Avi Tuschman

Avi Tuschman is an American evolutionary anthropologist and author.
Early Life and Education
Tuschman attended high school at Menlo School in California. He attended Stanford University He graduated in 2002 and relocated to Peru for his first job after college.
Career
In Peru, Tuschman worked as a speech writer and political adviser to President Alejandro Toledo, and served as international projects coordinator for Toledo’s Global Center for Development and Democracy.
Our Political Nature
Tuschman's 2013 book, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us proposed an evolutionary theory of human political orientation. As evidence, Our Political Nature synthesizes studies from the fields of political science, genetics, neuroscience, and primatology.
Chris Mooney writing in The Washington Monthly credited the book with "explaining the now well-documented psychological, biological, and genetic differences between liberals and conservatives with reference to human evolution and the differential strategies of mate choice and resource allocation that have been forced on us by the pressures of surviving and reproducing on a quite dangerous planet." John R. Hibbing writing in Political Science Quarterly reported that although the book was one of several published at the same time dealing with psychological, biological and evolutionary bases of political beliefs, it "makes a unique and important contribution to the field" and noted that with regard to its discussion of evolution in the context of politics, "as selection pressures are relaxed, it may be possible to push it too far." An unattributed review in The Economist described Tuschman as a biological determinist and found that book did not explain the unpredictability of voters in the middle ground, commenting: "the author’s efforts to use “hard science” to illuminate partisanship often run aground... The political world Mr Tuschman describes tends to be remarkably binary and easily classifiable." Reviewing the book in Forbes, Cedric Muhammad noted that the book was generally rejected by conservatives and embraced by liberals, criticized its discussion of ethnocentrism, yet said it makes "a compelling case that we are hard-wired to be liberal or conservative by nature, environment and adaptation."

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