What Biology Can Teach Us About History

Stephen H. Balch’s Naturalizing History: A Biocultural Theory of Human Progress (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2026) is a grand synthesis of biology and history that articulates many of the concerns of the generation of academics that revolted, in the 1980s and afterward, against the academy’s politicization and loss of rigor. Balch, former president of the National Association of Scholars (NAS, for whom I work), unites the animal and the human worlds in a common “meta-evolutionary” concern with learning—from the bacteria’s where is that nutrient? to price as information. He then applies this framework to analyze and to explain topics that have been of particular concern to academic reformers: dysfunctional modernity (“phenocracy”), the role of religion, the Scientific Revolution, and the free market. Naturalizing History not only aims to make its arguments, but also to re-naturalize within history ambitious work that is truly interdisciplinary—to summon historians once more, in line with their meta-evolutionary calling, To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Balch’s priority is to unite animal and human nature in a common framework—the desire to learn, and the meta-evolutionary desire to lessen learning’s costs. This translates, at least on Earth if not into the bleak infinitudes of space, to a sustained trend toward increased complexity, both animal and societal, and the defiance of entropy. There are delightful parallels: animal carnivores and human “hive states,” the extractive rule of warriors, both of which in their domains ultimately function to increase “ecological” complexity. Balch retains an awareness of what distinguishes the animal from the human, the realm of “Gaia” from the realm of “Urania,” but he sees them as deeply akin.

Within this broader parallel, Balch particularly focuses upon “inclusive fitness” as an organizing principle. “Inclusive fitness” allows for a leaven of altruism, enlightened self-interest—but also allows for sobriety that virtue will ever entirely supplant self-interest. “Inclusive fitness” allows Balch to create a biocultural interpretive framework that allows for sustained improvement in the animal and human condition—but assuredly does not take such improvement as an inevitability, a telos. Nature is sufficiently red in tooth and claw that a millennium of human learning might fall apart—and a billion years of life might still come up short, faced with a Sweet Meteor of Death.

Look far enough back in intellectual history and Balch’s unification of nature and history is a recapitulation of older theories. The Stoics saw natural human harmony with the cosmos leading to equally natural improvement in human nature; later theologians gave this harmony and natural improvement a Christian spin; and, after Machiavelli’s gleeful amoralization of human nature, Enlightenment theorists of the stages of social progression tied the self-interest of sociability to natural social progress and, in its final stages, to the development of liberty and the arts. The biological theorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries essentially applied these post-Machiavellian theories of human nature to help them understand the animal world; when I earlier described altruism as enlightened self-interest, that is also to say that modern biological theory is very much the child of the historical-anthropological conceptions of Enlightenment philosophers. Biologists have forgotten how much of their thought was originally drawn from Machiavelli and the Stoics; but that source makes it natural enough to align biology and history. Biology has acquired enough authority that theories of human nature now seek to ground themselves upon animal nature—but the measure of man was the first yardstick of beasts.

That said, it is good to provide a proper grounding for theories of human nature built upon biology. “Inclusive fitness” provides a flexible middle ground in biology that allows for ideals and interests to co-exist, neither erasing the other. This is an attractive stance by which to consider what human nature is, fixed (as ever) ‘twixt beast and angel, and hence what human action, soberly aware of humanity’s enduring character, should be. As well as attractive, this seems to be a true stance, as concerns human beings. As for animals, I am no biologist, and hence incapable of evaluating the professional literature on inclusive fitness. Historians engaged in biocultural theories doubtless should be aware that science is frequently unsettled and be prepared to update their syntheses.

Balch proposes a variety of ways that aspects of human history can fit into the meta-evolutionary framework of homo discens, man the learner. I find these persuasive—but then, I share many of Balch’s intellectual coordinates. What he politely dissects as “phenocratic” behavior, “subordination of genetic fitness to the satisfaction of human desires considered ends-in-themselves” (p. 178), is that repellent modernity whose least obnoxious feature is that it is dysgenic, and which I am predisposed to dislike. I believe Balch has done an excellent job integrating and explaining many aspects of human history within his biocultural framework, but the more reliable tribute would be from (say) a phenocrat reluctantly agreeing that Balch has a point.

Balch’s foci, including his three case studies, illustrate what he considers important in human history—religion and constitutional government, the Scientific Revolution, and the free market. Balch’s interests and biocultural framework foreground the interests and the outlook of a conservative liberal, a secular man opposed to leftist utopianism but distinct in his beliefs from the verities of transcendent faith. Balch’s consideration of how religion might be evolutionarily useful, from a framework of inclusive fitness, is ultimately a Machiavellian analysis; to justify faith by its utility is a desiccating service. Balch’s interests dovetail with those of a professor moderately Whiggish or Tory in his sympathies; his biocultural analysis may to some extent draw upon these sympathies.

Balch’s focus on learning, on a meta-evolutionary drive toward more efficient information processing, gives me the most pause in his book. This may be true, but, as he suggests, this also proffers the possibility of humanity supplanted by Artificial Intelligence, as a natural progression. Balch disclaims normative structure in his biocultural analysis—but there is a distinct implication that One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right. Balch’s biocultural analysis puts the emphasis on discens rather than on homo; there is cause to worry about the consequences of that slippage.

But all this is to say that Balch succeeds splendidly at what he aims at—to provoke new thought by means of an innovative intellectual synthesis. His book is indeed a model for broad-ranging intellectual synthesis. Readers indeed will be provoked to new thought—and, ideally, to attempts to emulate Balch’s work. In the best of worlds, Balchian syntheses will be a genre with enduring memetic success.

David Randall is Director of Communications at the National Association of Scholars.