Spiteful Mutants

The Enemy Is ... Us?

This is the introduction to Edward Dutton’s book Spiteful Mutants: Evolution, Sexuality, Politics, and Religion in the 21st Century.

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The Zombie As Modern Myth

In the “cult classic” 28 Days Later (2002), we are thrown into an apocalyptic dystopia of the not-too-distant future.¹ In an opening scene, animal-rights protesters have broken into a Cambridge laboratory, intending to release a group of chimpanzees, which, according to them, are tortured victims of systemic oppression. These animals have, in fact, been infected with a highly-contagious and extremely dangerous new virus, which instills them with uncontrollable rage. As the breakout ensues, one of the chimps bites a female activist, and she promptly becomes a convulsing, murderous maniac. After jumping from chimp to human, the virus quickly spreads throughout the global population, turning millions into zombies who seek out non-infected humans to bite, and so create yet more savage automatons. The social order collapses. 

28 Days Later—directed by Danny Boyle and produced on a small budget—became a runaway success in Britain. Since then, it has remained a standard in the burgeoning “zombie” genre. The first example of such a film was produced in 1932, though the style became especially prominent in the wake of George Romero’s (1940-2017) Night of the Living Dead from 1968.² The story-lines are always very similar: a group of “normal” people, who have escaped infection, struggle to survive, avoid the hoards of the mindless, violent “living dead,” and rebuild some semblance of civilization. The zombie genre is so popular—and culturally salient—that it has generated numerous spoofs, such as the British comedy Shaun of the Dead (2004),³ and even real-world “zombie walks.” Hundreds of citizens will don gory makeup and tattered costumes and march—or rather lurch and moan—through city centers, usually as part of a “pub crawl” or in the name of some charitable cause.4

The idea of the zombie can be traced back to the voodoo religion of Haiti and, ultimately, to the religious beliefs of Benin, from which many African slaves hailed. The “zombie” of that tradition is a monster or evil spirit. According to one ethnographer, only “deviant” people are made into zombies. It is unclear how this developed into the idea of the malevolent “walking corpse,” but it has become so ubiquitous in Western popular culture that the zombie has been termed “the only modern myth.”⁴

Why should the zombie be so popular? One possibility is that, as with traditional fairy tales, the genre taps into something that we fear might be happening to us. It thus provides us with advice on how to negotiate this trauma, doing so by means of a story, such that we can better absorb the necessary information. Evolutionary psychologists, those who study the evolution of the human mind, generally concur that a vital component of fairy tales is “transmitting practical information on such adaptively important matters as resource acquisition, predator avoidance, and social interaction.”⁵Literature of this kind, as well as the oral tradition that precedes it, should be understood as an “information acquisition strategy.” “Little Red Riding Hood,” for instance, “packs a double emotional wallop by combining our evolved fear of being harmed by animals with our evolved fear of being harmed by strangers.”⁶ The child is better able to take in this crucial, adaptive information due to it being presented in the form of an escapist fantasy, with its assorted surreal elements. Children are better able to imbibe information—that is, better able to learn—if it is dispensed together with imagination-stimulating elements, rather than simply explained in a matter-of-fact way.⁷ Also, these stories have been vetted across generations to be maximally informative and engaging, meaning that they are likely to be very useful guides to life.⁸

In many ways, “myths” can be argued to be fairy tales for adults. Their evolutionary function can be understood as being to “validate and justify, conserve and safeguard the fundamental realities and values, customs and beliefs on which depend the stability and continuance of a given way of life,” as one anthropologist put it.⁹ Myths, in other words, are the distillations of centuries of experience, under conditions of Darwinian selection, on how best to act in certain situations, including those we most fear. One of those situations is, of course, being invaded by another group, such that most of your own group is killed and a small band of you, surrounded by enemies, are left to survive on your own. 

