The Republican Brain

by is Mooney

  In fact, the very attempt to pit genes and environment in opposition to one another is nowadays a passé notion in science. We know that genes strongly influence us; we also know that environmental influences, aka our “experiences,” change us and change our brains. And get this: Environmental influences also change our genes, or at least how they are expressed by our bodies, via the production of proteins in individual cells (including individual brain cells). “Epigenetics” is the study of the many factors that modify the way our genes are expressed, even without any changes to the basic DNA code. It’s more about genes “switching off” and “switching on”—in different cells, in different phases of life, and even in response to our own choices and behaviors.

  When it comes to political genetics, for instance, some research suggests that while we’re living at home with our parents and growing up, the family environment has a lot of influence on our ideologies—especially during our teenage years. But once we leave the nest, perhaps to attend college, it is suggested that then our genes kick in and start shaping us.

  No wonder this area is complicated, and promises to fuel generations of ever-more-sophisticated research.

  If genes are influencing our political views, you can rest assured their influence is not going to be manifested through our elbows. It’ll be manifested through our brains. One obvious area to examine will be how our genes influence neurotransmitters like dopamine, which carry chemical messages between our brain cells.

  The question then becomes, which genes are involved, and what do they do?

  It is very unlikely that we will find a few political genes that explain everything, or even that have very large effects. Rather, with a complicated social behavior like one’s political views, there are probably thousands of regions of the human genome involved, and these are affecting us in different ways—ways that are often triggered by the environment, and that vary over a lifetime.

  At this very moment, the search for them is on. Scientists like Hatemi are conducting genome-wide studies to try to find what are called polymorphisms or markers—areas where the human genome varies from individual to individual—that are related to politics. This requires vast studies, with thousands of participants who get their genomes scanned and answer political questionnaires. Eventually, the hope is that markers will be identified that are statistically linked to political opinions—but it will probably turn out to be thousands of them, and it will be very hard to find all of them.

  So far, there is at least one “liberal gene” claim. University of California-San Diego political scientist James Fowler and his colleagues have highlighted a gene called DRD4, which seems to be involved in novelty seeking. Technically, the gene codes for a protein receptor that is activated by dopamine, a chemical messenger in the brain. The idea seems to be that a particular variant of this gene (if you have it) plays a role in the trait Openness to Experience, and thus, in liberalism. But here again, there’s a gene-environment interaction: The gene’s contribution to Openness appears to depend on your social life and how many friends you had growing up.

  That’s certainly intriguing, but again, we shouldn’t place too much weight on any one gene to explain why people vary in their political outlooks. Consider once again that steadfast analogy—the role of genes in height. Whereas genes appear to explain 40 percent or more of the variability in our ideologies, they explain 80 percent of the variability in height. However, scientists digging through the genome to try to find the “height” regions, over years and years, have only found about 20 percent of the specific DNA strips involved, according to Hatemi. That means sixty percent of the genetic regions involved in height remain unidentified, although we know they’re in the genome . . . somewhere.

  Right now, Hatemi continues, less than one percent of politics can be similarly explained. He expects that to gradually change as researchers continue to comb through genomes—and then, the real fun begins. Once regions are identified that are involved in politics, the question will become how their activity affects us: Not just at one point in time, but over a lifetime, in interaction with the environment.

  For many scientists, this itself portends a lifetime of exceedingly complicated research. But why do it?

  The thrill is to be part of a dramatic new merger of political science, psychology, and biology that ultimately promises to uncover a “science of human nature”—sure to yield fruit, but not necessarily to produce full clarity any time soon. For now, you have to be patient, live in the uncertainty, and thrill in the search.

  Any guesses about what personality types will want to be working in this area, or how they are likely to vote?

  On this account of the origins of our politics, it would appear not only that political dispositions travel in families, but so do personalities—and these traits would presumably emerge when we’re quite young.

  And, there’s suggestive evidence supporting this notion as well.

  It is difficult and expensive to conduct a so-called longitudinal study that looks at the personalities and behaviors of young children, and then follows them until they are grown-ups to see how they identify politically. That kind of lifelong commitment to a scientific study is rare, and even heroic.

  But in at least one case, it has been done. And the research, conducted at the University of California at Berkeley beginning in 1969, suggests that the children’s politics had already been set in motion at an early age. Note also that because this study was longitudinal, it is hard to imagine how the researchers could bias it: They didn’t know what was going to happen to the kids they observed. They couldn’t superimpose knowledge they would only gain later on what they saw as they watched three-year-olds play.

