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How do wokes/social constructionists/etc reconcile their views with the actual state of scientific knowledge or even basic logic? It seems clear to me that if one accepts genetics and evolutionary principles, it necessarily implies that 1: humans have a nature that is determined in large part by our genetics and 2: humans and human societies undergo selection on both an individual and group level. We've known for a long time now that intelligence, mental health and a whole bunch of other traits relating to ability and personality are very heavily influenced by genetics, and it's perfectly logical this could lead to differences in outcomes on an individual as well as population level.
However this gets dismissed away with a lot of spurious reasoning (which is usually presented with a huge amount of nose-thumbing and "Scientists say..." type wording in order to scare the reader into not questioning it). As an example, the whole "races can't be easily delineated, there's no gene specific to any race, and there's more variation within races than between them" argument seems to be a poor attempt at deflection and simply doesn't hold up as a method of dismissing population-level differences. Just because races can't be easily delineated does not mean that race is a "social construct" - race might not be discrete, but it is a real physical entity with roots in biology and just because there's no clear dividing lines which can be drawn doesn't exclude the fact that if you do decide to draw these lines it's entirely possible you'd find differences which exist. None of what's said is inconsistent with the idea of innate variations in intelligence and ability that roughly correlate with observable phenotypic traits. All it takes is for the frequency of specific alleles which code for these traits to be unequally distributed, and you'll find aggregate differences. But the way it's presented exists to mislead people into thinking that the continuum-like nature of genetic differences means that these differences or even the concept of race itself as a biological entity is not something that one should even entertain.
There is also another level to this denial of evolutionary principles that extends far beyond genetics, however. Many of these people also seem to think that social norms themselves are arbitrary vagaries of specific historical circumstances, rather than being adaptive practices which were selected for through the process of survival-of-the-fittest. This view fails to account for many commonalities among civilisations, one of the clear ones being religion (one of the favourite woke whipping horses out there). Not only is religion completely ubiquitous in pre-modern society, you can generally see a shift from animist-type religions in tribal societies to the more developed and organised forms of religion mostly predominant in societies that achieve "civilisation" status. This clearly seems to suggest that religious dictates don't simply arbitrarily drop out of the sky - it indicates that some form of selection was occurring and that societies that adopted certain religions had an advantage. Even more than this, these "successful" religions that are common in civilisations share quite a few similarities in their dictates - selflessness, self-discipline, abstinence, etc.
I'm no religious nut - I'm quite atheist, but religion is a social technology that exists so that large-scale societies can remain cohesive and retain a shared moral foundation, and I would call it a good thing overall (and yes, my perspective often pisses off both religious people and atheists). However this is never properly engaged with by the orthodoxy outside of "yeah people facing hardship make up bullshit to make sense of the world, it's got no validity or use outside of that". Such stock explanations that handwave away traditional social norms (at least, those which contradict the woke moral system and outlook) as being functionless at best and damaging at worst are painfully common, despite many of these social norms being absolutely everywhere up until recently.
Among the supposedly educated any discussion of these topics through these non-approved lenses tends to invoke accusations of "social Darwinism" with the implication that applying any kind of evolutionary logic to humans and human societies is invalid because it could be used to justify Bad Things. This is all consequentialist reasoning which has no bearing on the truth of the claim itself, and lumping in all kinds of belief systems under the same category is a very clear composition fallacy which is clearly done to tar every single idea contained within its bounds with the same brush.
More than this, despite these people being very intent on portraying themselves as secular, scientific people, their viewpoints clearly are in conflict with any kind of scientific understanding and come off to me as being borderline superstitious. In order to strongly believe that insights from genetics and evolution can't be applied to human behaviour and that humans do not come programmed with specific predispositions that depend on what you've inherited, you have to believe in metaphysical, dualist ideas of the mind which are essentially detached from anything physical that could be affected by genetics. Once you adopt a view of the human mind as a physical entity the shape of which is determined by the specifications of genetic instructions, it opens up that whole Darwinian can of worms and everything that stems from it, and many wokes simply do not want to acknowledge the possibility that it could have any amount of validity. Unless they're able to maintain an absolutely unreal amount of cognitive dissonance, I'm unsure how their ideas can be anything but superstitious.