Zombie movies are eye-opening because they do not involve a foreign invasion. They are centered-around “intra-vasions,” as it were. The vast majority of your own people are “losing their minds”—destroying civilization, creating chaos and bloodshed, and making other people zombies, just like themselves. This kind of myth may well be particularly popular in the modern West, as we, on a gut level, fear that this is exactly what is happening. In George Romero’s famous series of films, the nature of zombification is ambiguous: no clear cause is given, and some characters speculate it might be the result of radiation from a NASA space probe, thus affecting everyone on Earth. Indeed, everyone who perishes in the apocalypse transforms into a zombie, whether they have been bitten or not. The only escape from the horror is death through massive cranial hemorrhaging (the “head shot”). Romero’s zombies are passive and sometimes peaceful. They return to familiar places—most notably a shopping mall in Dawn of the Dead (1978)—and rehearse their former lives by rote, in what has generally been taken as a critique of “mindless” consumer capitalism.¹⁰

As these films developed, and began to take hold of the public imagination, the zombies became faster, deadlier, more aggressive, and, seemingly, intentioned in their riotous violence. As one survivor will invariably relay to another at some point in these films: “Maybe they’re coming for us!” Zombies thus serve as a mask on traumatic—and often “politically incorrect”—fears infecting contemporary mass society. In Zach Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead (2002), which was produced shortly after the events of September 11th, the zombies were Islamic fanatics living in Western countries: the title sequence includes images of Muslims at prayer and “found footage” of journalists being overwhelmed while reporting from the Middle East.¹¹ The “normals” congregate at a shopping mall as their home base. Snyder’s remake seems less a critique of capitalism than a Bushera, right-wing call to “defend our way of life.” In World War Z (2013), zombies form massive pyramids of bodies to scale the border walls surrounding Israel, seemingly a metaphor for mass immigration, demographic displacement, and the Jewish state’s precarious position in the Middle East.  

Might our fears, which play out vividly on the silver screen, be justified? My answer is “yes,” and that is what this book is about. The “zombie” is attempting to destroy humanity and, more immediately, to annihilate its own group. This is, without any exaggeration whatsoever, what “Woke” culture writ large is trying to do. Many of you reading this book might be part of distantly connected bands of the uninfected, who want to see another day. 

In the words of the ill-fated lab attendant in 28 Days Later, “In order to cure”—or, we would add, just survive—“you must first understand.” And we do seek to understand. Countless books, videos, and articles have been published denouncing, ridiculing, or lamenting homosexuality, transsexuality, Wokeism and “cancel culture,” “Social Justice Warriors” (SJWs), and the rest. If you are unfamiliar with this literature, a quick internet search with these key words will unearth it. Few of these explorations have advanced our understanding of the phenomena. They fail to answer why these things are occurring; how they came about; and how and why the ideology surrounding them has become prominent and, indeed, dominant, in our world. Moreover, a full analysis of contemporary morals, mores, and trends—“décadence,” as it was once widely known—helps us understand how societies function, can thrive and expand, and be brought crashing down. 

We will thus treat highly controversial topics with rationality and objectivity—and also sympathy. Zombies are not “evil” on a personal level; they are, in fact, “innocent” of their crimes. They have been infected with mind viruses and mutations, and, outside their control, enlisted in a nihilistic campaign. Condemning leftists and sexual deviants might purge pent-up frustration and revulsion, but it also overlooks a key component of their mindset, at least in many cases. We must remember that the most extreme sexual deviant and most obnoxious SJW could genuinely believe that what they are engaging in is “right” and “moral”—and, in turn, that traditional mores and morals are “evil,” “harmful,” and “Fascist.” This has something to do with the political ideologies of “liberation” that have developed since the 18th century and the Age of Revolution. But Woke morals have emerged as a mutation—and thus evolution—of religion in the Western world. In other words, “I am Woke—and you must be Woke, too! The world must be Woke!” Cries of “Just leave me alone!” will be about as effective as requesting a diplomatic parlay with an advancing zombie mob. The power of belief is at the core of these ideologies, and they might be best understood as part of an evolution of Christianity itself. It is “heretical” Christianity, perhaps, but heresy has a tendency of becoming dogma. And in contradistinction to most heresies, Woke ideology aggressively disrupts identity and productive sexuality— and thus threatens the existence of humanity itself. 

