D: There are polarizing -- my
colleague, he pulls research. the Republicans and Democrats are more polarized
than they have ever been in our political history. So we're in a very unusual moment of
politics, at least from the best way that Political Scientists have for
measuring these things. We see more differences
between Republicans and Democrats in Congress right now than we have ever seen
in American History, and they've got really fantastic measures that go back all
the way to the very First Congress, so the parties aren't closer together than
they've ever been, they're actually farther apart than they've ever been.
R: And who is doing that
research?
D: This is some work that's been
going on for a long time by a guy named Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, and a
bunch of other Political Scientists have followed along and are now
collaborating with them. They did some
fascinating studies that allow them to take every vote ever passed in Congress,
in the House and in the Senate, and put it into a computer and ask the computer
to see if there are dimensions to that data, and the computer spits out "Hey,
I've got this one dimension that seems to explain 85% of the votes in Congress." And when you look at that one dimension that predicts
85% of the votes in Congress, it looks an awful lot like what we would call
Liberal-Conservative. And that appears
to be consistent for a few hundred years of American History.
R: Wow. That sounds like someone interesting to
interview. Now I want to throw something
at you. There is an article that
basically is saying, Your Brain on Pseudoscience,
by Stephen Poole, and it's published in The New Statesman. And he says, "The dazzling real achievements
of brain research are routinely pressed into service for questions they were
never designed to answer. This is a
plague of "Neurosciencism: a.k.a. Neurobabble, Nuerobollox, or Neurotrash; and
it's everywhere." And this is by a guy
named Stephen Poole. What is your
response to that?
D: I haven't read it, but he's
probably right to a large degree. We've
got to be very careful on how we interpret this research. I think, generally, I've been pretty happy if
I've been talking to journalists about how they've been reporting on [our
work], because I think they've captured one of the key nuances in our paper,
[and that] is, that we show that the results that we're getting are so strong
in terms of the connection between brain activity and party affiliation, that
it can't be genetic. That sounds like a
paradox, but the people who have looked at twin studies and other ways of
estimating the effects of genetics on political affiliation or political
ideology, have shown that there is definitely an effect, but it is a limited
effect.
So, you don't get your Party from your genes, but there's an influence
of genetics - on your political affiliation, and on your political
ideology. The influence of your genetics
on your party affiliation, the heredity of it, looks about like ten percent [10%]
of the variation is explained by genes, which is really not very much, and in
fact, it's in many cases. These are studies
done across a number of different nations, they're not just in the US, they're
in a number of places. Party affiliation
just doesn't look very genetic. It may
be [that] less than ten percent [10%], to the extent that it exists at all, of
your being a Republican or being a Democrat, can be attributed to your
genes.
Political Ideology is more biologically inheritable. That appears to be in the forty percent [40%]
range, again, across a number of different countries where this has been studied. So, being more Liberal, being more
Conservative, that is about 40%, so that means also 60% of it is not related to
your biological heredity. Already we
know there is a kind of upper bound of the contribution of genetics. In our research, what we're showing is that
we can account for a little bit more than fifty percent [50%] of the variation
in our data, account for about 50% of the variation of Republican-Democrat, by
using this brain imaging data, which tells us that it can't be genetic.
What I think is going on is that being a Republican or a Democrat is
actually changing your brain. Again,
getting to that idea of neuroplasticity: when we engage with a group of people,
when we watch Fox news, when we listen to NPR, when we read The New Statesman
or The New Republic or whatever we're reading, that's changing the way that our
brain is functioning, and even changing the structure of our brain. The results that we get in this Red-Brain,
Blue-Brain Study suggest that the amount of relationship between your party
affiliation and your brain activity is so strong, that it can't just be coming
from your genes. It's got to be coming
from either the choices you are making as an individual, and/or your
interaction with the political environment.
So both the choices I'm making to watch Fox News or not watch Fox News,
and the choices I'm making to participate in conversations about politics or
not, that's influencing the way that my brain is structured and functioning.
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