Genes influence voting behavior?
Before you put too much credence in this, read this.
I’d love to find a link to the original study so I could read it for myself. Anyone who can supply one?
And I’ve often wondered how those who believe that political orientation is partly genetic—as some of the researchers quoted in the first link do—would explain someone like me.
[ADDENDUM: Just found the link. I’m busy today and can’t read it now, but will try to do so later. In the meantime, here it is for anyone who cares to plow through it.]
Yes, identical twins will make similar choices. Without going back to find the sources, I recall reading studies – not newspaper summations- years ago that identical twins separated at birth were very similar in later life, even down to occupational choice.
But to apply this to a non-identical population, and then claim that voting is genetically determined for a heterogeneous population, is another matter.
Bunk. The sample size is too small to draw general populace conclusions. In a small sample size like this, the noted 5% increase attributed to the gene is random deviation, not even a correlation, much less causation.
Piss poor statistics.
Genetics certainly influence behaviour, but only in so broad terms as activity or passivity, temper, type of nerve system (weak or strong, excitable or with prevalence of inhibition, and so on). This is a very far cry from any specific philosophical or political attitude, which is largely independent from lizard brain reactions, and any cognitive position can accomodate a very broad spectrum of inherited neurophysiologic patterns. The work referred in NYT is full of non sequitur: I can believe that genes can influence your decision to vot or not to vote, but how to vote is beyond genetic influence.
I’d send you the .pdf but we only get Journal of Politics –to 11/30/2007 — nevertheless still trying
Skimming the study itself, it looks like a lot of math applied to a fundamentally poor question. Genes code for proteins, not for behavior- although they can set the stage for the sorts of reactions people are predisposed to.
The variants of those MAO-A and 5-HTT alleles mentioned in the other Fowler and Dawes paper have actually been studied a fair bit- in the context of things like antisocial personality disorder and impulsive violence. Low-functioning variants, as the paper briefly notes, are associated with greater impulsivity and aggression.
So, the only conclusion that could be within spitting distance of honestly drawn is that… people with a more stable temperament are more likely to vote.
Not nearly as exciting.
First of all, voting – an essential ingredient of ‘Democratic’ institution – is of relatively new origin, may be the last 300 years or so. And gene mutations take generations. So, how did a ‘voting’ gene get started in the human gene pool?
How do you explain my political convictions? Born and raised in India, my dad has a socialist bent, has voted on and off – not reliably. But that is not me.
I guess I fall in the study’s ‘variance’!!!
When I was in college, my Introduction to Sociology course started with a long discussion about whether sociology was a science. I found it rather strange, as if the sociologists were a bit insecure and were doing all they could to collect inconclusive data so as to appear scientific. This sounds like this project is designed to win a grant from people who know very little about biology.
I was glad to see that you posted about this amusing article. Really, though I was surprised that you didn’t draw particular attention to the quotes from John T. Jost in the last 2 paragraphs. While the manuscript simply tries to use genes to account for political participation (voting), Jost makes a huge stretch by arguing that genetics account for political orientation. For your enjoyment, here’s those last 2 paragraphs.
“In some ways, this conclusion is not so surprising, given that we have known for over 50 years that there are basic cognitive, motivational, and behavioral differences between leftists and rightists,” Jost said.
“Unless one believes that basic psychological characteristics have no genetic antecedents whatsoever, one would have anticipated these results on the basis of the psychological literature,” Jost said. “Still, it’s quite important that these researchers appear to have identified specific gene combinations that are linked to political orientation,” he said.
Well here it is:
http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/two_genes_predict_voter_turnout.pdf
also check this out: http://rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.ytmnd.com/
I can only imagine the left wing academia nuts future solutions to this percieved problem.
Handicap parking places at the front door of voting precincts for the voting impaired?
The genetically blessed counting as only three fifths of a vote?
A general rule of application mathematics and statistics to raw data of sociology and psychology is “Garbage in, garbage out”. Yes, twin studies comparing prevalence of some trait in dizigotic/monozigotic twins is the golden standard of exploring genetic conditionality of traits, but such studies are plagued by insufficient samle sizes. Only when the dfference is so striking that is evident without statistics, its reality can be confirmed statistically. But if it is not evident by glance, no statistics of this sort can reveal it. Opposite is true: sometimes apparent difference evaporates after statistical analysis.
But there is more serious, paradigmatic defect in traditional scientistic approach reducing traits either to genetics of environment: in reality many of them do not fall to anyone of these, but are the results of individual development casually independent from genes and environment, that is, result of indeterministic self-organization. This indeterminism of complex system development makes it unpredictable and dependent on free choices of individ. That is why psychology and sociology are not sciences, and never will be.
It’s a load of bs for many reasons. One not often addressed, a lot of the left is ‘conservative’ if you judge it impartially. It is full of conservative notions….
Funny how an article that talks about the study linking genetics with voter turnout gets transfigured into proof that genes account for political orientation. Of course, I suppose that’s also why the eugenicists tended to be to the left, eh?
Human genetics, especially behavioral, is an exiting and a very needed field, but it is still very immature. Eugenics is a premature discipline: we know too little to recommend any specific policy, but it can have a brilliant future. But real research in this field is severely crumpled by ideological phobias.
Correction: I meant “exciting”, not “exiting”.
So is McCain monozygotic or dizygotic? What about Obama. I need to know where these people stand.
Only handful of traits can be directly associated with one or two genes. Absolute majority of them are results of complex interaction between hundreds of genes, so to identify the role of any one of them by observational data is impossible. This is the main stumbling block of darwinism: individual genes are invisible to natural selection, it affects only phenotypes, and relation between genotype and phenotype is not simple and in most cases can not be established by statistics. Only for rare genetical diseases cause-effect relationship can be established, but natural variants of the norm usualy have not distinct genetical explanation.
This is a common fallacy viewing genes as actors defining traits. No, they are simply texts read by emerging development system, and different systems read different texts from this vast library, and react differently on what they read. Modern genetics is 99% theory of misprints, and you can not have a meaninfull view of literature and its trends based on data on misprints.