So where is all this coming from? This book is based on a critical insight about the most existential of subjects: who lives, who dies, who passes on their genes, and who doesn’t. Once upon a time, the crucible of evolution was child mortality. Until 1800, the child mortality rate was approximately 50 percent; that is, every other baby didn’t make it into adulthood. Only the healthiest children— those with the lowest “mutational load,” that is, the fewest “mutant genes,” which made them less fit—survived childhood diseases and grew up to have a legacy.¹² Warfare also played a role. Groups would fight each other, and the group that was better able to triumph in these battles and invasions would be more likely to advance their culture. 

Following the Industrial Revolution, the world became immensely wealthier, healthier (in the sense of the development of inoculation and effective medicine), and more comfortable, and the harsh Darwinian selection pressures that characterized previous ages subsided. One of the most impactful consequences of this is the dramatic decrease in childhood mortality, which has fallen to below one percent in most advanced countries.¹³ Thus, millions of people with high levels of mutation, who would not have survived childhood in previous times, walk among us in the postmodern age. The brain is roughly 84 percent of the genome—that is, 84 percent of genes relate to brain development—rendering it a massive target for mutation. Thus, if you have high mutational load of the body, you will certainly have high mutational load of the mind. In fact, the two have been proven to be comorbid, that is, to go together.¹⁴ To the extent that they behave like zombies, destroying the genetic interests of their group, these people are what have been termed “Spiteful Mutants,”¹⁵ a concept we will dissect below. 

Due to the highly sociable nature of humanity, we are evolved to be around other genetically healthy people, who believe and espouse ideas that are fitness-elevating. Furthermore, humans are highly environmentally plastic. Less complex organisms are born ready to get on with life, following their instincts. More complex organisms, often evolved to a harsher but more predictable ecology, benefit from having a “childhood,” in which they are able to learn about their world and so be more likely to thrive. Accordingly, they are born helpless and relatively low in instinct. They learn adaptive behaviors from their parents and from their broader group. They are socialized into the most adaptive possible ways to behave; directed to follow a road map of life that will make them the most likely to survive, to develop optimally, and pass on their genes. In addition, this “road map” directs them to optimally thrive in the very specific and narrow environment to which their species, or sub-species, has long been adapted, and any instincts they have will be highly useful to them. Thus, if the environment rapidly changes, members of such a species may experience an “evolutionary mismatch,” resulting in their behaving in maladaptive ways. This will be mediated, in part, by the way in which such a mismatch induces a sense of dysphoria and depression. 

We are evolved to compete to survive, every day, and, suddenly, we don’t have to. Congruous with this, it has been found that “mortality salience”—the fear of danger, death, and deprivation—predicts a desire to have children, as we are evolved to ensure that our genes are passed on in the context of imminent destruction.¹⁶ Take away mortality salience, and we may heavily limit our fertility and even, maladaptively, reason ourselves into not having children at all. This is especially so as mortality salience elevates religiosity, something that in turn tends to promote natalism, and other adaptive traits, as “God’s will.”¹⁷ And if the nature of the group changes—such that it ceases to be composed overwhelmingly of genetically healthy people—

then it will cease to socialize its offspring properly, resulting in more and more of them adopting fitness-reducing behavior or even developing abnormal sexuality. 

Spiteful Mutants

We will see that when there are too many spiteful mutants in the population, their anti-adaptive ways of thinking can spread like a virus, unless we are extremely genetically healthy ourselves and thus resistant to them. Let us be clear by what we mean by “spiteful mutants.” They can be understood as manifesting in three inter-related forms, all of which we will explore in this book: leftist individualists (Machiavellians and Narcissists), psychopaths, and people with low IQ. As we will explore, leftist individualists, due to runaway individualism, eventually direct the group to destroy itself and not to place its children on the adaptive road map of life. Psychopaths and those with low IQ, who share psychopathic traits such as selfishness, help to create a dangerous, chaotic and disunited society which, as we will see, tends to be displaced by a more united one. These spiteful mutants, and especially the former type, heighten or bring about a series of partly genetically-mediated conditions which we will also explore such as homosexuality, gender dysphoria, pedophilia and sexual dysfunction.