  That’s what makes the results so stunning. As one part of the Berkeley study, preschoolers were first assessed at ages 3 and 4 for their personalities, and then were asked, much later at age 23, a battery of political questions. That’s how the researchers learned that children who later turned out to be conservatives had been observed as “uncomfortable with uncertainty, as susceptible to a sense of guilt, and as rigidifying when experiencing duress.” The later-life liberals, meanwhile, had been described as children as “autonomous, expressive, and self-reliant.” In other words, wrote the researchers, what centrally separated the future conservative children from the future liberal ones was that the former were seeking to “over-control” their environment, whereas the latter were seeking to “under-control” it.

  Order and chaos, yin and yang—right there in the sandbox.

  We’ve come a long way. Not only have we learned about the psychological underpinnings of political ideology—and seen how strong the evidence is that our political views are rooted, at least in part, in personality and psychological needs. We’ve also sought further confirmation of this insight in the 100 billion neurons of the brain (and the 100 trillion connections between them) and the more than 3 billion DNA base pairs that make up the human genome.

  Not surprisingly, once you reach these realms, the search becomes vastly more difficult. These are the cutting edge areas of modern biological science, where real revolutions are expected to occur in the 21st century, as our powers of scientific computation steadily increase. No wonder we don’t have all the answers yet from political neuroscience or political genetics.

  What’s surprising, in fact, is that we have such suggestive answers at all. “If you had called me four years ago and said, what is your view on whether Republicans and Democrats have different brains, I would have said no,” said the University of California-San Diego’s Darren Schreiber. Now, he sees it differently. It appears that people are partly making their political brains, and partly inheriting them, but the sum total of the process is measurable divergences in brain structure or in brain functioning. The result is that, in looking at those brains, we can already pinpoint consistent differences, between left and right, in key regions.

  I’ve said plenty already about the high degree of scientific uncertai
nty that remains in this field, so I won’t further belabor it. The more I learn about the science—reading the studies and interviewing those who are designing them so I can understand what’s written between the lines of their research papers—the more I grow convinced that it all points in an obvious direction. But at the same time, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if we don’t yet have the right overarching theory or organizing concept to unite all of the evidence—and if, in the next decade, much of this evidence winds up being reorganized into a different paradigm that nobody has thought up yet.

  The evidence will still be there, of course. There’s just too much for it all to be wrong. How it’s all ultimately interpreted, though—that could certainly change. And that’s something that, as good liberals, we have to be ready for.

  In closing this chapter, I think it is necessary to consider what it might mean, in an evolutionary sense, to find that people’s genes and brains vary in a way that leads to different tendencies in politics. If you find evidence that a human trait has a genetic basis, it is natural to inquire why that is—and whether evolution through the process of natural selection might have “put it there.”

  Asking about whether evolution “intended” for us to be liberals and conservatives is a lot like asking whether it “intended” for us to be religious and irreligious. In evolutionary terms, what you are actually asking is whether politics (or religion) is an adaptation: a direct product of Darwinian natural selection, one that exists because it increased our ancestors’ chances of surviving until they reproduced. For any trait, there’s always another possibility as well: It could be a by-product, a feature that arose more accidentally, because of other adaptations.

  For an example of a trait that is a by-product, consider the redness of our blood. As the renowned Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker explains:

  Is there some adaptive advantage to having red blood, maybe as camouflage against autumn leaves? Well, that’s unlikely, and we don’t need any other adaptive explanation, either. The explanation for why our blood is red is that it is adaptive to have a molecule that can carry oxygen, mainly hemoglobin. Hemoglobin happens to be red when it’s oxygenated, so the redness of our blood is a byproduct of the chemistry of carrying oxygen. The color per se was not selected for . . . Random stuff happens in evolution. Certain traits can become fixed through sheer luck of the draw.

  When considered in this context, it seems exceedingly unlikely that the evolutionary process had Republicans and Democrats “in mind.” Nor were liberals and conservatives probably part of the endgame. As I’ve noted, the concept of a left-right divide originated in the French Revolution, not much more than 200 years ago. By contrast, Homo sapiens with complex tools, hunting styles, and symbolic art forms originated in Africa about 160,000 years ago.

  Evolution did, however, build brains that were capable of intricate social interactions, ingenuity, and creativity—and of course, beliefs and opinions and group identification (including defending the in-group and attacking the out-group). And it did this in a context when life was certainly more difficult, often more brutal and violent, than it was today.

  Our political beliefs and differences could thus be a by-product of these more core traits, varying within some natural range and interacting in different combinations in different people. A tendency to be distrustful of outsiders, say, or a tendency to want to try new things. Each, perhaps, comes in a variety of forms or degrees, and we all wind up somewhere on a spectrum—and these tendencies then predispose us to adopt certain political positions.

  Political beliefs could also be partly influenced by physical traits that are far more basic to humans, and that were definitely acted on by natural selection.

