I figured the recent post on conservatives and the amygdala, and liberals and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), wasn’t controversial enough. So why not go farther and discuss recent research that ties our political views to our genes?

I point you to the following paper: Peter K. Hatemi et al (there is a long list of als), “A Genome-Wide Analysis of Liberal and Conservative Political Attitudes,” recently published (2011) in the Journal of Politics. A PDF of the paper can be found here. And here is the abstract:

The assumption that the transmission of social behaviors and political preferences is purely cultural has been challenged repeatedly over the last 40 years by the combined evidence of large studies of adult twins and their relatives, adoption studies, and twins reared apart. Variance components and path modeling analyses using data from extended families quanti?ed the overall genetic in?uence on political attitudes, but few studies have attempted to localize the parts of the genome which accounted for the heritability estimates found for political preferences. Here, we present the ?rst genome-wide analysis of Conservative-Liberal attitudes from a sample of 13,000 respondents whose DNA was collected in conjunction with a 50-item sociopolitical attitude questionnaire. Several signi?cant linkage peaks were identi?ed and potential candidate genes discussed.

The technology used, “genome-wide linkage,” is one that the authors say was used to locate the BRACA1 and BRACA2 genes linked to breast cancer…. Basically, all the subjects (13,201) had completed the aforementioned political attitudes questionnaire and had given blood. Then there was an attempt to find chromosomal regions with polymorphisms–i.e., these regions vary in people–where the variance correlated with political views.

The rather amazing result–for any of us who stops to think about the incredibly vast distance between the genes we are born with and our political attitudes as adults–was that three regions were found to be linked in a way that was “significant” (one reaching the most stringent test of it) and one was linked in a way that was “suggestive.” (The technical stuff on all of this is in the paper.)

What could this mean? Well, as the authors write:

As we identified four regions of interest, and one that meets the strictest criteria, our ?ndings are consistent with what might be expected if the genetic component of variation in Conservatism-Liberalism resembles any other polygenic human trait, for which the genetic resemblance between relatives can only be resolved reliably into the effects of a large number of genes with small effects that typically cannot be identi?ed by linkage.

In other words, no gene is acting directly to determine our political views–there is no “liberal” or “conservative” gene–but there might be a combination of genes acting together that somehow predispose us to have particular politics, presumably through their role in influencing our brains and thus our personalities or social behaviors. Indeed, the most promising gene regions turned up in the study all involved “NMDA and glutamate related receptors.” The authors couldn’t resist speculating here:

Thought organization, information processing, capacity for abstract thought, learning, and performance are related to blockage of NMDA. Of particular interest to political ideology is the relationship between NMDA and performance on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). The WCST is a neuropsychological test of the ability to display flexibility in the face of changing schedules of reinforcement. By definition Conservatism and Liberalism have much to do with flexibility of opinion in the face of a changing world.

These are highly exploratory results. The scientists can’t even say that they identified, for sure, a single the genetic pathway that influences our political views. But at the same time, the genome wide fishing expedition didn’t turn up empty. They caught some things that will definitely be subjected to further research.

What’s the big picture? Here are the authors again:

To ?nd a signi?cant linkage region that may implicate certain genetic markers is not to say that a particular gene determines a particular behavior. Nor do our results advocate that genes have some greater effects than that of the environment. This is certainly not the case. Rather, we are starting from two opposite ends of a very complex process: DNA, somewhere near the very basic matter of what living organisms are made of on one end; and an expressed complex behavior (political ideology) on the other. Behavior is the ?nal end product of all that goes in and out of what it is to be human, interacting in a complex and changing environment during one’s lifecycle (e.g., puberty, menopause, etc.). We have barely begun to understand what goes on in between those two spaces, which makes this area of research exciting, while also inspiring caution. The understanding that we cannot yet accurately map how genes in?uence brain processes and biological mechanisms which in turn interact with our upbringing, social life, personal experience, the weather, diet, etc, to somehow be expressed in part as a ConservativeLiberal orientation, is the exact reason that genomewide analyses are valuable and necessary for political science. Human behavior emerges from the interaction and interplay of genes, socialization and environmental stimuli, working through ontogenetic neurobiological processes embedded in an evolutionary framework (Dobzhansky 1973). So far as the data suggest, a theory and method which includes genetic in?uences, no matter how large or small, accounts for portions of Conservative-Liberal orientations that environment-only models do not.

I truly find this amazing. But, if this is what the science says for now, there is only one thing to do: more science.

Many implants like this pacemaker can receive
and transmit wireless signals

What’s the News: Topping the list of things you don’t want hacked is your heart. And with 300,000 medical devices such as pacemakers and drug pumps implanted each year, many of which can be controlled through wireless signals, that might soon be a real risk for patients to consider. 

To prevent such attacks, researchers from MIT and UMass Amherst are developing a jamming device that can be worn as a necklace or watch and keeps implants from receiving orders from unauthorized senders. The team will present their experiments with defibrillators [pdf], with off-the-shelf radio transmitters playing the role of the shield, at the SIGCOMM conference in Toronto.

How the Heck:

Many medical implants send data about how a patient is doing directly to the doctor via radio transmission. And doctors can tweak implants’ performance by sending instructions like “Release more of that drug” or “Beat faster.”
The team’s device, called a shield, would intercept such instructions and, if they were encrypted using the key available only to the patient’s doctor, send them along to the implant, while unauthorized messages—which might go something like ”Provide a lethal shock to the heart”— wouldn’t be passed on. The implant’s own messages would in turn be encrypted and sent onto the doctor. The team found ...

