送交者: Latino2 于 2005-6-21, 12:57:27:
如果有的人天生是右派，却因种种原因误当了左派，后来就有可能叛变。
右派倾向于找右派结婚，左派倾向于找左派结婚，生下的儿女会倾向于继承其父母派别，共和党与民主党的分歧只会越来越大。
“出身不由自己选择，道路由自己选择”。你们都是“可以教育好的子女”。
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Some Politics May Be Etched in the Genes
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: June 21, 2005
Political scientists have long held that people's upbringing and experience determine their political views. A child raised on peace protests and Bush-loathing generally tracks left as an adult, unless derailed by some powerful life experience. One reared on tax protests and a hatred of Kennedys usually lists to the right.
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Inheriting AttitudesBut on the basis of a new study, a team of political scientists is arguing that people's gut-level reaction to issues like the death penalty, taxes and abortion is strongly influenced by genetic inheritance. The new research builds on a series of studies that indicate that people's general approach to social issues - more conservative or more progressive - is influenced by genes.
Environmental influences like upbringing, the study suggests, play a more central role in party affiliation as a Democrat or Republican, much as they do in affiliation with a sports team.
The report, which appears in the current issue of The American Political Science Review, the profession's premier journal, uses genetics to help answer several open questions in political science.
They include why some people defect from the party in which they were raised and why some political campaigns, like the 2004 presidential election, turn into verbal blood sport, though polls find little disparity in most Americans' views on specific issues like gun control and affirmative action.
The study is the first on genetics to appear in the journal. "I thought here's something new and different by respected political scholars that many political scientists never saw before in their lives," said Dr. Lee Sigelman, editor of the journal and a professor of political science at George Washington University.
Dr. Sigelman said that in many fields the findings "would create nothing more than a large yawn," but that "in ours, maybe people will storm the barricades."
Geneticists who study behavior and personality have known for 30 years that genes play a large role in people's instinctive emotional responses to certain issues, their social temperament.
It is not that opinions on specific issues are written into a person's DNA. Rather, genes prime people to respond cautiously or openly to the mores of a social group.
Only recently have researchers begun to examine how these predispositions, in combination with childhood and later life experiences, shape political behavior.
Dr. Lindon J. Eaves, a professor of human genetics and psychiatry at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the new research did not add much to this. Dr. Eaves was not involved in the study but allowed the researchers to analyze data from a study of twins that he is leading.
Still, he said the findings were plausible, "and the real significance here is that this paper brings genetics to the attention to a whole new field and gives it a new way of thinking about social, cultural and political questions."
In the study, three political scientists - Dr. John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska, Dr. John R. Alford of Rice University and Dr. Carolyn L. Funk of Virginia Commonwealth - combed survey data from two large continuing studies including more than 8,000 sets of twins.
From an extensive battery of surveys on personality traits, religious beliefs and other psychological factors, the researchers selected 28 questions most relevant to political behavior. The questions asked people "to please indicate whether or not you agree with each topic," or are uncertain on issues like property taxes, capitalism, unions and X-rated movies. Most of the twins had a mixture of conservative and progressive views. But over all, they leaned slightly one way or the other.
The researchers then compared dizygotic or fraternal twins, who, like any biological siblings, share 50 percent of their genes, with monozygotic, or identical, twins, who share 100 percent of their genes.
Calculating how often identical twins agree on an issue and subtracting the rate at which fraternal twins agree on the same item provides a rough measure of genes' influence on that attitude. A shared family environment for twins reared together is assumed.