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Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 16, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I would predict that

  1. You can come up with a "polygenic risk score for votin liberal" which has an AUC of 0.70 or better

  2. No single gene explains more than 20% of the variance explained by the PRS as a whole.

  3. This is true because you can determine someone's ancestry by looking at their genome, and people in the same ancestry have a pretty strong tendency to vote the same way.

No. Why would there be?

Very generally speaking, Conservatism is based in risk avoidance: the core conflict is basically a risk/reward evaluation of courses of action, weighing potential benefits of further societal optimization against potential dangers of disrupting a currently-mostly-functional complex dynamic system. It seems like such a thing might well have genetic components.

Individualism vs. Collectivism also seems as though it could well be genetically influenced: different species are gregarious to different extents, and that almost certainly interplays with genetics. Williams syndrome in humans is a clear display of genetic changes to sociability and desire for the presence of others.

Besides, if we accept that genetics affect I.Q., well then obviously--the genes that give the low IQs are the liberal genes, duh! (jkjk don't hurt me)

I'm skeptical of the risk/reward definition of conservatism. Sure, Chesterton's fence fits, but risk/reward fails to explain a lot of the ethos. Some of it is more along the lines of the hygiene hypothesis--insularity, self-reliance, concentric obligations. Other parts are appeals to familiarity and comfort. Basically, I think reducing conservatism to a strategy elides the values-based reasons.

But yes, risk tolerance, gregariousness, and various other social or intellectual dynamics surely prejudice people towards one or another ideology. Even without considering the environment, I don't believe that polygenic soup would count as a "liberal gene."

Yeah, I agree with everything you've said here. "Multiple genes could likely prejudice toward ideologies" is a better way to put it than "liberal gene", with the relative strength of that prejudice tough to decouple.

Consider the omnigenic model. Simple thing like 'height' have tiny contributions to heritability from thousands of genes. The causes of being a 'liberal' are manyfold, and depend in myriad ways on your environment - which in turn are caused by genetic traits! The (many) intelligence-associated will mean you're more likely to get educated, maybe making you more liberal? Would that make you more liberal 200 years ago? That's one of a many possible contributors. So, what even is a 'liberal gene'? "Liberalism genes" will mostly go through environmentally contingent circuitous pathways from something like 'slightly more athletic' or 'slightly more prone to random injury' to '.01% more likely to become democrat', as opposed to anything directly political.

Also, all genes depend on environment too. Imagine a plant with space that can be occupied by one of three genes, Wet, Dry, or Neutral. If it has a Wet gene and is planted in a swamp, it grows 10 centimetres taller than a plant with Neutral, but if it’s planted in a desert it grows 10 centimetres shorter than neutral. And vice versa for Dry gene.

So are what will grow taller, a plant with Wet or Dry? It depends entirely on environment. It can very well be the same with a “liberal” gene- maybe it makes you more liberal than average in one environment, but more conservative than average in another.