Science Quote by Keith Henson

Henson is doing something sly here: he frames “utopian” not as a political label but as a diagnostic category, a kind of cognitive error that evaporates once you’ve absorbed what evolutionary psychology claims about human nature. The line isn’t built to persuade the already-convinced utopian; it’s built to police the boundaries of seriousness in a debate. If you know the literature, you supposedly can’t be “deluded enough” to believe in sweeping social perfection. If you still do, the problem isn’t your values, it’s your ignorance.

The subtext leans on a familiar late-20th-century posture: biology as cold shower. Evo psych becomes an intellectual solvent that dissolves grand plans into incentives, status competition, tribalism, sexual selection, and the less flattering parts of altruism. By pairing “up on” with “related areas,” Henson signals a whole ecosystem of adjacent authority - behavioral genetics, game theory, sociobiology - marshaled as a coalition against idealism.

The rhetorical move is also a preemptive strike. Calling utopians “deluded” reframes disagreement as epistemic failure rather than moral conflict. That’s powerful because it makes compromise unnecessary: why negotiate with a mirage? But it’s also revealing. The quote quietly assumes a specific model of human nature (stable, constraint-heavy, evolutionarily anchored) and treats it as the default setting for policy imagination. Whether or not evo psych deserves that gatekeeping role, Henson’s intent is clear: to make optimism sound not just naive, but scientifically embarrassing.