When the World Cup comes to Seattle in June, the globe is going to get to see that something around here is really wrong.
Almost as soon as socialist mayor Katie Wilson took office in January, the graffiti in our city seemed to bloom further, as if responding to an organic call to greater chaos and disorder. The horrid graffiti is just one index of a seeming madness that has overtaken us. The amount of human waste in the streets is another.
The situation was bad under the previous mayor, Bruce Harrell, but it’s worse now. Harrell was not on a mission to chase iconic Seattle businesses, and the affluent taxpayers that go with them, out of the area.
Wilson looks to be on such a mission, and it worked with Starbucks, which is shifting executive operations to Tennessee. As the company’s former CEO, Howard Schultz, warns in The Wall Street Journal, “Seattle Turns Hostile to the Great Businesses It Made.”
Asked at a community forum what she thinks about the flight of the wealthy, faced with the state’s newly passed so-called “millionaires’ tax,” Mayor Wilson waved and giggled and said, “Like, bye!” The audience, presumably not all millionaires, applauded, apparently not realizing that when the millionaires have fled, they will be the ones expected to make up the tax revenue deficit.
Our region has changed dramatically under the influence of such radicalism. More than a quarter century ago, when I was visiting and thinking of moving here from New York, friends in a Seattle suburb proudly drove me around downtown to show off the place. It was clean, safe, with minimal graffiti.
Today, if you were trying to persuade anyone to move to the Seattle area, the last thing you would do is show him around Seattle. The downtown commercial core, once bustling and lovely, is a ghost town, with the best-known and most-loved businesses having moved out, taking the jobs with them. The streets are haunted by the mentally ill and drug-addled homeless, like zombies from the movies, abandoned in tents lining the freeway.
What are people around here thinking? What is the mayor thinking? Seattle keeps diving downward under the influence of analyzing social problems through a cracked lens. Katie Wilson is a socialist, but her lens may have its origins not in socialism but in science. Specifically, evolutionary science.
When she was elected, a Discovery Institute colleague of mine noted something of interest. Katie’s father is David Sloan Wilson, an esteemed evolutionary biologist at Binghamton University whose work Discovery Institute scholars have considered and criticized in the past. Was there any connection between Katie’s thinking and her father’s?
There is, and another evolutionary biologist, Bret Weinstein, has put his finger on it. On a podcast with his wife, Heather Heying, he noted that Professor Wilson is best known as a proponent of group selection, a variation of evolutionary theory that has been around since the 1960s.
Conventionally, Darwinian evolution sees individual organisms, in competition with each other, as the focus of natural selection. In this view, individuals with favorable genetic variations outcompete other individuals, and so their genetic contribution to the population is “selected” over others.
In Darwinism, which excludes intelligent design, this is supposed to promote the gradual buildup of biological sophistication and complexity, as organisms scale the evolutionary tree. Unguided evolution alone is almost certainly not capable of such feats, but that’s not the point here.
Under group selection, as advocated by David Sloan Wilson, it’s not competing individuals but community altruism that is the focus of selection. Group survival is the winning ticket. Altruistic populations, with individuals looking out for each other, are at the crucial advantage. Dr. Weinstein noted something that’s obvious once it’s been pointed out: the altruistic model is essentially socialism.
It’s also a very unrealistic way of understanding behavior. In the real world, as in the Communist experiment of the Soviet Union, tender feelings for your fellow citizens are unreliable. The cheaters, the abusers of the system, are usually the only ones to get ahead, while the hard-working, honest, and industrious are penalized. Such a system is unsustainable, leading to failed societies.
Socialism is the flip side of a faulty evolutionary theory. “It is interesting,” says Weinstein, “to watch the academic version of this misunderstanding flow down a lineage to the now mayor of Seattle.” Yes, you can chase out the businesses and the wealthy, and let the drug zombies rule the street. The result will not be a socialist utopia, but a nightmare.
It’s not the first time that evolutionary science has been abused this way. As Dr. Heying points out, racist and eugenic pseudoscience was another, now discredited example.
Socialist pseudoscience has no better prospects in the long run. The Soviet Union floundered and collapsed after a 69-year experiment. Seattle’s experiment is failing. David Sloan Wilson’s daughter is the latest evidence of that.
David Klinghoffer is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute in Seattle and the author most recently of "Plato's Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome."