William Buckner

William Buckner
Born
🏳️ Nationality	American
🏫 Education	University of California, Davis: evolutionary anthropology Boston University: Department of Anthropology (affiliated, research assistant)
💼 Occupation	Evolutionary anthropologist, researcher, writer, public intellectual
🌐 Website	Traditions of Conflict Substack Traditions of Conflict blog archive @Evolving_Moloch on X

William Buckner (online handle: @Evolving_Moloch) is an American evolutionary anthropologist, researcher, writer, and public intellectual. He is best known for his ethnographic analyses of deception, magic, rituals, violence, male cults, and intersexual conflict in small-scale societies, drawing primarily on data from Melanesia, Amazonia, Australia, and hunter-gatherer groups. Buckner maintains the blog and Substack Traditions of Conflict, where he argues that coalitional male dominance, ritual secrecy, and intersexual antagonism represent ancient and normative features of human societies rather than harmonious adaptations driven primarily by female mate choice or evolved protectiveness toward women.

Buckner has published peer-reviewed papers in journals such as Human Nature and the Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion, and popular essays in Quillette, Works in Progress, and Nautilus. He is a vocal critic of certain claims in mainstream evolutionary psychology (EP), particularly those associated with David Buss and Geoffrey Miller, arguing that they overemphasize female mate choice, under-engage with ethnographic evidence of male coalitions, and rely excessively on WEIRD samples. While not identifying as a feminist, he has praised second-wave feminist sociobiologists such as Sarah Hrdy and Barbara Smuts for offering more ethnographically accurate accounts of male dominance than some contemporary EP narratives.

Early life and education

Public details about Buckner's early life are limited. He studied evolutionary anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and was described as a student in the field as early as 2018. He later became affiliated with Boston University's Department of Anthropology.

Career

Buckner serves as a research assistant at the Human Systems and Behavior Lab in Boston University's Department of Anthropology. His academic work has focused on cultural evolution, human conflict patterns, deceptive practices in healing, and the cognitive science of religion.

Since at least 2017, Buckner has maintained a parallel public writing and social-media presence. He launched the blog Traditions of Conflict around 2018, later migrating primary content to a Substack of the same name (launched 2022), which has attracted thousands of subscribers and focuses on "the evolutionary anthropology of deception, magic, and violence". His X/Twitter account (@Evolving_Moloch) is used for sharing ethnographic insights, research threads, and scholarly critiques.

He has contributed to public discussions on the romanticization of hunter-gatherer societies, the cultural impacts of colonial contact, masculinity and initiation rites, and the display of human remains in museums.

Research and scholarly views

Buckner's scholarship is ethnographic and functionalist. He prioritizes cross-cultural data from small-scale societies to explain persistent patterns in rituals, deception, and conflict, arguing that many human institutions reflect coalitional strategies for reproductive advantage, often involving male dominance, rather than purely cooperative or female-driven equilibria.

Male cults, secrecy, and dominance

A central theme in Buckner's work is the prevalence of male cults and secret societies in Melanesia, Amazonia, and Australia. In "On Secret Cults and Male Dominance" (2018) and his ongoing Substack series, he describes these as "conspiracies in plain sight" that use sacred objects (flutes, masks), violent initiation rites, deception of women and uninitiated males, and lethal enforcement (including gang-rape or execution for revealing secrets). These institutions, he argues, allow older males to monopolize resources (e.g., meat), control female sexuality, suppress younger male competition, and coordinate for warfare.

Intersexual conflict and critique of evolved protectiveness

In his 2025 Substack article "Did Humans Evolve to 'Protect' Women?", Buckner reviews ethnographic evidence showing that special male protectiveness toward women is not an ancestral human universal. Practices such as food taboos, spatial exclusion, beatings, ritual punishments, and gang-rape as enforcement for intruding on male secrets are common and often serve male reproductive interests rather than female welfare. He argues that modern Western protectiveness is largely a recent cultural pattern tied to post-feminist WEIRD norms and reduced sex-segregation, not a deep evolutionary adaptation.

