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.
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.
"Ideology is about 40 percent heritable. It's almost half genes and half environment," Fowler told FoxNews.com.
For more, see Researchers Find the 'Liberal Gene' by , October 28, 2010 at FoxNews.com.
1 comment:
This seems implausible to me. With a half and half relationship it seems representative of the roughly 50/50 split of the population along liberal and conservative lines. It may be a correlation that is not causative but coincidental.
Post a Comment