It's even worse when it comes to their idea of social norms as something that just drop out of the sky and persist and propagate over the long term regardless of the adaptiveness of these norms, since there is clearly nothing controversial about the idea that societies compete against each other, and this will tend to select for those norms that promote functioning (which is why you find common threads). But you still come across this type of knee-jerk denial nevertheless. Regardless of how well-read they may be, their reasoning remains fundamentally sloppy, and I'm unsure how they manage to square this circle.
I think I agree that religion can offer group selection benefits to a society and that this likely has been relevant in history.
Some of it also may have just been by chance as well, humans like a good story and maybe some of these religions are just very successful memes that do a good job at lighting up our neurons in a way that reproduces itself well. We should be careful to not fully confuse evolutionary fitness on the memetic landscape with fitness on the landscape of intergroup competition.
But it’s definitely true that it’s a useful lens. How else do we explain for example that once a man came out of a cave with a prophetic vision, and within one generation a group of desert nomads have conquered half of the known world, and that the territory they originally conquered still maintains their religion and often too their language some 1500 years later. That was a highly successful cultural meme which was the main driver leading a backwater ethnic group to huge social and linguistic power.
But if we accept this conclusion then we can also argue that secular societies are incredibly evolutionarily fit in the landscape of the modern world. And I believe this to be true. The intergroup competitive landscape is not what it was in the pre-modern world. If a modern secular country were to become deeply religious, there may be consequences in the level of their decision making which puts them at a disadvantage relative to other countries. Even if you have trouble accepting that conclusion, if we’re working from the thesis that a societies’ worldview determines evolutionary outcomes at the scale of the group, were confronted with the fact that it’s the secular countries which lead the world and that “your society having one religion they all believe” is currently inversely correlated with measures of human development, as well as with geopolitical power.
If we’re using an evolutionary lens to explain these things (which I think is quite useful and a fun way to look at history), we might also acknowledge that sometimes the evolutionary landscape itself shifts and favors certain adaptations over others. I’m waiting for any non-diverse mono-religious society to rise to global prominence to prove this thesis wrong, but I have trouble even imagining such a thing occurring in the modern world. I just don’t think it’s one of the favored adaptations for our current landscape.
I wouldn't get so ahead of ourselves. Societies have only been secular for the last 60 years or so - depending on how you define it, was 1950s American society (not just government) truly 'secular'? - while religious societies have been around since, well, since the dawn of history. The contemporary secular society is really a flash in the pan compared to the entirely of human history. Yes, I know that you could make some argument that the speed of history is accelerating or whatever, but it's still important to consider that the secular society is still in relative infancy. Any negative consequences of mass but societal changes will usually have some lag time. Maybe the broad decline we're seeing across the West is in part a consequence of the secularisation of society.
In addition to this, it also may be the case that widespread secularism in the first place is a consequence of the removal of environmental/selection pressures. In evolution, there's an idea that once selection pressures are removed, this no longer creates pressure that maintains the traits that were previously adaptive, leading to decay of traits down to the level that selection is operating. Most mutations degrade functioning instead of promoting it, and without selection pressures to weed out these destructive mutations they can accumulate and cause phenotypic loss.
Perhaps there has been a version of this occurring on the social level in that the technological advances in the West have led to relaxed selection pressure on these societies and their norms. It's an idea I've been playing with for a while that abundance and lack of competition has allowed for the fostering of historically unique social practices which can emerge only under a condition of relaxed selection. In other words, only the societies that don't have much to worry about and possess such a decisive advantage that few others can realistically compete with them can actually sustain a secular society (and not without creating problems of internal strife in the process).
This reconciles pretty well with the following observations that 1: secularism is a very recent and localised phenomenon whereas religion was absolutely ubiquitous for the vast majority of human history (and the more organised, moralising religions developed independently many times), 2: evidence exists to suggest that religion has pro-social effects, 3: the key scientific and technological advances that catapulted Western societies into being a world power were made long before they were secular, and 4: the adoption of secularism seems to correlate with the "broad decline" you've mentioned.
Could I have a definition of religion here? I think I could agree with some and disagree with others.
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