"Liberal Gene" Discovered

[dales]

Researchers Find the 'Liberal Gene'
By Jeremy A. Kaplan

Published October 28, 2010


Don't hold liberals responsible for their opinion -- they can't help themselves.

A new study has concluded that ideology is not just a social thing; it's built into the DNA, borne along by a gene called DRD4. Tagged "the liberal gene," DRD4 is the first specific bit of human DNA that predisposes people to certain political views, the study's authors claim.

And the key to it all: Liberals are more open, said lead researcher James H. Fowler, a professor of both medical genetics and political science at the University of California, San Diego.

"The way openness is measured, it's really about receptivity to different lifestyles, for example, or different norms or customs," he told FoxNews.com. "We hypothesize that individuals with a genetic predisposition toward seeking out new experiences [a measure of openness] will tend to be more liberal" -- but only if they had a number of friends when growing up, Fowler cautioned.

This isn't a typical gene association study," he said. "There's a combination of genes and environment that matter."

A 'Liberal Gene' You Say --

The paper, which appears in the latest edition of The Journal of Politics, focused on 2,000 subjects from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. By matching genetic information with maps of each individual's social network, the researchers were able to show that people with a specific variant of the DRD4 gene were more likely to be liberal as adults -- though only if they had an active adolescent social life.

The research, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, focused on dopamine -- a neurotransmitter that affects a wide variety of brain processes, including control over movement, emotions, and ability to experience pleasure and pain. Previous research identified connections between a variant of this gene and novelty-seeking behavior, a personality trait that numerous studies have shown is linked to political liberalism, the authors say.

So if a liberal ideology is genetic, or at least partly genetic, does that mean it runs in the family -- and can be passed on to your kids? No doubt about it, the authors say.

"In fact, psychologists have asserted for many years that social conservatism is heritable," the paper notes. Fowler cites twin studies comparing fraternal and identical twins that have pinpointed exactly how much liberal ideology can be passed along.

"Ideology is about 40 percent heritable. It's almost half genes and half environment," Fowler told FoxNews.com. What's more, he said, any trait that can be inherited has potentially been with the human race for a long time, meaning political ideology has been a part of us for tens of millions of years.

"If it's really the case that genetic variation is influencing ideology, this isn't something we've been living with for the last ten years," he told FoxNews.com. "These are processes that have been going on for the past million years."

Fowler suggests that it made more sense to be liberal in certain environments at specific points in human history, and in others a conservative ideology was merited. "And this is what made it possible for our species to survive," he said.

"If it made sense for us all to be liberal, natural selection would have made us all liberal."

Fowler and colleagues Jaime E. Settle and Christoper T. Dawkes, also of UC San Diego, and Harvard University's Nicholas A. Christakis hypothesized that people with the novelty-seeking gene variant would be more interested in learning about their friends' points of view. As a consequence, people with this genetic predisposition who have a greater-than-average number of friends would be exposed to a wider variety of social norms and lifestyles, which might make them more liberal than average, they deduced.

The researchers reported that "it is the crucial interaction of two factors -- the genetic predisposition and the environmental condition of having many friends in adolescence -- that is associated with being more liberal."

The research team also showed that this held true independent of ethnicity, culture, sex or age.

[Lord Jim]

Shouldn't this have been posted in "Laffs"?

[Sue U]

"Ideology is about 40 percent heritable. It's almost half genes and half environment," Fowler told FoxNews.com. What's more, he said, any trait that can be inherited has potentially been with the human race for a long time, meaning political ideology has been a part of us for tens of millions of years.

"If it's really the case that genetic variation is influencing ideology, this isn't something we've been living with for the last ten years," he told FoxNews.com. "These are processes that have been going on for the past million years."

Aside from the basic silliness of the article, somoene has their timelines seriously screwed up. The entire genus Homo has only existed for about 2.3 million years, and our own species has only been around about 200,000 years, and even so we didn't become "behaviorally modern humans" until about 50,000 years ago -- and that was after the Toba catastrophe wiped out all but a few thousand breeding pairs. "Liberal politics" is something that's only been around a few hundred years, at best.

[tyro]

… [they]...hypothesized that people with the novelty-seeking gene variant would be more interested in learning about their friends' points of view. As a consequence, people with this genetic predisposition who have a greater-than-average number of friends would be exposed to a wider variety of social norms and lifestyles, which might make them more liberal than average, they deduced.

So it isn’t that there is a “liberal gene” but rather one that lets the carrier acquire a diversity of friends and (Gawd damn it) some compassion for these friends.

Missing source

[The Hen]

Couldn't that also be described as a 'Survival Gene'?