Yesterday, the Moon passed into the Earth’s shadow for the longest lunar eclipse in many years. Unfortunately for me, North America had its back turned to the event, but folks in South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia had a great view. Tim Bates, in Adelaide, took this fantastic series of pictures of the Moon in and out of totality:

He took one picture every three minutes or so and combined them into this composite. It reminds me strongly of the lunar eclipse we did get to see here in the States last December. He posted a nice picture showing a series of close-ups, too.

YouTube user Jakub Barabas posted a lovely video of the eclipse as well:

Once the Moon went into full eclipse he increased the exposure time a bit so you can see the red glow on the Moon’s surface, which is difficult to photograph when exposing correctly for the still-brightly-lit surface. The red is due to sunlight passing through Earth’s atmosphere before getting to the Moon; it’s the same reason sunsets are sometimes red.

Did you take some ...

I’ll be on “Think,” an hour-long talk show on Dallas’s public radio station KERA at 2 pm EST, to talk about A Planet of Viruses. Listen live here.

There comes a time in every science writer’s career when one must write about female sea monkeys having sex with male sea monkeys from the future, and the troubles that follow.

That time is now.

In many species of animals, males and females have a conflict of evolutionary interests. Males compete with each other for the opportunity to fertilize the eggs of females. Males use all sorts of strategies in these competitions. They fight with each other for territory, they scare off intruding males, they put scrapers into females to dump out the sperm from previous males, and they inject “anti-aphrodiasiacs” to make females unreceptive to other males.

A number of experiments suggest that females have to pay a steep price for these male shenanigans. Anti-aphrodisiacs are toxic to the females, shortening their lifetime. Why would males harm the females that carry their offspring? In many species, males can mate with many females. The long-term health of any one female doesn’t matter–in an evolutionary sense–to the male.

As natural selection favors increasingly deadly male mating strategies, this onslaught opens up the opportunity, in turn, for the evolution of counterstrategies in females. In some species, ...

This is the fifth and last in a series of posts elaborating on my recent American Prospect magazine article entitled “The Reality Gap: Now more than Ever, Republicans and Democrats are separated by expertise–and by facts.”

Okay. So now we’ve seen how academia and expertise have shifted left, how counter-expertise has moved in from the right, how this leaves us with a postmodern political culture, but how nevertheless, if you drill down on basic scientific and policy facts, you find Democrats, who are closer to expertise, much more aligned with them. There are exceptions, to be sure. But that’s the picture.

However, the final point is the one that matters most–facts and expertise aren’t helping Democrats, nor is the fact that they have them helping America. Minds aren’t being changed, consensus isn’t being formed (just look at one of the latest comment threads). And among expertise-saturated liberals, there’s a failure to see why this is happening–and even, sometimes, the delusion that rational and fact-based argument is going to solve problems that are really rooted in value differences:

Liberals, to Lakoff, are just different. Science, social science, and research in general support an Enlightenment ethic–finding the best facts so as to improve the world and society and thus advance liberals’ own moral system, which is based on a caring and “nurturant” parent-run family. “So there is a reason in the moral system to like science in general,” Lakoff says. Here also arises a chief liberal weakness, probably amplified by an academic training: constantly trying to use factual and reasoned arguments to make the world better and being amazed to find that even though these arguments are sound, well researched, and supported, they are disregarded or even actively attacked. Too often liberals–we–fail to see how our very credentials, and the habits of argument they impart, set the stage for the postmodern world just as soon as our unending factual dance with conservatives begins….

So do all of us, left and right, care about expertise? Sure, when it suits us. We also usually agree about where expertise lies–when it isn’t contested. “You would certainly be horrified if you found out the guy who was flying your airplane didn’t have a pilot’s license,” Kerry Emanuel says.

Politically, though, we use expertise in service of different agendas–and reason for different reasons. And we don’t all necessarily share the Enlightenment ethic of using science and research to lift us all up into a more caring and progressive society. Indeed, liberals who do share this ethic often don’t seem to understand what’s happening when reasoned, evidence—based arguments fail to have their desired effect–and are countered by flimsy objections or unjust attacks.

We’ve got a lot of science, a lot of experts–and a lot to learn.

Again, you can read the full article here.

Designers of prosthetics and artificial organs have for a long time tried to replicate the human body. From the earliest peg legs to some of the most modern robotic limbs, the prosthetic we make looks like the body part that needs replacing. Lose a hand? Dean Kamen’s DEKA arm, aka the “Luke arm,” is a robotic prosthesis that will let you grasp an egg or open a beer. The Luke arm is a cutting edge piece of technology based on a backward idea – let’s replace the thing that went missing by replicating it with metal and motors. Whether it’s an artificial leg or a glass eye, prostheses often seek to reproduce not only the function of the body part, but the form and feel as well.

There are good reasons to want to reproduce form and feel along with function. The first reason is that our original bits and pieces work quite well. The human body as a whole is a natural marvel, let alone the immense complexity and dexterity of our hands, eyes, hearts, and legs. No need to reinvent the wheel, just replicate the natural model you’ve ...