In “The African Queen,” Humphrey Bogart’s character questions, “What are you being so mean for, miss?” after indulging a bit too much, attributing it to “only human nature.” Katharine Hepburn’s character firmly responds: “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”

Does human nature really exist, and if so, are we bound by it, or can we overcome it? Many modern thinkers, especially those aligned with utopian Maoist ideas that are prevalent in our universities, suggest that there is no fixed human nature. According to them, we are blank slates, shaped entirely by cultural influences.

However, this viewpoint encounters inconsistencies. For example, they claim men can become women, yet assert that being gay is an inherent trait from birth. Similarly, while toxic masculinity is seen as something to be altered, empathetic femininity is regarded as natural and inviolable.

Politics is the art of working out how to change society without having to change what can’t be changed in human nature. This is the main message of an intriguing new book by the veteran science writer Nicholas Wade, “The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations.” He explores how political success comes from working with the grain of human nature more than against it. “When ideologies drive politics, without regard to the social structure and behaviors inherent in human nature, a society is torn away from its evolutionary roots and can suffer severe or even fatal damage.”

There is ample evidence of human instincts universal to every society. All people ever found, including newly contacted foragers in New Guinea or the Amazon, show happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust and contempt on their faces in much the same manner. All dance and sing; decorate their hair and bodies; have standards of sexual modesty; have religious or supernatural beliefs about things beyond the visible; have theories of fortune and misfortune.

Wade argues that evolution has embedded four features of society in the human genome: the family, the sexual division of labor, a tendency to build social institutions and tribalism.

There is also extensive evidence that genetics heavily influences the variation in personality between individuals. Identical twins reared apart are nearly always more similar in personality than unrelated individuals reared in the same family. Human nature, both universal and individual, is not a fiction.

But that does not mean there is nothing you can do about it. Reproducing is an instinct — but one that increasing numbers of people decide to overcome to the point where plummeting birth rates may risk decline and perhaps even the extinction of the human race. Evolution endowed us with a desire for sex as a way to ensure we have babies: Contraception decoupled the two.

Likewise, young males have a natural tendency to commit murder under certain circumstances — but of course policy can stop them. In one study, two Canadian researchers showed that among Canada, Chicago, Britain and Detroit the late-20th-century homicide rate varied enormously, with more than 100 times as many murders per head of population in Detroit as in Britain. But murder’s gender and age bias were the same in all four cases: Men commit 20 to 30 times as many homicides as women, and homicide peaks at roughly 25 years of age. That pattern is down to human nature; the difference in murder rate is down to policy.

Wade relates that the idealistic collective enterprises known as kibbutzim in postwar Israel raised children separately from their mothers and shared bounties communally. Both were a failure against which people quickly rebelled. “It is notable that the kibbutzim regained their footing only after they had abandoned their two primary policies that conflicted with human nature — abolition of the family and separating work from reward,” writes Wade.

Today, I would argue, the source of some of our culture wars in the West is that many institutions were built around male instincts and are being rebuilt around more female-friendly ones. Wade argues that men are more willing than women to devote everything to pursuit of their careers, build coalitions to seize power and take risks by entering dangerous professions. But men are also more apt to oppress and sequester women, a natural tendency Western societies now strive to combat while Muslim societies tend to indulge it.

A good example of working against the grain of human nature is the so-called STEM paradox. The number of women taking courses in science, technology, engineering and mathematics is higher in Muslim countries than in Western ones. In Iran, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Algeria women earn about half of all STEM degrees. In Switzerland, Germany, Spain and Finland — countries with far more sexual equality generally — only around a quarter to a third of such degrees go to women. Why? Because in Muslim countries women are more likely to take the course their fathers tell them to. In Western countries, women are free to gravitate to courses that suit their natures more.

It is human nature for powerful and wealthy men to seek multiple sexual partners, and they have done so again and again. Today, however, with varying degrees of success, the church, the courts and now the media have sought to restrain, deter or punish these urges.

It is human nature to be nepotistic, favoring your kin and your tribe at strangers’ expense. “Our instincts tell us to show fierce loyalty to the tribe, hostility to dissidents and would-be traitors, and suspicion or outright aggression toward outsiders.” But such tribalism fractures nation-states and hinders the trade networks among strangers that raise living standards. So a big part of history has been about finding a way to tame or divert tribal instincts.

Stamping out cousin marriage was one way the Christian church and successive kings worked to forge a nation-state out of warring tribes. Then, using the language of the family and the tribe — “band of brothers,” “father of the nation,” “motherland” — rulers sold the illusion that patriotism is like defense of kin. Wade argues that making the transition from tribalism to administrative states was an arduous process, often driven by rulers’ need to wage war.

One vexing challenge we face is entrenched inequality. In a meritocracy, paradoxically, good fortune becomes more genetic, as successful people marry each other and breed offspring with similar successful personalities. Hollywood stars, Nobel Prize winners, billionaires — all are tending to become heritable. “A meritocracy if anything intensifies the unfairness of the genetic lottery,” writes Wade, “because, through equality of opportunity, it lets everyone exercise their talents to the full and thus enhances the differences between them.”

Human beings are African apes, unleashed into a wider world with millions of years of evolved instinct honed by survival on the savanna. The success of our political and social institutions today depends on how well the institutions fit those instincts and how well we channel and divert instincts to serve social goals. Simply denying that we are instinctual beings is a recipe for disaster. As Wade puts it, “The nation-state is a modern invention, a blend of natural instincts and cultural institutions, but it rests on more ancient components of sociality.”

Matt Ridley’s books, including “The Rational Optimist” and his latest, “Birds, Sex and Beauty,” have sold more than a million copies. He sat in the House of Lords between 2013 and 2021, serving on the science and technology select committee and the artificial intelligence select committee.