: )

[Gob]

That's one of the meanest perversions of science I've seen in a long time, they should be ashamed of themselves.

[Andrew D]

Let's not forget that we are not seeing the article actually written by the researchers and published in The Journal of Politics (which has not chosen to make it freely available). We are seeing a FOX spin-piece about that article. When we strip away the FOX spin, we are left (based on what is available to us) with something rather different than FOX would have us believe.

It turns out that the essential hypothesis of the original article (as presented to us by FOX) is that individuals with a genetic predisposition toward seeking out new experiences will tend to be more willing than are those without that genetic predisposition to respect and accept behaviour or opinions different from their own. Hardly the loony-lefty-pseudo-science that FOX tries to make it out to be.

The spin-piece's opening line is "Don't hold liberals responsible for their opinion -- they can't help themselves." That should make the level of objectivity (which is, as usual, zero) perfectly clear. And if that's not enough, notice that the spin-piece mentions in passing the original article's assertion that "'psychologists have asserted for many years that social conservatism is heritable,'" but the spin-piece conspicuously does not say "Don't hold conservatives responsible for their opinion -- they can't help themselves."

Nothing in FOX's spin-piece tells us what the researchers actually mean by liberal (or conservative) ideology. But there is this:

And the key to it all: Liberals are more open, said lead researcher James H. Fowler, a professor of both medical genetics and political science at the University of California, San Diego.

"The way openness is measured, it's really about receptivity to different lifestyles, for example, or different norms or customs," he told FoxNews.com. "We hypothesize that individuals with a genetic predisposition toward seeking out new experiences [a measure of openness] will tend to be more liberal" -- but only if they had a number of friends when growing up, Fowler cautioned.

That -- which does not say anything about what party one votes for, etc. -- comports quite nicely with the core meaning of "liberal":

liberal adjective 1 willing to respect and accept behaviour or opinions different from one's own.

(Compact Oxford English Dictionary (3d. ed. (rev.) 2008) at p. 584.)

The FOX spin-artist, Jeremy A. Kaplan, would have us believe that the article says that those with a genetic predisposition toward seeking out new experiences will tend (subject to environmental factors) to vote in a politically "liberal" way. That is pure spin.

Read the quotation from the lead researcher without FOX's bracketed obtrusion:

"We hypothesize that individuals with a genetic predisposition toward seeking out new experiences will tend to be more liberal" ....

Take the word "liberal" as meaning what the first given dictionary definition says that it means, and we end up with this:

We hypothesize that individuals with a genetic predisposition toward seeking out new experiences will tend to be more willing to respect and accept behaviour or opinions different from one's own.

(Grammatically, it should be "their own," but I did not want to make a bracketed intrusion of my own.)

Thus, the genetic predisposition is toward seeking out new experiences, and the "ideological" result is being more willing to respect and accept different behaviors and opinions. That's a far cry from how FOX-SPIN would have us take the article.

All of the foregoing, of course, is derived from what is available. Again, I do not have access to the article itself. It is possible that the researchers really think that there is some genetic predisposition to vote for the Liberal Democrats or the Democrats or whatever the name of the (somewhat) left party in one's country might be. But if apparent crackpotism of that sort* is what the original article actually says, surely the people at FOX-SPIN could have so demonstrated by some means other than injecting their own political views into what the lead researcher actually told them.

* That conclusion strikes me as obvious crackpotism. On the other hand, there was a time when heliocentrism was seen as obvious crackpotism. Despite my immediate and strong inclination toward seeing as crackpotism the notion that people's genes play a significant role in whether they vote Democrat or Republican, I have not seen the evidence (if there is any) adduced by the proponents of that notion (if there are any), so I reserve judgment.

[rubato]

The only definition of 'liberal' used by the researchers (or attributed to them) in the opening article is that "they tend to be more open". I don't see any hard connection between that statement and a social or political "ideology".

""The way openness is measured, it's really about receptivity to different lifestyles, for example, or different norms or customs," he told FoxNews.com. "We hypothesize that individuals with a genetic predisposition toward seeking out new experiences [a measure of openness] will tend to be more liberal" -- but only if they had a number of friends when growing up, Fowler cautioned."

I think I'd have to read the original article to make sense out of claims like that. How is "openness" measured? Concretely?

In any case many aspects of character and personality have a large genetic component. It is entirely possible that the sadistic love of inflicting pain which animates most conservative approaches to public policy is biologically determined and not due to ignorance and intellectual sloth. Perhaps we really should pity them for being psychologically stunted and deformed?

yrs,
rubato

[Econoline]

"Liberal Gene"?

Would that be Gene McCarthy (discovered in 1968)?