So I recently (last week) had an opinion piece published in Real Clear Policy titled "The Atavism of Bernie Sanders." In the piece, I take a view of Senator Sanders' policies and immense popularity from the side of evolutionary biology.
It's certainly a touchy subject, but it should not be controversial that our emotions and urges have evolutionary origins. As Edward O. Wilson's career testifies, though, it is very controversial, even on atheistic campuses, when one suggests that there is such a thing as human nature and that it can be investigated just like any other biological adaptation.
I quote the conclusion below:
A specter is still haunting commercial society. That specter is not socialism, but the people's romance. Bernie Sanders is now at the forefront of exploiting that bias in our emotions inherited from our distant ancestors. Our modern civilization cannot be expected to satisfy the primordial urges that spring from those instincts. Unlike the bands of our ancestors, it is the product of learned rules. If the people's romance were to triumph in politics, the operation of those abstract rules would be correspondingly subverted, and our lives impoverished.
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