Susan McKinnon's Neo-Liberal Genetics: The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2005) is a slim, provocative pamphlet that reads less like an artifact than a diagnosis of an enduring biological alibi.
A cultural anthropologist specializing in kinship studies, now professor emerita at the University of Virginia, McKinnon was writing as the academic field of evolutionary psychology became a wildly popular science, propelled by bestselling authors like Steven Pinker and a stream of headline-friendly “discoveries” about mate preferences, parental investment, and other affirmations of “family values.” Her core claim, echoed by a long line of feminist and cultural critics, was that evolutionary psychology laundered a specific, historically contingent, and reactionary vision of gender and family through the register of natural science, ignoring the entirety of the historical and ethnographic record that showed enormous cross-cultural variation in kinship arrangements. Combining Victorian sexual morality with neoliberal economic thought, packaged together as a Darwinian claim, she showed how Pinker & Co’s claims of a universal human nature were a barely disguised assemblage of ideas drawn from late-twentieth century capitalism: rational choice theory, market behaviors, a gendered world of production. “Neo-liberal genetics” was her apt coinage, your evolutionary genetic inheritance that turns you into a self-optimizing rational actor with an assigned sex role — and preferences. (More recently, Quinn Slobodian and others have come to insist on how one of the founders of neo-liberalism, Friedrich Hayek, and his “mutant” followers themselves derived their positions from evolutionary theory).
McKinnon doesn’t just denounce the ideology; she shows how the whole complex runs on a baseless rhetorical claim. The field of evolutionary psychology was born of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975); it was immediately dismantled by Marshall Sahlins, founder of Prickly Paradigm Press, in his Use and Abuse of Biology (1975). Wilson’s own colleagues, including Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, also denounced the “science” as just-so stories that justified the status quo on a genetic basis. Under attack, the field mutated, taking refuge in theories of the brain shaped by Pleistocene selection processes, but it continued to smuggle a historically specific and culturally parochial formation – the “nuclear family” – into prehistory, to declare it an “evolutionary adaptation,” then to “discover” its universal existence. This wasn’t a theory to be falsified, since ethnographic counter-evidence from just about every other culture could easily refute it, but a hypothesis that achieved its validity through a simple act of recognition. Aha! It’s in our genes. I knew it all along.
McKinnon made mincemeat of the arguments about jealousy and mate selection through judicious citations from the ethnographic record, but she also showed how “family values” were given a biological alibi that drew on received ideas about gender, markets, and competition. But what happened since? On the one hand, the critics scored points, and the triumphalism of the academic field shrank and shifted, absorbed into dark corners of anthropology departments as “behavioral ecology” and “cognitive evolutionary theory.” On the other hand, the theory scaled into a broader public set of claims about sex roles, gender, and human nature that have most recently become politicized in the “manosphere” and in pronatalist discourse.
The manosphere’s own idiom is a largely incoherent set of claims from evolutionary psychology. “Red pill” communities, borrowing the term from The Matrix, sort men into an “alpha” and “beta” hierarchy while insisting women are “hardwired” for hypergamy – a preference for high-status mates – a Darwinian logic lifted wholesale, if crudely, from academic “experts.” A 2025 study in Evolutionary Human Sciences catalogued over a hundred distinct “just-so stories” circulating in these communities – most concerning sex differences, fewer than four in ten flagged even by their own proponents as speculative – and found evolutionary psychologists themselves increasingly publishing rebuttals disowning the appropriation of their field.
Natalist discourse, too, draws on origin stories about the Pleistocene, untestable by design, recruited to explain why things must stay exactly as they are – or change to include more children, at least of the right color. Neo-liberal genetics has gone mainstream: look no further than the tech-right natalist Elon Musk and his talk of embryo selection and “good quality children.” That’s the idiom predicted by McKinnon: fertility and embryos as a portfolio to be optimized. McKinnon saw two decades ago how neo-liberal genetics glossed an internal split between proponents of market rationality and moral tradition: today, that same split – between techno-engineers and religious fanatics – cohabits the latest iteration of a discursive formation promoting fertility, and limiting women’s choices, founded on claims about “human nature” and evolutionary adaptation.
McKinnon’s framework also allows us to make sense of genomics, both the “respectable” science and the kind sold directly to consumers. On the scientific side, genome-wide association studies of educational attainment and other “polygenic scores” have revived, with better statistics, exactly the ambition evolutionary psychology once claimed for the Pleistocene brain: a genetic account of who ends up where in the social order. Kathryn Paige Harden’s The Genetic Lottery (2021) argues that genetic influence on outcomes like schooling is real but no different, at least morally, from any other form of luck. Her critics note that her “polygenic index” for educational attainment was built almost entirely from White European-ancestry samples and barely explains more variance than household income already does. On the consumer side, the popularization is even more reductionist. Direct-to-consumer firms from 23andMe (now bankrupt) and other at-home consumer testing companies spent two decades teaching ordinary people to read their own saliva as a horoscope of dispositions – genetic astrology, say the critics. The embryo-selection industry has taken the next step, charging prospective parents tens of thousands of dollars to rank IVF embryos by predicted IQ, height, and disease risk. This is neo-liberal genetics made literal: the family not just described in the language of markets and portfolios, but realized in practice, with an embryo conceived as an asset to be optimized before birth. McKinnon’s rhetorical description has become a shopping cart.
McKinnon’s approach – and that of a generation of critics ever since – insists that every time we read claims about the Darwinian foundations of “human nature,” we should reach for our cultural guns. She shows us how ideology gets dressed up in a scientific suit, how “bad science” persists in academic departments and in the public sphere. The naturalizing, reductionist, pseudo-scientific vocabulary about which she warned us two decades ago is today serving different agendas, not the “family values” of the 1990s but the pronatalism and manosphere discourse so essential to the Trumpian project. For these reasons alone, Neo-Liberal Genetics continues to be essential reading.
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