The Genetics of Political Behavior

How Evolutionary Psychology Explains Ideology

Michael Ryan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367568610
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000262285
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this unique amalgam of neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary psychology, Ryan argues that leftists and rightists are biologically distinct versions of the human species that came into being at different moments in human evolution.

The book argues that the varying requirements of survival at different points in history explain why leftists and rightists have anatomically different brains as well as radically distinct behavioral traits. Rightist traits such as callousness and fearfulness emerged early in evolution when violence was pervasive in human life and survival depended on the fearful anticipation of danger. Leftist traits such as pro-sociality and empathy emerged later as environmental adversity made it necessary for humans to live in larger social groups that required new adaptive behavior. The book also explores new evolutionary theories that emphasize the role of the environment in shaping not only human political behavior but also humans' genetic architecture. With implications for the future of politics, the book explores how the niche worlds we build for ourselves through political action can have consequences for the evolution of the species.

Proposing a new way of understanding human politics, this is fascinating reading for students and academics in psychology, the social sciences, and humanities, as well as general readers interested in political behavior.

1
POLITICAL ADAPTATIONS

The terms of Whig and Tory belong to natural as well as to civil history.

—Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams

Rightists and leftists differ biologically as well as ideologically. Each group evidences more or less of certain personality traits such as Openness to Experience or Need for Closure that are due to temperament rather than acculturation. Rightists are by nature more fearful, leftists more experimental. Such trait differences are rooted in biology and governed by genes.¹

How did such different traits emerge in the same species?

Traits are the result of adaptation to an environment. Donald Trump is different from most of you reading this book because your ancestors and Trump’s ancestors lived in different environments that posed distinct survival challenges. Each environment prompted the evolution of radically different adaptive behaviors. The evolutionary rule is: geographic isolation plus genetic diversification equals population segregation (and, in some cases, speciation).

For example, over the course of 11,000 years, Tibetan highlanders adapted to a high-altitude environment by acquiring a variant of the EPAS1 gene and evolving an ability to process scarce oxygen more easily than lowlanders. Tibetan women’s bodies evolved to increase blood flow and oxygen delivery to the uterus, lessening the chances of low-weight babies and increasing the chances of survival in the harsh climate.²

Darwin’s finches differ from one another for similar reasons. They populate the Galapagos Islands, sometimes one species to an island. Although descended from a single common ancestor, they evolved distinct beaks over time, and each beak is suited to finding food on a particular island. Some beaks are long for rooting out bugs under rocks, while others are blunt for cracking nuts.

Like Darwin’s finches, your ancestors and Trump’s lived on different islands; only they were islands in evolutionary time, different moments in human history. Rather than evolve different beaks, they evolved different brains and different adaptive behaviors.

Signs suggest Trump Island was a brutal place. To survive, Trump’s ancestors had to be brutal themselves. They competed remorselessly and selfishly with other small kin-based hunting bands, creating a static-filled situation of anxious fear regarding out-group people and a legacy of prejudice and racism in this strain of our species. The ancestral Trumps hoarded resources and denied others access to them—much as Trumps do today. They treated others’ needs with callous indifference because being generous did not pay off in the grand competitive scheme of things. One’s obligations to others extended to the rim of one’s kin band.

The hunting bands of the archaic environment were authoritarian, as Trump and his followers are still. Quick responses to danger got the hunting band to the end of the day, and such fast responses are best mobilized by a clear command structure with a single leader with complete authority. Because the survival of one depended on the survival of all, bonding with fellow band members was essential. In consensus was safety, as also loyalty. Dissidents were a danger to survival and were bullied or ejected and fell in the hierarchy. All had to know their place and stick to it. The rule of life was dominate or submit.

Trump Island came early in human history, and that accounts for why Trump’s behavior seems so archaic at times. It seems so because it is so. The most archaic aspect of Trump is dominance behavior. Trump regularly scowls at adversaries in an attempt to intimidate them. During one debate with Hillary Clinton, he prowled the stage behind her, looming over her physically. Such dominance behavior once served a survival purpose. Those good at dominance stood a better chance of controlling the distribution of resources (one of which was, of course, women) in their hunting band.

Studies show leftists favor smiling to scowling and equality to dominance.³ That is the case because their island in evolutionary time—let’s call it Obama Island—required very different adaptive strategies. Signs suggest Obama Island was a more crowded place than Trump Island. Smiling is a more sociable activity than scowling. It forges links with others and fosters reciprocity.⁴ Such reciprocity would have been helpful in a world where early humans were forced to live in greater proximity by environmental adversity. In such a novel situation, small kin-based hunting bands had to help one another rather than kill one another to survive. Former enemies on Trump Island had to become friends on Obama Island—or at least not murderous adversaries. The changes in the environment created new survival exigencies that required more cooperation and less competition between hunting groups. Kin and non-kin had to get along for the first time. That would explain the entry of more smiling behavior and greater cooperativeness into the human repertoire of traits—in leftists at least. In studies, rightists score low for smiling behavior and are more competitive than cooperative.⁵ But not everyone in a population has to acquire a new trait for it to be adaptive. If just one person is inventive enough to figure out how to keep a fire going for weeks rather than hours, all will benefit. If she finds a like-minded mate, a new subpopulation begins to emerge. Something similar occurred on Obama Island. Some of our ancestors evolved traits such as cooperativeness that aided the survival of all even though not everyone acquired the trait. They gravitated to others similar to themselves—using an early version of facial recognition technology to detect each other if recent neuroscience is to be believed.⁶ Eventually, a new subpopulation or genotype emerged. Leftist traits became a permanent feature of our genome—in some, at least.