Until recently, we were selected to be relatively grouporiented. This is because, under harsh selection pressures, the group that is highest in “positive ethnocentrism” (internal cooperation) and “negative ethnocentrism” (external aggression) tends to predominate, all else being equal, as computer models have shown. In these studies, ethnocentric groups always dominated the computer grid after many generations when they battled those that cooperate with nobody, cooperate with everybody, or only cooperate with members of another group.¹⁸

As pack animals, we need to be group-oriented, but we also need to climb the hierarchy of the group, because those with more resources tend to disproportionately pass on their genes by ensuring their own survival and the survival of more of their offspring. Thus, we were selected—and our group was selected—to have a balance between “binding foundations” and “individualizing foundations.” “Binding” means group-orientation: obedience to authority, in-group loyalty, and a regard for “sanctity,” that is, strong feelings of disgust to what is maladaptive. “Individualizing” refers to a regard for “equality” and “harm avoidance”: the individual is sacred and sovereign and nothing should constraint or (de-) form him, or prevent him from climbing to the top.¹⁹ We will explore these “foundations” in more detail later, but it’s important to understand that these are largely “instinctive” or “hard-wired;” they are not entirely the result of nurturing or education. Moreover, we were also under selection pressure for intelligence: the ability to solve cognitive problems. All else being equal, groups that are more intelligent will dominate those who are less intelligent, through superior weapons and planning. Under harsh conditions, people with high intelligence will attain higher social status, leading to more resources and more of their offspring surviving.²⁰ The richer half of early 17th-century English populations had as much as double the completed fertility as the poorer half.²¹ In that all these traits were being selected for, as was genetic physical and mental health, we would expect all of these traits to correlate. In other words, there is a general “fitness factor” that was being selected for. Intelligence correlates with genetic health,²² as does traditional religiosity, something which tends, itself, to be highly group oriented.²³  

We can understand all of these “instincts of the mind”—and deviations from them—in terms of the values that predominate among societies and individuals that compose them. Any deviation from this optimum can be expected to be associated with evidence of mutation. This can be expected to be the case with leftism, as this is characterized, as we will see, by extreme individualism. Leftists are concerned with the individualizing foundations of “equality” (as pulling everyone else down gets you relatively more power) and “harm avoidance” (as avoiding harm to all avoids harm to you).²⁴ Leftists signal their concern with these foundations because they always perceive themselves as lacking power, which makes them strive for ever more power. For individualists, there’s always someone out there more powerful than they are, real or imagined. Perceiving themselves as weak, they cannot risk overtly playing for status—by signaling their power—as they will fear being harmed. Thus, they must “disguise” their attempts to attain status, only playing for it covertly. “Virtue-signaling” is a covert competitive strategy. It is less likely to provoke direct conflict than signaling bravery or toughness, as it will make the signaler seem kind. This tactic has been noted to be more prominent among females than among males.²⁵

Individualism is also found with the most extreme elements of the Right. Such people have been shown to be high in psychopathic traits; in other words, they are extremely low in concern about harm-avoidance and are thus belligerent.²⁶Leftism gives us the evolutionary mismatch of insufficient concern with binding values; the extreme Right will take us in the other direction, to perpetual war, or at least to fantasies of “civil war” fought in the streets or various “days of reckoning” like we saw on January 6, 2021. In that the “Alt-Right” is currently “dissident,” psychopaths may also be attracted to it simply because they like danger and offending people. Libertarians—often classified as on the right— are concerned with no moral foundations at all; they are amoral, something also associated with psychopathology.²⁷

