Genetics & Politics

[James Brody]

I stumbled over this recently and noticed:
1) Genes are not yet born to political theorists but the water has been broken.
2) The platitude about the incredible slow pace of evolution has had its day. That is, in response to environments, genes supply alternate developmental channels.
3) Environmental turmoil favors the emergence of winner-take-all networks: a Yanomamo village or a group of Progressives organize in much the same way. Settled environments appear to favor scale-free networks that explore stable settings and discover opportunity by means of small steps.
4) Heat shock proteins repair DNA changes attributed to heat, poisons, or starvation. They also stabilize mutations that frequently allow expression by formerly silenced genetic sequences. (Your kid will have hairy palms after the bombs go off!)
5) Giles may be a top-down believer when he concludes, "Come to terms with these differences, and you can spend the energy now wasted on persuasion on figuring out ways of accommodating both points of view." The alternation between top-down and bottom-up networks appears to be in the fabric of our universe. An era of stressed mothers may well produce nasty fellows; fat calm mothers may provide calmer sons even if less muscular.

JimB

"Are political leanings all in the genes?

"by Jim Giles, New Scientist
"February 2nd, 2008
"...In newsrooms and bars across the land, liberals and conservatives are slugging it out, trying to convince each other that their way of thinking is right. They may be wasting their breath.... 'These views are deep-seated and built into our brains. Trying to persuade someone not to be liberal is like trying to persuade someone not to have brown eyes. We have to rethink persuasion,' says John Alford, a political scientist at Rice University in Houston, Texas...In 2005, Alford published ... two decades of work in behavioural genetics, including a huge database containing the political opinions of 30,000 twins from Virginia (American Political Science Review, vol 99, p 153). He found that identical twins were more likely than non-identical twins to give the same answers to political questions....In 2003, John Jost, a psychologist at New York University, and colleagues surveyed 88 studies, involving more than 20,000 people in 12 countries, that looked for a correlation between personality traits and political orientation (American Psychologist, vol 61, p 651). ... People who scored highly on a scale measuring fear of death, for example, were almost four times more likely to hold conservative views. Dogmatic types were also more conservative, while those who expressed interest in new experiences tended to be liberals...Many psychologists believe personality can be categorised into five classes, relating to conscientiousness, openness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism...Scores on the conscientiousness scale, however, show a significant correlation with position within the political spectrum...A much stronger link exists between political orientation and openness... people with high openness scores turn out to be almost twice as likely to be liberals...All of the big five personality traits are highly heritable (Journal of Research in Personality, vol 32, p 431), ... James Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, thinks the decision to vote rather than stay at home on election day may be linked to individual genes...In a study currently under review at The Journal of Politics, Fowler...shows that people whose version of the MAOA gene is efficient at regulating the brain chemical are 1.3 times more likely to vote than those with a version that is less efficient...Members of religious groups are known to be more likely to vote and, among this subset of subjects, those with a particular version of 5HTT were 60 per cent more likely to vote...Last September, David Amodio, a neuroscientist at New York University, ... asked around 40 people to complete a simple test, in which they had to press a button as soon as a certain letter flashed up on a computer screen (Nature Neuroscience, vol 10, p 1246). .....Evan Charney, a political scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina....has a more general criticism of the personality work. As others have pointed out, a rather unflattering view of conservatives emerges from the studies. They are portrayed as dogmatic, routine-loving individuals, while liberals come across as free-spirited and open-minded folk...Lindon Eaves, a behavioural geneticist at Virginia Commonwealth University helped assemble much of the data that Alford reviewed in 2004. He says that complex traits such as openness are likely to be determined by the combined action of a large number of genes. It is not impossible to identify them, but previous experience suggests it will be tough....Next March, Carmen is inviting over 50 geneticists, politics researchers and neuroscientists to a conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to discuss such ideas, in the hope of giving birth to a whole new field of study....Jost and others speculate that all societies contain groups analogous to western liberals and conservatives: one wants to bring in new ideas, the other resists change....Of the researchers that New Scientist spoke to, none said that professional politicians had expressed an interest in their work. Some political think tanks know about the results, but view them with suspicion. At the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-free-market group, scholar David Frum says that he is "flattered by the evidence that conservatives are more honest and dutiful than liberals".

Lots more at: http://geneticsandsociety.org/article.php?id=3929

The Amodio study can be downloaded at: http://www.psych.nyu.edu/amodiolab/Amodio%20et%20al.%20(2007)%20Nature%20Neuro.pdf

Brody, JF (2008) Rebellion: Physics to Personal Will. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse. Esp chapter 8, Conceived to rebel, & 9, Your divided self. Due in March.
Burt, Austin, & Trivers, Robert (2006) Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard. (Esp chapter 4 on genomic imprinting...read it carefully! Dream about it!)
Csermely, Peter (2006) Weak Links: Stabilizers of Complex Systems from Proteins to Social Networks. NY: Springer.
Hayek Friedrich A von (1944/1994) The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press. (talks about the same stuff as Csermely, or for that matter, Tom Sowell, but focussed on Britain from about 1910-1930.
MacArthur R & Wilson EO (1967/2001) The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (on K/r-selection. K/r theory has a mixed fan club. I like it because of the overlap that appears with genomic imprinting.)
Sowell, T. (2002) A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. NY: Basic Books. (Hang this one just above your crib!)

[James Brody]

New Reference...

Fowler, James H. and Dawes, Christopher T., "Two Genes Predict Voter Turnout" (December 1, 2007). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1032632

1) Now that we might know this, what might anyone do with the information?

2) There are substantial hints that genomic imprints interact with environmental stress: DNA sequences are turned on or off as a function of conditions. If someone bombs New York will there be an increase in male births, males who are more impulsive and aggressive?

Stay tuned (sic!)

JimB

[James Brody]

People and parrots make territorial claims. Here's another...

JimB

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 614, No. 1, 34-55 (2007)

"Genetic Configurations of Political Phenomena: New Theories, New Methods

"Ira H. Carmen

"Recent research by E. O. Wilson, Alford-Hibbing, Carmen, and others indicates that the competing social science paradigms of behavioralism and rational choice are in their last throes. Their salient weakness is insensitivity, bordering on ignorance, to politics as a biologically orchestrated phenomenon ( Or to biology as orchestrated by physics! JB!). More specifically, political scientists know precious little about either genetics or evolutionary dynamics. In this article, the author presents a new theory—sociogenomics—to replace the shopworn conceptions of yesterday's political science. The author then demonstrates how social scientists can employ the tools of molecular biology to flesh out the genes coding for baseline political attitudes and behaviors. The theory and methods of sociogenomics will serve to synthesize the social sciences with the natural sciences in a broader consilient framework, so that the laboratory of Darwinian investigation can become the laboratory of Aristotelian investigation."

More at: http://ann.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/614/1/34

Reference:

Brody JF (2008) Rebellion: Physics to Personal Will Lincoln, NE: iUniverse. (available in March-April)