  As an example, consider male strength. In recent intriguing research by a group of evolutionary psychologists led by Aaron Sell of Griffith University, it was found that stronger men (as measured by bicep size, the amount of weigh they could lift at the gym in exercises like arm curls, and other measures) were more likely to show anger, had a greater history of getting into fights, and—politically—were more in favor of the death penalty, military spending, and the Iraq War. Male strength is surely an evolutionary adaptation. But these modern-day political offshoots of male strength would presumably be by-products, and more accidental. There was no such thing as modern large-scale war when we evolved, and there’s no way one man’s individual physical strength could determine the outcome in Iraq. Yet the stronger men in the study supported the Iraq invasion more.

  According to Sell and his colleagues, here’s how such a result could come about. If you’re stronger, you “learn”—or at least, your brain calculates—that showing anger works as a negotiating technique (because you intimidate people), and that force works to resolve conflicts in your favor (because you beat up people). This then spills over into your view of the world, including your political views. “People have these intuitive gut feelings about whether or not force works,” says Sell, “and this stems from this evolutionary environment in which physical strength was a good predictor of your ability to survive and use aggression. So our modern minds are still designed that way.”

  Not only does this suggest that conservatives could probably beat up liberals, if it ever came to that. It also implies, once again, that our political differences may be a by-product of actual evolutionary adaptations, and one consequence of plopping down evolved human beings in liberal democracies.

  Yet despite the many reasons for thinking of politics as an evolutionary by-product, some thinkers—including Everett Young—suggest that evolution may have built us to vary in subtle but important ways because a society fares better when it has both “liberal” and also “conservative” tendencies in it. What would the core tendencies be? Something like maintaining order, versus generating innovation. Protecting and serving, versus creating and challenging. Once again, we’re back to the yin-and-yang view of our politics.

  One difficulty with such an account, though, is that our differences today seem highly dysfunctional, rather than functional. And there’s an even deeper problem. This is a group selection theory, one that proposes that natural selection operated at the level of a group of individuals, to make it more fit to survive, rather than operating at the level of the individual or the gene. Such group selection theories have long been viewed skeptically in the field of evolutionary biology, although they have recently undergone a revival.

  The truth is that very little is known about why political tendencies are so strongly influenced by our genes, and what evolution might have to say about that. It’s an area where, surely, there will be many insights in the coming years.

  The last four chapters have made it very clear that liberals and conservatives are different, in ways that extend far beyond explicit ideology. And these differences are highly pertinent to my analysis of why it is that we have such a war over the facts in the U.S.—and why one side, the liberal side, is usually right.

  But the background against which all of this plays out is hardly a static one, either in the United States or anywhere else in the world. American politics in particular have changed dramatically over the last 40 years, and it would be stunning if this had no impact on the dynamics that interest us. Parties have changed, and people have changed parties. New institutions have grown up and the media have been exploded and rebuilt.

  These changes surely work in interaction with the basic tendencies I’ve been surveying—tendencies for people to rigorously defend their beliefs, for instance, and for liberals and conservatives to approach the world differently. In other words, if you want to understand why Tea Party followers don’t believe in global warming or the risks of breaching the debt ceiling, studying fundamental liberal-conservative differences will only get you so far. I contend that those differences are an essential part of the story—but still only part of the story.

  In the next chapter, then, I will seek to interweave nature and nurture—or psychology and the environment—wh
en it comes to the relationship between liberals, conservatives, science, and facts.

  Notes

  111 Let’s begin In preparing this chapter I have greatly benefited from many conversations and exchanges with Andrea Kuszewski. Her own take on the matter, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Liberals and Conservatives,” can be found online at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2011/09/07/your-brain-on-politics-the-cognitive-neuroscience-of-liberals-and-conservatives/.

  111 the amygdala Again, see Andrea Kuszewski, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Liberals and Conservatives,” online at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2011/09/07/your-brain-on-politics-the-cognitive-neuroscience-of-liberals-and-conservatives/.

  111 “conflict monitoring” Matthew M. Botvinik et al, “Conflict Monitoring and Cognitive Control,” Psychological Review, 2001, Vol. 108, No. 3, pp. 624–652. See also Matthew M. Botvinick et al, “Conflict Monitoring and Anterior Cingulate Cortex: An Update,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 8, Issue 12, 539–546, 1 December 2004.

  111 a recent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study Kanai et al, “Political Orientations are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults,” Current Biology, 21, 1–4, April 26, 2011.

  112 “I took this on as a fairly frivolous exercise” Quoted in Joe Churcher, “Brain shape ‘shows political allegiance,’” The Independent, December 28, 2010.

  112 “hardwired not to be hardwired” Interview with Darren Schreiber, July 28, 2011.