other) species ever since they were created by God. Waltz asks students of Inter-
national Politics to revise their tendency to exaggerate change. Adaptation for
Darwin promoted diversity: adaptation for Waltz promoted ‘like units’. Darwin’s
work offers a lesson in how ideas can change reality: Waltz’s work is a warning that
reality cages ideas.
Natural selection for Darwin, and state survival for Waltz, invite us to historicise
our pictures of the development of both the species and the state system if we want
to know more. Such an approach is basic in Cultural Anthropology. As one of its
leading proponents, Michael Carrithers, has emphasised, humans are ‘animals with
history’.^24 The history of human sociality – the ‘capacity for complex social
behaviour’ – offers evidence in human affairs, as certain as fossil evidence, that radical
change has taken place in human society. Before Darwin the world appeared timeless
and unchanging; but this appearance was only the result of a set of dominant ideas.
His theory offered better ones, and so changed the appearance – at least for many
people. (One day, of course, the theory of evolution may itself be superseded.) Ideas
have always changed human realities, as certainly as physical evolution has changed
human bodies.
Through time, incrementally, ideas and their structures have interacted and
constructed the phenomenon we today understand as ‘international politics’. Human
agency includes the ability over social time to reorder global realities by changing
our common sense about global realities. We can intervene to bring about change
in politics more easily than in evolution, but neither is easy, though both are certain.
Looking to the future, we can no more guess when ‘international politics’ as now
understood will become extinct or be replaced than we can we guess what evolution
will do to us. We only know that the latter is not at an end and is unpredictable
over hundreds, never mind millions, of years. Such is particularly now the case in
the context of developments in biotechnology and genetic research – when we ‘play
God’ as it is sometimes put, by intruding ever more into biological evolution.
Important questions confront the idea of natural selection in a species that can
increasingly control its fertility and health: ‘Has cultural evolution replaced biological
evolution?’ is the most important.^25 IR must be considered a part of that cultural
evolution, and as such will have a role, remotely and more directly, in human
biological evolution.
To the extent that dominant ideas about International Relations contribute to
the collective consciousness about living globally – and I do not want to exaggerate
the direct impact of academic work in the corridors of power – it is imperative to
understand influential theories such as structural realism. If the structure of anarchy,
the survival of states, and the distribution of capabilities have persistent causal weight
in shaping who gets what, when, and how across the globe, then they must remain
central to the agenda of all students of IR. But that engagement must be informed
by the meta-theoretical understanding that anarchy, states, and capabilities are ideas,
and that ideas can change radically; we can give different meanings to international
anarchy,^26 just as many gave a radically different meaning to the phrase ‘the origin
of species’ after 1859. Cultural Anthropology shows, across space and time, that ‘We
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