Trends in Genetics
ReviewSpecial Issue: Human GeneticsThe genetics of politics: discovery, challenges, and progress
Section snippets
Why use genetics to explore politics?
Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he, who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity; he is like the ‘Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one’ whom Homer denounces-the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts. Aristotle (Politics, Bk. I) [1].
Aristotle's claim is widely cited to emphasize the importance of politics to
Genetic influences on political attitudes and ideologies
Lindon Eaves and Hans Eysenck [7] conducted perhaps the first study exploring genetic influences on individual differences in political values using a classical twin design (CTD) that estimated genetic and environmental sources of variance. Monozygotic (MZ) co-twins correlated more highly than did dizygotic (DZ) co-twins on measures of ideology constructed from a scale of attitudes, including the death penalty, ethnocentrism, morality, unions, unemployment, and abortion, among others. The
Politics as pro-sociality: participation, cooperation, and voting behavior
Politics is more than attitudes and voting; political engagement, efficaciousness, political sophistication, and participation are of equal significance. Unlike attitudes, genetic influence on these behaviors has only recently been explored. However, the foundational elements of political participatory behavior, such as cooperation, trust, and pro-sociality, have a long history in genetics research. Twin studies indicated the importance of genes in contributing to pro-social behaviors [66], and
The future of genetics and political science
In 2008, it was questioned whether ‘the recent introduction of genetics as a source for preferences in the political science literature is a rogue wave or a more fundamental challenge to a central theoretical principle of the social sciences, leading to a broader paradigm that encompasses both biological and social influences.’ [75]. Four years later, it would be difficult to argue that this area of research is simply a rogue wave. Rather, the number of scholars, hundreds of publications,
Acknowledgments
We thank the National Science Foundation for funding training and most of the recent data collection in this area (1047687, 0921008, 0729493, 0721707, and 0721378). We also thank Kristen Jacobson, Levente Littvay, and the editors for their guidance and thoughtful comments. We would especially like to thank the pioneers of research in this area, Lindon Eaves, Nicholas Martin, and the late Hans Eysenck.
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2021, Studies in History and Philosophy of ScienceCitation Excerpt :In reality, however, researchers of genopolitics are well aware of the complexity of the process of translating genetic effects into behaviours and their focus only on selected causal influences is justified by methodological reductionism – a methodological directive that assumes the division of the studied system into small components. The analysis of the dispute over genopolitics clearly demonstrates the existence of cognitive and communication barriers between the disputing parties, as pointed out by Hatemi and McDermott (2012, p. 527): ‘Most researchers consider political traits to be influenced by thousands of genetic markers both indirectly and through interactions with numerous environmental stimuli and other genes in complex genomic, epigenetic, and neural pathways. By contrast, many criticisms are developed as if responding to the view that political traits are simple Mendelian traits, governed by a single gene or a small set of genes.