Although it’s dressed up in the pseudo-scientific language of evolutionary psychology, this defense of free trade and outsourcing elides the same issues as most such defenses. The question of trade policy isn’t just whether our society gets richer as a whole or on average, but also what the effects on particular people are and whether those costs are worth, say, a cheaper widget. Talking about our supposed evolutionary history of in-group and out-group psychology doesn’t address the issue at all. Jeremy is absolutely correct to point out that science (and I use that term loosely in this instance) is being used here as a substitute for moral and political judgment. Whether or not the loss of jobs is an acceptable side effect of free trade isn’t something that our evolutionary history can tell us. It’s a fundamentally moral and political decision.

You see a similar obfuscation at work whenever anyone raises objections to forms of medical research such as embryonic stem cell research. Defenders of ESCR like to say that “science” should decide such matters. But science as such is utterly incapable of deciding such matters. It’s morally impotent in that sense. It can tell us what states of affairs we can bring about and what they might entail in terms of consequences and costs, but it can tell us absolutely nothing about which state of affairs we ought to bring about. To talk about what “science” tells us we should do is nothing more than a naked appeal to authority, and not a particularly convincing one.