For decades conservs have tried to say that liberals are some suffering from a mental disease or that it is a sickness or some such dribble……oops! It seems someone has found a liberal gene…..
Appearing in the latest edition of The Journal of Politics published by Cambridge University Press, the research focused on 2,000 subjects from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. By matching genetic information with maps of the subjects’ social networks, the researchers were able to show that people with a specific variant of the DRD4 gene were more likely to be liberal as adults, but only if they had an active social life in adolescence.Lead researcher James H. Fowler of UC San Diego and his colleagues hypothesized that people with the novelty-seeking gene variant would be more interested in learning about their friends’ points of view. As a consequence, people with this genetic predisposition who have a greater-than-average number of friends would be exposed to a wider variety of social norms and lifestyles, which might make them more liberal than average. They reported that “it is the crucial interaction of two factors – the genetic predisposition and the environmental condition of having many friends in adolescence – that is associated with being more liberal.” The research team also showed that this held true independent of ethnicity, culture, sex or age.
Fowler concludes that the social and institutional environment cannot entirely explain a person’s political attitudes and beliefs and that the role of genes must be taken into account. “These findings suggest that political affiliation is not based solely on the kind of social environment people experience,” said Fowler, professor of political science and medical genetics at the Univer. of San Diego.
Okay, I can just hear Limbaugh, Beck and the rest of Right Coast radio jerking off…..so liberals are born and conservs are made…is that about it?
Oh, pleee-ease… Put the same information another way round – extremists (like hard right conservs) have something LACKING in their genetic makeup! Now we ALL knew that, didn’t we? I mean, we didn’t nedd a goddamned expensive study to discover that people like Limbaugh have NO generosity of spirit, did we?
Really! The things you guys waste money on!
😆
See….we need to get on that list for grant cash……I mean we could do some amazing work and I bet it would be a lot more interesting….
Oh yes… we could study red-heads, blondes, brunettes – all sorts of interesting things 😆
My thought exactly……one that comes to mind…is hip size and happiness or satisfaction….
Yes… we could study why we see one woman as highly desirable and another not. We could study the effect of nagging on infidelity – lots of money and detailed exploration would be required.
Now we have plan on this one…a consensus….