In this series of five diaries, I've been critiquing George Lakoff's Nurturant Parent metaphor for the liberal worldview and using recent insights from evolutionary psychology to try to create a stronger foundation for understanding the differences between the liberal and conservative worldviews and a more appealing framework for telling the liberal story.

In Part One, I argued that the Strict Father model doesn't go deep enough and that the conservative worldview is actually based on behaviors that are typical of primate societies, namely alpha-male behavior. Part Two concluded with a question: If evolution rewards the pursuit of self-interest, does the Strict Father model fit better with evolutionary theory than the Nurturant Parent model does? Part Three showed that natural selection can lead to cooperation as well as competition. Part Four proposed that competition and cooperation might make more sense as underlying conservative and liberal values, respectively, than strength and nurturance.

Join me on the flip for the big finish (Part Five).

In this series of five diaries, I've been critiquing George Lakoff's Nurturant Parent metaphor for the liberal worldview and using recent insights from evolutionary psychology to create a stronger foundation for understanding the differences between the liberal and conservative worldviews and a more appealing framework for telling the liberal story.

In Part One, I argued that the Strict Father model doesn't go deep enough and that the conservative worldview is actually based on behaviors that are typical of primate societies, namely alpha-male behavior. Part Two concluded with a question: If evolution rewards the pursuit of self-interest, does the Strict Father model fit better with evolutionary theory than the Nurturant Parent model does?

Join me on the flip for Part Three and Part Four.

In this series of five diaries, I've been critiquing George Lakoff's Nurturant Parent metaphor for the liberal worldview and using recent insights from evolutionary psychology to try to create a stronger foundation for understanding the differences between the liberal and conservative worldviews and a more appealing framework for telling the liberal story.

In Part One, I argued that the Strict Father model doesn't go deep enough and that the conservative worldview is actually based on behaviors that are typical of primate societies, namely alpha-male behavior. Join me on the flip for Part Two of this five-part diary.

Like 98% of you on Daily Kos, in 2004 I read George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant and thought it was brilliant. However, the more I thought about Lakoff's model of the liberal worldview (his Nurturant Parent metaphor), the less it "hung together." It wasn't until I came across an article about religious fundamentalism that I began to put my finger on what seemed to be wrong. Serendipitously, I had just finished reading The Moral Animal by Robert Wright, which prompted me to connect Lakoff's metaphors with recent insights from evolutionary psychology. The result of this intermingling of politics and prehistory is, I believe, a stronger foundation for understanding the differences between the liberal and conservative worldviews, and also a more appealing framework for telling the liberal story.

Join me on the flip for the first of my five criticisms of Lakoff's Strict Father / Nurturant Parent metaphors and Part One of this five-part diary.