Figure 1.1 Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump at the second presidential debate, 2016.

Image Credit: Associated Press

The difference between Trump Island and Obama Island, between rightists and leftists, tells us that our species did not evolve in unison. The same adaptive traits did not emerge in the entire human population at the same time. Instead, different traits were adaptive in different sub-populations at different moments in human history. At one point in time, it paid to hoard resources, to callously deny others access to them, and to treat out-group people with hostility. It paid to be rightist. But at another point, on a different island in evolutionary time, it made more sense for survival if at least some of our ancestors evolved the capacity to share resources and treat out-group people with kindness. It paid to be leftist.

Trump Island came first. Very early human history was harsh, and you had to be harsh to survive in it. Obama Island came later, as new environmental challenges obliged some of our ancestors to evolve behaviors such as experimentation and cooperativeness that were newly beneficial to survival. The result is two distinct sub-populations living in fractious cohabitation, arguing over the future direction of our species. That is the origin of human politics.

Notes

1.Alford, J., Funk, C. & Hibbing, J. Are political orientations genetically transmitted? American Political Science Review, 2005, Issue 99, pp. 153–167; Hatemi, P. et al. Genetic influences on political ideologies: Twin analyses of 19 measures of political ideologies from five democracies and genome-wide findings from three populations. Behavioral Genetics, 2014, Vol. 44, pp. 282–294; Hatemi, P. et al. Genetic and environmental transmission of political attitudes over the life time. Journal of Politics, 2009, Vol. 71, Issue 3, pp. 1141–1156; Hatemi, P. et al. Not by twins alone: Using extended family design to investigate genetic influence on political beliefs. American Journal of Political Science, 2010, Vol. 54, Issue 3, pp. 798–814; Hatemi, P.K. & McDermott, R. The genetics of politics: Discovery, challenges, and progress. Trends in Genetics, October 2012, Vol. 28, Issue 10, pp. 525–533; Benjamin, D. et al. The genetic architecture of economic and political preferences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012, Vol. 109, Issue 21, pp. 8026–8031; Smith, K.B. et al. Linking genetics and political attitudes: Reconceptualizing political ideology. Political Psychology, 2011, Vol. 32, pp. 369–397; Smith, K. et al. Biology, ideology, and epistemology: How do we know political attitudes are inherited and why should we care? American Journal of Political Science, 2012, Vol. 56, Issue 1, pp. 17–33; Kandler, C. et al. Left or right? Sources of political orientation: The roles of genetic factors, cultural transmission, assortative mating, and personality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2012, Vol. 102, Issue 3, pp. 633–645; Kandler, C. et al. The structure and sources of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. European Journal of Personality, 2016, Vol. 30, Issue 4, pp. 406–415; Funk, C. et al. Genetic and environmental transmission of political orientations. Political Psychology, December 2013, Vol. 34, Issue 6, pp. 805–819.

2.Beall, C.M. Two routes to functional adaptation: Tibetan and Andean high-altitude natives. PNAS, 15 May 2007, Vol. 104, Issue 1, pp. 8655–8660; Yi, X. et al. Sequencing of 50 human exomes reveals adaptation to high altitude. Science, 2010, Issue 209, p. 7578.

3.Kugler, M. et al. Group-based dominance and opposition to equality correspond to different psychological motives. Social Justice Research, September 2010, Vol. 23, Issue 2–3, pp. 117–155.

4.Carney, D.R. et al. The secret lives of liberals and conservatives: Personality profiles, interaction styles, and the things they leave behind. Political Psychology, 2008, Vol. 29, Issue 6, pp. 807–840.

5.Ho, A.K. et al. Social dominance orientation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2012, Vol. 38, Issue 5, pp. 583–606; Harnish, R.J. et al. Predicting economic, social, and foreign policy conservatism: The role of right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, moral foundations orientation, and religious fundamentalism. Current Psychology, 2018, Vol. 37, pp. 668–679.

6.Bonnefon, J-F. et al. Can we detect cooperators by looking at their faces? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14 June 2017, Vol. 26, Issue 3, pp. 276–281; Rule, N. et al. Democrats and republicans can be differentiated from their faces. PLoS One, 2010, Vol. 5, Issue 1, p. e8733; Gokhman, D. et al. Extensive regulatory changes in genes affecting vocal and facial anatomy separate modern from archaic humans. BioRxiv, Cold Spring Harbor, 24 September 2019.

2
EVOLUTIONARY MODELS

According to the standard model of evolution known as the “evolutionary synthesis,” evolution occurs through accidental changes in the human genome.¹ David Reich summarizes the process in the following way:

The genome is a sequence of about three billion paired chemical units that can be thoug...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Political Adaptations
• 2 Evolutionary Models
• 3 Traits, Brains, Genes
• 4 Art and the Origin of Civilization
• 5 The Genetic Geography of Conservatism
• 6 Religion as Adaptation
• 7 European History in Light of Evolution
• 8 Violence Against Others: Torture, Genocide, War
• 9 The Psychology of Political Correctness
• 10 Leftist Form and Rightist Substance
• 11 Dominance and Deception in Economics
• 12 Is Socialism Adaptive?: The Future of Homo Sapiens
• Conclusion
• Future Work: The Center for the Study of Conservatism
• Index