Finally, those who have low intelligence will be low in conformism to the dominant set of values, because low IQ, as we will see, correlates with the inability to understand what these are and the inability to force oneself to believe them.²⁸ Low intelligence also correlates with low trust, and thus skepticism of democracy and civic life, because less intelligent people are more likely to be conned, so it pays to trust nobody. It is further correlated with rigid, blackand-white thinking. The result is a tendency for those with low IQ to be attracted to extreme conservatism and conspiracy theories.²⁹ Such beliefs can also be attractive to those with depression and anxiety. These ailments can make people paranoid and make the world seem like an evil place with evil forces behind it. Conspiracy theories can make sense of a chaotic world. Famously, those with schizophrenic tendencies are prone accepting the most outlandish notions.³⁰Psychopathology, perhaps due to the paranoia involved, independently predicts belief in ³¹conspiracy theories.³²

It seems that when these mental conditions come along with Machiavellianism, people are left-wing— attacking group-oriented foundations to attain personal power. When they are found with psychopathology, which makes people more openly aggressive and unconcerned about what others think of them, they adopt certain forms of the extreme Right; they do not virtue-signal, and they are not concerned about fairness or equality: they simply desire conflict. Extreme leftism is also associated with Narcissism, desiring love and praise.³³ It may be that the relationship between this trait (and to some extent Machiavellianism) and political orientation varies according to whether leftist or rightist values are dominant in the society. But in that these perspectives are associated with both low intelligence and psychological disorders, they can be understood as expressions of mutation. 

Spiteful Ideas

In that we were selected to be strongly grouporiented, we might expect much of the deviation from preindustrial norms to involve the manifestation of more and more selfish, individualistic people, adapted to an environment that is not harsh and selective but, rather, easy and unpredictable. Such an easy environment does not require great cooperation, because basic needs are met, meaning that mental instability is not selected out. It is quite feasible, in such an easy ecology, to withdraw into yourself if something bad happens—to suffer from a period of depression, in which you work out what occurred and why—and still survive. Confronted with an environment that is stable, such people can be expected to actively try to create chaos, because that is the ecology to which they are evolved. They are adapted to intragroup or inter-group warfare, not to the stability that has selected for an optimum balance between the moral foundations, that is, conservatism. 

Now, the ideas that emanate from such people can be seen to spread, in the same way that depressive ways of thinking can spread. An example of this is the way that depression—and the nihilistic, suicidal ideas associated with it—can spread from people who are depressed for primarily genetic reasons to their friends and colleagues.³⁴ It might be averred that, strictly-speaking, these mutations are not “spiteful,” as “spite” implies needless malice, which doesn’t benefit the person being spiteful.³⁵ It can be responded, however, that, in an evolutionary sense, everyday “spiteful” behavior may be adaptive on some level: it is damaging an evolutionary competitor and his prospects, even if only mildly. So, in a sense, a spiteful mutation—even if it causes the carrier to kill himself— could be adaptive by helping to create chaotic conditions in which people who are genetically similar to him might better thrive. But from the perspective of group-oriented people, he is a Spiteful Mutant, who infects other people with maladaptive inclinations, such as the inclination to abandon reproduction. 

It has been mathematically shown that this is plausible when organisms are bunched together and cannot escape each other—this being the modern condition to a great extent.³⁶ In such conditions, a spiteful mutant, in a position of societal influence, could infect a whole society with depression, by creating dysphoria as an out-working of their dark and despondent worldview. And this would be more likely if there were growing numbers of mutant, depressed people. This, along with related processes that we will explore, is what has happened, such that the majority of people, to varying degrees, are now infected with a virus of the mind that causes them not to want to pass on their genes to any significant extent, and even to directly, and indirectly, dissuade others from doing so. 

