Voting: In Your Genes?

摘要

Behavior geneticists say almost every human behavior that can be reliably measured-from TV-watching to optimism-is significantly influenced by genes. Now they're extending their reach into the voting booth. Numerous studies over the past 2 decades, the first led by psychologist Nicholas Martin at the Queensland Institute for Medical Research in Australia, have indicated that genes have a significant influence over whether you're "liberal" or "conservative" on various political and social issues. Some heritability estimates have been as high as 50%. That's roughly the heritability found for many personality traits such as "extraversion" or "agreeableness," and it implies that, in a given population, about half of the variation in a particular trait is attributable to genetic differences. Now James Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, and grad student Christopher Dawes say they've produced fresh evidence that DNA also has a hand in the intensity of someone's partisan attachment and even in whether someone bothers to vote.