I read with concern a recent opinion column published in El Mercurio that, drawing on arguments from genetics and evolutionary social scientists, concluded that progressive ideas aimed at reducing inequalities would be contrary to progress.
This is not the first time that attempts have been made to explain politics through the lens of biology. Nor is it the first time that a particular social organization has been presented as an inevitable consequence of our nature.
History shows that this path is dangerous.
From Darwin to contemporary research in neuroscience and evolutionary biology, the evidence shows that cooperation has been a fundamental adaptive advantage for our species. Trust, empathy, solidarity, and the ability to act collectively account for much of our evolutionary success. Human survival and progress cannot be understood without them.
However, the temptation to use biological arguments to justify certain political positions resurfaces periodically. The logic seems simple: if a behavior has a genetic basis, then it must be natural, inevitable, and legitimate.
But just because something exists in our nature does not mean it should become a rule for organizing society. Human beings are also capable of violence, aggression, selfishness, and domination. No one would propose turning these behaviors into political principles simply because they exist.
Civilization advances precisely when we are able to build institutions, laws, and agreements that allow us to live better than what our most basic impulses dictate. Democracy, human rights, equality before the law, and the rule of law are expressions of that collective effort.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that one of the defining features of totalitarianism is the transformation of supposed laws of nature into political laws. When a biological characteristic comes to define who has more rights, who deserves more opportunities, or which political project is legitimate, we leave the realm of democracy and enter that of ideologies that seek to govern in the name of a higher truth.
History is full of tragedies built on this logic. European colonialism was justified by appealing to supposed racial differences. White supremacist movements continue to assert the genetic superiority of some people over others. Nazism took this logic to its ultimate conclusion by turning a biological fiction into state policy, leading to one of the greatest genocides in history.
Of course, no one today espouses such barbarities. But ideas do not always reappear with the same faces or the same words. They begin by establishing seemingly reasonable assumptions: that certain inequalities are natural, inevitable, or even beneficial.
The differences between progressives, liberals, conservatives, and social democrats must be debated in the realm of ideas, values, evidence, and results—not in DNA.
Democracy rests precisely on the conviction that no person, social group, or political movement possesses a biological superiority that grants it more rights than others. To forget that lesson is to fall, once again, into the old trap of genetics.