Wikimedia, Voice of AmericaEveryone knows that social factors, such as parents and childhood environment, strongly influence political views. But that may not be the whole story. A growing number of studies suggest that biological factors may also shape political beliefs and behaviors, Nature reported. Much of this research is controversial, but the evidence indicates that biology could play a bigger role in ideology that previously thought.
In 1986 Nicholas Martin, a geneticist now at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane, Australia, compared identical and fraternal twins of the same sex and found that genes could influences attitudes towards abortion and the death penalty. More recently, several groups of political scientists used the same method to find similar correlations between genes and political views. But twin studies are fraught with difficulty—largely because they can’t control for environmental factors when the twins are raised together—so the findings have been treated with caution.
In future, genome-wide association studies (GWAS)—which scan the genomes of large numbers of people in search of sequences linked to traits and behaviors—might shed more light on the issue. But considering that a trait like height is influenced by ...
