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On November 12 2016, the alternative medicine website-turned-conspiracy-hub Natural News published a pseudo-scientific rant by editor and founder Mike Adams (aka the Health Ranger) arguing and celebrating the fact that liberal millennials (whom he calls crybully snowflakes) are not biologically fit and therefore not likely to survive the next natural selection event: For anyone wondering what a natural selection event might be, this is what Adams suggested: Adams’ piece, titled TRIGGER WARNING: Why precious college snowflakes will eliminate themselves from the human gene pool at the next natural selection event, is flawed for myriad reasons, most notably its repeated use of strawman arguments and conspicuous lack of citable evidence. In this article, however, we will dissect the Health Ranger’s argument strictly based on his flawed understanding of natural selection. To begin with, here is how he describes the characteristics of the two populations whose biological fitness he claims to be comparing: Discounting the aggressively broad generalizations of both sides, we'll turn to the science supposedly expressed here. What follows is Adams’ understanding of natural selection: In his view of natural selection, which, we will grant, is close to (but falls short of) being accurate, the process results in millennial snowflake liberals who are less fit because they don’t possess the following traits that are universal across the natural world: The issue, though, is that these three traits are far from universal in the natural world. On his first point, we can obviously agree with Adams that competition is a key part of natural selection. But do populations of organisms feature ruthless competition between members? No. In what could easily be branded as an example of the natural world's version of the liberal welfare state, skilled vampire bat predators will give nourishment, unreciprocated, to those less able to feed themselves. A 2013 paper published by Proceedings of the Royal Society documented this behavior over a two-year period, finding that donors who offered the food to the recipients without prompting, and that this action occurred independent of kinship. The phenomenon is important, the authors argue, because: Adams' second point about the need to be adaptive to one’s environment results from a flawed reading of Darwin. When proposing his theory of natural selection, Adams repeatedly suggests: Adaptations are, of course, a big part of natural selection, but what Darwin was referring to in this case were genetically determined features of an organism, set at birth, that would give it a reproductive advantage — not the specific characteristic adaptability to rapidly changing environments, as Darwin stated in On the Origin of Species: Adams' third point is a common rallying cry among those who argue that a patriarchal society is the only social structure existing in the natural world. The problem, of course, is that there are myriad animals, including primates, that live in female-dominant social structures all around the natural world. A small selection of those animals are listed in a 2008 study published in the journal Animal Behavior: Outside of those primary claims, Adams make some even more inflammatory, and equally illogical, scientific claims. For example, he believes that liberal female college students don’t need to be selective in their choice of mates because of their easy access to abortions: If anything, the opposite is true. Abortion rates and unplanned pregnancies have been declining since the Reagan administration of the 1980s, a fact researchers attribute to contraception, something college students generally have better access to than the population at large. This would put females explicitly in charge of whom they would want to have procreative sex with, making them (from an evolutionary standpoint) more selective. Another specious notion is the concept of a natural selection event. This is not a thing. Natural selection happens all the time, a point explicitly and poetically made by Darwin: The final and perhaps most alarming issue with Adams’ conception of natural selection is his omission of the fact that any trait selected for has to be heritable, which means it is controlled by genetics and is able to be passed on through reproduction. While there there is some evidence from studies that genetic differences can be found between people of different ideological persuasions, these studies are limited in their ability to tell us much about what specific aspects of ideology are hereditary. A 2012 review article on this topic by Peter K. Hatemi and Rose McDermott published in Trends in Genetics concluded that genetics may account for a significant portion of political persuasion, but that the manner in which genetics controlled specific issues was not consistent (i.e., some issues appeared to be more genetically determined than others) and played a much smaller role in actually determining political party affiliation. The study also pushed back against the simplistic notion that there is a liberal gene and a conservative gene: For Adams’ argument to work, he would have to find evidence that all or most of the traits he ascribes to the snowflakes and the conservatives are hereditary. It is unlikely that he would be able to find studies addressing the genetic basis of qualities like being pathetic and pussified, metrosexual, having an everybody's a winner or real-world mentality, or having the desire for feel good social conformity. Arguably, Adams actually delves into the discredited and archaic theory of Lamarckism, which suggests that an organism can pass on characteristics that it has acquired during its lifetime to its offspring when he claims that parents inflicting liberal ideals upon their offspring will doom their genetic line: Sure, Adams’ piece is meant to be political and is potentially even a poorly-executed attempt at satire (though his followers probably don’t see it that way), but it was published on a site that bills itself as a science-based natural health advocacy organization, and it is riddled with scientific errors in an effort to make a largely inflammatory (if not incoherent) point. The larger fallacy that Adams is committing is the serious problem: abusing scientific information to convince people that the natural world supports your version of humanity and that people who don’t fit that view are, as Adams put it, little more than aberrations of nature.
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