Are Our Political Beliefs Encoded in Our DNA?
In December 2008, The New York Times Magazine reported on the emerging science of “genopolitics.”
“For years,” Emily Biuso wrote,
scholars have assumed that a voter pulls the lever because she grew up in a voting household or perhaps sat through a lot of civics classes. But this year two political scientists published studies claiming that in addition to environment, genes may be a primary influence on political engagement.
Biuso was among the first to talk about what has become a bitter dispute within the study of politics, a dispute in which the stakes are high and the potential consequences significant.
On one side of the debate are those like James Fowler, a professor of medical genetics and political science at the University of California, San Diego, and Darren Schreiber, a political scientist at U.C.L.A who point out, in a 2008 article in Science, that
In the past 50 years, biologists have learned a tremendous amount about human biology and its genetic basis. At the same time, political scientists have been intensively studying the effect of the social and institutional environment on political attitudes and behaviors. However, biologists and political scientists have been working largely in isolation of one another. Little cross-disciplinary work has been done.
The authors go on to argue:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/01/are-our-political-beliefs-encoded-in-our-dna/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131002
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