If You Live Near Other People, You're Probably a Democrat.

  > Or am I misinterpreting something here?

Conservationism has historically been associated with a strong central government, under the belief that a selected group of suitable people are better at governing than the general population. The definition of "suitable" has changed throughout the years: typical examples are "King chosen by divine right" or "general with enough troops to seize the capital".

Liberals have emphasized the idea that the general population should have a loud voice in their own future. In an ideal liberal society, people lead their own lives according to their own desires, with decisions affecting the entire group made by group consensus. Authority figures would be temporarily elected by consensus to lead the group during times of danger, and would step down once things are back to normal.

Both extremes have been tried during various times in history, and there's a lot of evidence that we don't yet know how to make either one work. Purely conservative societies tend to degrade into dictatorships when the wrong leader comes to power, while purely liberal societies fall apart when they grow past the size of a small town.

Major modern nations are a compromise between both conditions. A liberal nation might have a leader with weaker powers elected by direct vote from every adult. A conservative nation might have a leader with strong powers, elected by successful businessmen or the aristocracy. Smaller societies tend to be more extreme than large ones, with successful examples of both totalitarianism and communism existing in small towns throughout the world.

Among liberals, one of the popular ideas is that everyone should have some basic quality of life. This can be accomplished either through government (e.g. taxing according to earnings and then distributing according to need) or non-government (e.g. church or charities) mechanisms. Strong liberals prefer the first because it can be more fair and efficient, whereas more moderate liberals prefer the latter because it gives the donor more choice over who receives help.

Personally, I lean more towards the liberal side because I feel there is significant evidence that when a program needs to cover a large majority (say 90+%) of the population, letting it be run by the government will make it more effective and less costly than letting it be run by a corporation.

Firstly, he doesn't actually define r/K selection theory and then map it onto politics by showing an actual mapping. He simply defines r-selection according to his disfavored strawman of "liberalism" and K-selection according to his favored strawman of "conservatism".

"The theory was popular in the 1970s and 1980s when it was used as a heuristic device, but lost importance in the early 1990s as it was criticized by several empirical studies."[1] Emphasis mine. Furthermore: if we actually try to make a mapping, we find exactly the reverse of what your blogger describes: it's the highly-educated, urban-dwelling, blue-state "liberals" (as alluded to in the Atlantic article) who are actually observed to have fewer children and invest more in each child, while the less-educated, rural-dwelling, red-state "conservatives" produce more children with less investment in each.

It's really, really amazing just how wrong your blogger has managed to get his ecology, how completely backwards. For one thing, if we look at Wikipedia, we find that human beings simply are not considered an r-strategist species at all, at least not modern humans.

But hey, let's go ahead and extend the analogy, because I'm feeling particularly evil today and thus see no reason not to map between evolutionary/ecological behaviorism and actual moral philosophy for real people as if such a thing isn't outright blasphemous to the very concept of human dignity. An r-strategist population is held in check from becoming K-selected by... what? Well, some form of external population culling, something that kills off the less-fit in large numbers and thus ensures the population as a whole has no need to evolve more complex behaviors or lifestyles.

What, in conservative politics, is the culling agent? Well, capitalism. It's an r-strategist economic system: produce lots of low-human-capital proletarians and then just work them until they either drop dead or manage to reproduce.

What, in left-wing politics, follows K-selection strategies? Well, the entire emphasis on social investment in individual lives, actually.

And yet half the population feigns moral offense at the notion that human beings, a K-selected species in the first place, should shift further in the direction of K-strategizing by going from capitalism to socialism! And in the face of a slow-motion planetary-level ecological collapse driven by human overpopulation in the most conservative, r-strategist societies, nonetheless!

[1] -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_theory

How much of the above is at all accurate or precise? Well, probably not very much, but more than that godawful "Anonymous Conservative" blog entry, most likely. Do I care? Not entirely, the point was more to rant and to show that you can easily argue either "side" of the so-called political "spectrum" (which is actually far more complex than "liberal versus conservative", a dichotomy produced entirely by the idiocy of First Past the Post voting systems) based on any given ecological/evolutionary theory, because real scientific theories are not moral or ethical arguments!