Critiques of evolutionary psychology

Buckner has offered sustained, evidence-based critiques of mainstream EP, particularly its tendencies toward hyper-adaptationism, over-reliance on WEIRD samples, and insufficient engagement with small-scale society ethnography. He argues that certain EP claims underweight coalitional dominance and constraints on female choice in favor of harmonious mate-choice narratives.

• With David Buss: Buckner has criticized Buss's framing of patriarchy as largely arising from women's preferences for resource-capable mates. He points to ethnographic examples (e.g., the Tiwi of Australia, where infant betrothal and male-controlled arranged marriages predominate) as evidence of male coalitions enforcing dominance rather than female choice creating patriarchy. Buckner contrasts this with primatological/feminist sociobiology views that better capture coalitional strategies.

• With Geoffrey Miller: Buckner has critiqued claims in Miller's The Mating Mind that advanced human traits (art, music, language, creative intelligence) evolved primarily as courtship signals via sexual selection. He argues that ethnographic data show such traits often function in secret male cults for coalition signaling, hierarchy enforcement, and social control—hidden from women, sometimes on pain of death—rather than visible mate displays. Buckner has also disputed specific claims about human penile morphology as overly mating-centric.

• With William Costello and broader EP: Buckner has publicly engaged Costello (a researcher in the Buss lab) on EP's scientific status. In a January 2026 reply to Costello's thread on a new American Psychologist paper defending EP as testable and falsifiable, Buckner stated that survey participants correctly identified real flaws in EP (e.g., the two highest-rated criticisms), rating general psychology as slightly worse but noting evolutionary biology escapes too much scrutiny. In October 2025, Buckner tagged Costello (along with other EP researchers) when promoting his "protect women" article, noting expected disagreement but inviting fair engagement. These interactions reflect Buckner's broader view that EP requires stronger integration with ethnographic data from non-WEIRD contexts.

Buckner consistently praises EP as "important & necessary" while calling for refinement on these points.

Engagement with feminist sociobiology

Buckner has explicitly praised second-wave feminist scholars in primatology and anthropology, such as Sarah Hrdy and Barbara Smuts, for their focus on male dominance as a coalitional phenomenon rooted in anisogamy and socioecology. He argues their work provides a clearer evolutionary account of patriarchy as a "male conspiracy" across cultures than some "knee-jerk" EP arguments that overemphasize female choice. In his 2018 Quillette essay "On the Nature of Patriarchy", he draws on Hrdy's analysis while maintaining that patriarchal practices have deep evolutionary roots and that progress toward sex equality should not be assumed automatic. Buckner does not identify as a feminist and has critiqued romanticized or ideological narratives (e.g., matriarchies that never existed).

Additional research interests include deceptive curing practices in hunter-gatherers, the evolution of disguises and clothing, polygyny, human sacrifice, norm enforcement, and critiques of overly peaceful portrayals of hunter-gatherers.

Selected publications

Peer-reviewed

• Buckner, W. (2021). "Disguises and the Origins of Clothing". Human Nature, 32(4), 706–728.
• Buckner, W. (2022/2024). "Sacrifice, Secrecy, and Sexual Conflict in Small-Scale Religions". Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion, 10(1–2), 80–89.
• Moser, C., Buckner, W., Sarian, M., & Winking, J. (2023). "Aggressive Mimicry and the Evolution of the Human Cognitive Niche". Human Nature, 34(3), 456–475.
• Garfield, Z. H., Ringen, E. J., Buckner, W., et al. (2023). "Norm Violations and Punishments Across Human Societies". Evolutionary Human Sciences, 5, e11.

Popular essays

• "Romanticizing the Hunter-Gatherer" (Quillette, 2017).
• "Becoming a Man" (Quillette, 2018).
• "On the Nature of Patriarchy" (Quillette, 2018).
• "Did Humans Evolve to 'Protect' Women?" (Traditions of Conflict Substack, 2025).

External links

• Traditions of Conflict Substack
• Traditions of Conflict blog archive
• @Evolving_Moloch on X
• Google Scholar profile

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