Spiteful Mutants, as we will see, have interfered with the ability of the group to direct its offspring along an adaptive path—by undermining institutions that did so, such as the family and traditional religiosity—helping to create more and more maladaptive people who have lost the desire to breed, to aid their group’s genetic interests, or even live at all. Some Spiteful Mutants, it will be argued, have managed to bring about the collapse of traditional religion, ethnic pride, and everything that is associated with mental and physical health and evolutionary success. Up is down, right is left, and, as it were, the dead walk the earth. Others, those who completely lack individualizing values, also help to sow chaos, pushing us towards a situation of war, in which they can thrive. These are leaders of extreme conservative cults, such as David Koresh (1959-1993) of the Branch Davidians of Waco, Texas, and similar paranoid, bellicose types, who may be, for example, very high in “sanctity” but low in the other moral foundations.³⁷ Such societies collapse into chaos and are displaced by societies that are more balanced.

Many genetically healthy people can be infected with these ideas and especially, in our current society, with leftwing ideas. Even under harsh selection pressures, there was always a balance in the group between “binders” and “individualists,” leading to genetically healthy individualists who were kept in check by a group-oriented culture. With this switch to an individualistic culture, many healthy group-oriented people—being conformist—can be induced to be individualist while individualists are in their element. That said, it is the rise in individualists, due in part to mutation, and the extent of their individualism that has precipitated this transformation. 

La Résistance 

The silver lining of the Zombie Apocalypse is that the mentally unhealthy are in the process of removing themselves from the gene pool. In this way, Wokeness can be considered the new child mortality. If you can overcome the dysphoria, nihilism, and individualism that it induces and breed anyway, then your genes will survive. Zombies spread a virus of Wokeness—that induces you not to pass on your genes—and only certain kinds of people, those who are genetically resistant to Woke ideas, will leave a legacy.

The result, as we will explore below, will eventually be the return to something like the society that existed before the Industrial Revolution—at the very least to a society that is traditionally religious and that promotes, as part of this religiosity, adaptive traits such as pronatalism. In the meantime, we have an evolutionary trial not by “warfare,” as in days of old, but by “Wokefare.” We will explore a number of the most salient results of this new evolutionary situation, a number of expressions of the influence of Spiteful Mutants. Specifically, we will look at the evolutionary dimensions behind the rise of Social Justice Warriors, the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, right-wing conspiracies such as QAnon, trans-sexuality, homosexuality, celibate males, and related issues such as feminism and pedophilia. But before looking at exactly how Spiteful Mutants operate, however, there are a number of scientific concepts with which we need to familiarize ourselves. 

1. Danny Boyle (dir.), 28 Days Later, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2002.

2. George Romero (dir.), Night of Living Dead, Continental Distributing, 1968.

3. Edgar Wright (dir.), Shaun of the Dead, Universal Pictures, 2004. 4—Euro News, “Mexico City’s Zombie Walk Attracts Tens of Thousands,” (5th November 2017), https://www.euronews.com/2017/11/05/mexicocitys-zombie-walk-attracts-tens-of-thousands.

4. Christopher Moreman and Cory Rushton, “Introduction: Race, Colonialism and the Evolution of the ‘Zombie,’” in Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on the Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition, edited by Christopher Moreman and Cory Rushton (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2011). 

5. Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), 38. 

6. Ibid.

7. Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Hande Ilgaz, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, et al., “Shovels and Swords: How Realistic and Fantastical Themes Affect Children’s Word Learning,” Cognitive Development, 35 (2015): 1-14.

8. A point made by Jordan Peterson in Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (London: Routledge, 2015). 

9. E. O. James, “The Nature and Function of Myth,” Folklore, 68 (1957): 474-482. 

10. George Romero (dir.), Dawn of the Dead, United Film Distribution, 1978.

11. Zack Snyder (dir.), Dawn of the Dead, Universal Pictures, 2004.

12. Anthony Volk and Jeremy Atkinson, “Is Child Death the Crucible of Human Evolution?” Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, 2 (2008): 103-116. 

13. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Mortality in the United States, 2018,” NCHS Data Brief No. 355, January 2020, https://www.cdc. gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db355.htm.

