanation for a relatively simple phenomena, but it has several advantages. First, it explains much more than the predilection of the rich towards pedophilia: it explains their attitudes towards sex, towards society, and in particular their interest in eugenics. Second, it provides a material explanation for this cluster of behaviors instead of explaining them with vague language about how the rich are evil. The logic of the k-r tradeoff is an inescapable feature of organic sexually reproducing life, and the movement of humans towards an r-selected strategy would have all kinds of predictable consequences.
Whether this emergence of an r-selected ruling class has long-term evolutionary consequences is another matter. Elon Musk may have aspirations of leaving his mark on the human genome, but his odds are extremely low; even Khan, who had many more children than Musk ever will, and in a world with a much smaller population, barely managed to leave his DNA signature in .5% of modern Eurasians. Even if every Silicon Valley oligarch matched Khan’s promiscuity, any impact they made in the gene pool would be easily washed out in a global population of 8 billion.
Still, even if it doesn’t have much of an effect on human evolution, the movement towards an r-selected reproductive strategy among our ruling class could have horrific short-term consequences. For Genghis Khan, this mean mass rape. For our billionaires, this seems to have meant large scale human trafficking. Moving forward, this is likely to mean social policy increasingly informed by genetics — with the ultimate superiority of our ruling class taken for granted.
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