Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?

[sparrowrose.livejournal.com]

I looked up the article that was referenced in the short editorial kalquessa posted yesterday:

Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted? By: Alford, John R.; Funk, Carolyn L.; Hibbing, John R.. American Political Science Review, May2005, Vol. 99 Issue 2, p153, 15p; (AN 17276698)

I made a 795k PDF file of the article for anyone who's interested in looking at the source of the liberal lunacy. It's the first PDF file I've ever made, so I apologize for the quality, but hopefully anyone who's interested will not have too many problems reading it.

Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?

Comments

[mosellegreen.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I wanted to read that.

[sparrowrose.livejournal.com]

Enjoy! I've only glanced over it so far (won't have time to thoroughly read it until tomorrow) but at a cursory glance it looks so skewed that I wonder how it made it into a peer-reviewed journal.

Or maybe not. (While I was at the library, I checked out a copy of Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education. It was recommended by ISI (http://www.isi.org/) and looks like an interesting book.)

[georgiapeachy.livejournal.com]

"This just in: Conservative politics are genetic!"
See that's what makes my science oriented brain explode. Conservative politics are genetic? So? Lots of things are and if that were true than liberal politics would be genetic as well. Evolutionary psychology loving conservatives like Steve Sailer http://www.isteve.com/ or GNXP (mixed politically) http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/004096.html. Note the small numbers and difference between ideology and party

But after correcting for the tendency of politically like-minded men and women to marry each other, the researchers also found that the twins' self-identification as Republican or Democrat was far more dependent on environmental factors like upbringing and life experience than was their social orientation, which the researchers call ideology. Inheritance accounted for 14 percent of the difference in party, the researchers found.

Even if this study is skewed, I think we all have to be open to a genetic component to ideology (not party, I can see our brains being adapted to certain reactions that define an ideology that is relatively constant, but parties are so fluid that there is no way they could be embedded in the human mind). It's still a choice, but genes influence the probability of us chosing an ideology. It's not a function f(political ideology)=republican, it's an issue of the odds of something happening.

[helens78]

Heh. My parents are kneejerk, big-government-lovin' liberals. I am an anti-government libertarian nut.

Maybe if you twist "passed on genetically" to mean "passed on by whoever you're shagging a lot in college", 'cause that's where my libertarian tendencies came from...