Report: Biology May Shape Political Views

The Chronicle:

If conservatives and liberals can’t see eye to eye, it may be because their brains are wired differently from birth, according to researchers who have for the first time found a link between people’s political leanings and their physiology.

The researchers’ report, published in today’s issue of the journal Science, suggests that genetic differences may help explain why some people favor capital punishment and the Iraq War, while others support gun control and foreign aid. It’s part of a growing field, called “genopolitics,” that is threatening to rewrite the rules of political science, which hold that political beliefs are shaped by people’s environment and experiences. To work in the new field, political scientists are scrambling to learn genetics, neuroscience, and other aspects of biology.

This line of work is drawing together diverse research teams that include political scientists, geneticists, behavioral economists, social psychologists, and neuroscientists. It has also forced political scientists to broaden their training in the life sciences. At the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association last month in Boston, [University of Nebraska researcher and professor of political science John R.] Hibbing spent an afternoon teaching a course called “Genetics for Political Scientists.”

A Duke University critic, assistant professor of political science Evan Charney says, “I don’t think you can conclude anything from this, anything whatsoever.”

The Times Online, in referring to an image used in one of the two laboratory tests, headlines its story on the report, How scary is this spider? That may depend on your politics.