Politics In Our Genes?

In the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta Iolanthe, a British Grenadier Guardsman named Sgt. Willis spends a lot of time on sentry duty thinking about the oddities of the universe. During the course of the opera he sings a song in which he shares some of his musings with us and remarks on how tickled he is by the fact

That Nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
                   
That’s born into the world alive
               
Is either a little Liberal
                   
Or else a little Conservative!

Politics is in our genes, Sgt. Willis suggests. It’s inborn.

But that’s just Gilbert being silly, right?

Maybe not.

A new study published in the American Political Science Review argues that, while party affiliation is more determined by the environment in which we are raised, our basic political instincts–conservative or liberal–are influenced by our genes.

The study relies on comparing the view of identical twins raised together to fraternal twins raised together. The results of such a study are suggestive, but not the gold standard of such research. The study was based on comparing twins raised together, but I’d like to see the study controlled by comparison to twins raised apart. If you’ve got two identical twins raised together, there may be additional forces at play that steer the twins toward sharing common opinions on thing besides just their genes. To remove these potential factors from the equation, one would want to look at the views of identical (and fraternal) twins not reared together.

Still, the evidence at hand is worth following up with further study.

The article concludes:

The researchers are not optimistic about the future of bipartisan cooperation or national unity. Because men and women tend to seek mates with a similar ideology, they say, the two gene pools are becoming, if anything, more concentrated, not less.

Okay, so we get culture wars . . . until the Roe effect runs its course and the anti-baby folks breed themselves into cultural obscurity.

GET THE STORY.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

11 thoughts on “Politics In Our Genes?”

  2. I know a family of five adult chidlren, all raised at home, same parents, etc. Two of them are flaming liberals. One an articulate conservative, one a gut-governed conservative, and one does not even know the debate is going on. So much for THAT theory. A genetics paper in a poli sci review? They can’t even keep their genres straight.

  3. I know a family of six children, all from the same parents. Three of them have brown eyes, 2 have blue eyes and one has almost hazel eyes. So much for the theory that eye color is genetic. A science post from a lawyer??!!

  5. Okay, so we get culture wars . . . until the Roe effect runs its course and the anti-baby folks breed themselves into cultural obscurity.
    The Lord can bring out good from even the greatest evils.

  6. Coincidentally, just before looking at this blog I was reading a local list where a posting reminded me of a signature tag I’ve sometimes used: “Experience beats in vain upon a congenital progressive.” — C. S. Lewis

  7. “So do liberals who become conservatives change their genes?”
    No, they start wearing slacks instead.
    (I’d have said “suits”, but, apart from an occasional wedding or funeral, I wear a suit only for Sunday Mass.)

  8. And just which group is the “anti-baby” group?
    I’d consider myself politically liberal, and I have three babies (and hope to have more).

  9. Steve, good try. At least two of the people ref’d in my post have completely changed political views in adulthood. none have changed eye color. or height, or blood type, or, well, you get the point. so much for THAT theory. genetics explains some things, not every thing. your bid….best, edp.

  10. Without having read the article, I’ll point out something that seems to have come up in comments.
    Correlative gene studies are no longer published in journals such as JAMA. Originally they were, i.e. the gay gene. The problem came that no one was ever able to replicate these studies. Twins studies are still considered better as Jimmy points out. Personally, I put a lot of this into the speculative realm. Scientists are trying to explain complex things (like rational thought or sexual proclivity) by looking at a small piece of a base-4 system. It is the equivalent of trying to explain the differences between Minesweeper and Solitaire, both base-2 (boolean) systems, by looking at a few dozen bytes of the respective programs.

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