{"id":73612,"date":"2012-08-28T20:49:14","date_gmt":"2012-08-29T04:49:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=18064"},"modified":"2012-08-28T20:49:14","modified_gmt":"2012-08-29T04:49:14","slug":"a-political-animal-in-the-genes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2012\/08\/28\/a-political-animal-in-the-genes\/","title":{"rendered":"A political animal in the genes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Trends in Genetics<\/em> has a review article, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cell.com\/trends\/genetics\/abstract\/S0168-9525(12)00111-4\">The genetics of politics: discovery, challenges, and progress<\/a>. The main reason I point to these sorts of papers isn&#8217;t that I think they&#8217;re revolutionary. Usually they aren&#8217;t. <strong>Rather, the public domain has totally forgotten about this domain of study.<\/strong> Most of the informed and high-toned discussion presumes that almost everything of worthy note is socially constructed. If not, then the counterpoint is a crude caricature of genetic determinism which is refutable in a blink of the eye. It&#8217;s as if someone was commissioned to paint <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/R._Daneel_Olivaw\">R. Daneel Olivaw<\/a>, and ended up using crayon to sketch out the Frankenstein monster.<\/p>\n<p>For example, in sex differences the public debate veers between evolutionary psychological\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Leave_It_to_Beaver\">Leave It To Beaver<\/a>, pre-scientific cultural traditionalism,\u00a0and <em>de facto <\/em>Blank Slatism. On the one hand you have to deal with people who use &#8220;scare quotes&#8221; around the &#8220;highly speculative&#8221; &#8220;hypothesis&#8221; that males have a greater tendency toward <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Fight_Club\">inter-personal physical aggression<\/a> than females (including in the comments of this blog, so spare with lectures about how this is a marginal perspective; I&#8217;m pretty sure I talk to people about behavior genetics a lot more than you do, though if not I&#8217;d &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Trends in Genetics has a review article, The genetics of politics: discovery, challenges, and progress. The main reason I point to these sorts of papers isn&#8217;t that I think they&#8217;re revolutionary. Usually they aren&#8217;t. Rather, the public&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-behavior-genetics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73612"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73706,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73612\/revisions\/73706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}