Human rights, reason, government, as well as everything about humanity come from, as 1974 Nobel laureate in Economics F.A. Hayek tells us, “processes of selective evolution”.

“We understand now that all enduring structures above the level of the simplest atoms, and up to the brain and society, are the results of, and can be explained only in terms of, processes of selective evolution…” (Hayek F. , 1981, p. 158)

If we envision mankind 20,000 years ago, we would see a sort of petri dish of competing cultures(languages/concepts/rules/laws) that are being ‘naturally selected’ based on their ability to grow the groups that contain them relative to other groups. Customs/concepts/rules/religions/etc. that inadvertently cause their respective social orders to grow whether it’d be via conquest, successful defense, migration into, imitation, etc., expand their order and the very customs/concepts/ideologies/etc. which helped them thrive.

Every rule/law has an effect in the productivity/growth/fitness/survival of a social order. Given that a society is likely to have hundreds of such rules it is impossible to know the exact impact of any one of them when considering the overall growth/stability/fitness/competitiveness of a society/order. For simplicity’s sake let us focus on just one rule, what is the optimal punishment for theft? Let’s assume that in culture/tribe A when a man steals he is killed which might deter many thefts but decreases the number of people in the group and all the productivity that this person might contribute in the future. In tribe B they cut off a hand, in tribe C they cut off a finger, and in tribe D 10 lashes. Let’s assume that tribe A’s custom/rule of killing the thief actually proved to lead to a “fitter” social order. Perhaps it turns out that cutting off the hand led to an unproductive person that became a big drain on rest of tribe and a weak/useless fighter when it came to offense/defense so it was better if he was dead. And that cutting off a finger and lashes proved to not be enough of a deterrent which led to many thefts and retaliatory violence which turned out to be more costly than losing a member of the tribe. Once again for simplicity’s sake let us assume that this was by far the most important custom/rule affecting the growth/fitness of the social order, and that because of this, tribe/culture A eventually displaced the others so that its kill-thieves rule/custom survived while the other punishments disappeared. The kill-thieves rule, is the result of human action, yet not the result of conscious human planning or design with the reasoned or conscious goal of having a more competitive/fit social order. The real designing of this rule or cultural element was made, not by innate instinct or human reason, but by ‘natural selection’/competition/‘group selection’/‘cultural evolution’.

Omnipresence, the ability to be everywhere at all times is another very useful concept that would provide a great benefit to religions that used it to describe their God (which happens to be yet another culturally evolved concept). Without God’s omnipresence you could get away with breaking the rules that give society order and only have to face the consequences brought upon you by fellow men. But if God is everywhere, watching your every move, you will be much more likely to follow those rules that give your society a productive social order. You might be able to steal and leech off of others and not get caught but God can see everything, not only is he everywhere all the time, he can even read your “impure” thoughts, so the idea of breaking the social rules that give society order are prevented from entering a brain before they can even lead to action. A similar case can be made for the concepts of sin/evil/etc.

So we have very briefly discussed two traditions, one related to the punishment of a behavior (theft) that can weaken an order, and one that helps members adhere to rules which are beneficial to the order (omnipresent God). And we can easily imagine how they could be naturally selected as they help the groups that house them be more competitive relative to others.

This concept of cultural evolution allowed Hayek to identify a sort of third dimension or mechanism for discovering knowledge which was neither instinctual (tied to our genetics/biology), nor the result of our reason. We are now in a position to understand F.A. Hayek when he summarizes:

“Culture is neither natural nor artificial, neither genetically transmitted nor rationally designed. It is a tradition of learnt rules of conduct which have never been ‘invented’ and whose functions the acting individuals usually do not understand”

Cultural evolution is the key to understanding the emergence and evolution of various social institutions which have transformed men from the ape-like tribal order to the current world-wide market economy. We can now better understand what Carl Menger referred to as “unintended results of historical development”, Menger writes:

“There exists a certain similarity between natural organisms and a series of structures of social life, both in respect to their function and their origin…Natural organisms almost without exception exhibit, when closely observed, a really admirable functionality of all parts with respect to the whole, a functionality which is not, however, the result of human calculation, but of a natural process. Similarly we can observe in numerous social institutions a strikingly apparent functionality with respect to the whole. But with closer consideration they still do not prove to be the result of an intention aimed at this purpose, i.e., the result of an agreement of members of society or of positive legislation. They, too, present themselves to us rather as “natural” products(in a certain sense), as unintended results of historical development. One needs, e.g., only to think of the phenomenon of money, an institution which to so great a measure serves the welfare of society, and yet in most nations, by far, is by no means the result of an agreement directed at its establishment as a social institution, or of positive legislation, but is the unintended product of historical development. One needs only to think of law, of language, of the origin of markets, the origin of communities and of states, etc.”

So where do human “rights” come from? “Rights” are just a concept that embodies the current culture’s ideas as to how people should be treated, and ultimately comes from this process of cultural evolution. I should add that there is no such thing as “natural rights” or “natural law”, or some human-reasoned ideal of what morals/ethics/rights/rules we should follow. All that seems to exist is ‘natural selection’/competition selecting among competing orders/ideas/rules/etc. Various thinkers who had the fortune of stumbling upon the vitality of individual freedom for socioeconomic prosperity attempted to use their reason and understanding of economics to design/discover some ideal moral/ethical code, the most famous of these might be people like Ayn Rand(Objectivism), Murray N. Rothbard (Natural Law), Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Argumentation Ethics), and more recently Stefan Molyneux (Universally Preferable Behaviour). These are wonderful intellectual achievements and competing suggestions for morality, but the ultimate designer of our complex and ever-changing social order and the rules/“morals”/“rights” that sustain it is ‘natural selection’/competition. These proposed ‘ethical systems’ are all sort of “centrally” planned moral/ethical codes which will always under-perform compared to what we should be striving for, competitive moral/legal systems, or to borrow Edward Stringham’s terminology “Private Governance”. By privatizing anything, including the legal/ethical system, we are allowing competitive discovery of what is best, which is precisely what natural selection has been doing for millions of years without our being aware of its culture/legal/moral/linguistic/economic achievements(until Hayek really nailed it). The best we could probably do is to help preach an understanding of economic freedom and allow for competitive moral/legal systems to continue to evolve in ways our reason can’t possibly predict. Which brings us to our next question.