14. See, Matthew Sarraf, Michael Woodley of Menie, and Colin Feltham, Modernity and Cultural Decline: A Biobehavioral Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 

15. Michael Woodley of Menie, Matthew Sarraf, Robert Pestow, et al., “Social Epistasis Amplifies the Fitness Costs of Deleterious Mutations, Engendering Rapid Fitness Decline Among Modernized Populations,” Evolutionary Psychological Science, 3 (2017): 181-191. 

16. Immo Fritsche, Eva Jonas, Peter Fischer, et al., “Mortality Salience and the Desire for Offspring,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43 (2007): 753-762. 

17. Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff, “The Origin and Evolution of Religious Pro-Sociality,” Science, 322 (2008): 58-62.

18. Ross Hammond and Robert Axelrod, “The Evolution of Ethnocentric Behavior,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 50 (2006): 1-11. 

19. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion (London: Penguin, 2012).

20. Edward Dutton and Michael A. Woodley of Menie, At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for the Future (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2018). 

21. John F. Pound, “An Elizabethan Census of the Poor,” University of Birmingham Historical Journal, 7 (1972): 142160.

22. David Hugh-Jones and Abdel Abdellaoui, Natural Selection in Contemporary Humans is Linked to Income and Substitution Effects (School of Economics, University of East Anglia, 2021).

23. Edward Dutton, Guy Madison, and Curtis Dunkel, “The Mutant Says in His Heart, “There Is No God”: The Rejection of Collective Religiosity Centred Around the Worship of Moral Gods is Associated with High Mutational Load,” Evolutionary Psychological Science, 4 (2018): 233-244.

24. Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian Nosek, “Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations,” Personality Processes and Individual Differences, 96 (2009): 1029-1046.

25. Joyce Benenson, “The Development of Human Female Competition: Allies and Adversaries,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 368 (2013): 2013007920130079.

26. Jordan Moss and Peter O’Connor, “The Dark Triad Traits Predict Authoritarian Political Correctness and Alt-Right Attitudes,” Heliyon, 6 (2020): e04453. 

27. Ravi Iyer, Spassena Koleva, Jesse Graham, et al., “Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians,” PLOS ONE, 7(2012): e42366. 

28. Michael A. Woodley of Menie and Curtis Dunkel, “Beyond the Cultural Mediation Hypothesis: A reply to Dutton (2013),” Intelligence, 49 (2015): 186-191. 

29. Viren Swami, Martin Voracek, Stefan Stieger, et al., “Analytic Thinking Reduces Belief in Conspiracy Theories,” Cognition, 133 (2014): 572-585.

30. Neil Dagnall, Kenneth Drinkwater, Andrew Parker, et al., “Conspiracy Theory and Cognitive Style: A Worldview,” Frontiers in Psychology, 6 (2015): 

31. David De Coninck, Thomas Frissen, Koen Matthijs, et al., “Beliefs in Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation About COVID-19: Comparative Perspectives on the Role of Anxiety, Depression and Exposure to and Trust in Information Sources,” Frontiers in Psychology, (2021), https://doi. org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.646394.

32. Evita March and Jordan Springer, “Belief in Conspiracy Theories: The Predictive Role of Schizotypy, Machiavellianism, and Primary Psychopathy,”  PLoS ONE, 14(2019): e0225964.

33. Moss and O’Connor, “The Dark Triad Traits Predict Authoritarian Political Correctness and Alt-Right Attitudes,” op cit.

34. T.E. Joiner, “Contagious Depression: Existence, Specificity to Depressed Symptoms, and the Role of Reassurance Seeking, Journal of Personal and Social Psychology, 67 (1994): 287-296.

35. William Hamilton, “Selfish and Spiteful Behaviour in an Evolutionary Model,” Nature, 228 (1970): 1218–1220.

36. See Francisco Dionisio, “Selfish and Spiteful Behavior Through Parasites and Pathogens,” Evolutionary Ecology Research, 9 (2007): 1199-1210.

37. Rebecca Frey, Fundamentalism (New York: Facts On File, 2007), 4.