Thank you for your comment!

I should not have sad ‘while in American politics “liberal” is used as an insult by almost everyone’ — like you, I was blinded by the cultural environment I live in!

I should have said something like, the word liberal is generally negatively charged among Americans, and so those self-identifying as liberals will be suppressed by the desire to avoid displeasing the interviewer…

It’s really amazing research.

[1] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4783077.ece

A schwerpunkt/center-of-gravity/hard-point is a place of greatest resistance. An implication from the findings of genetics would be that in the American political environment, school prayer is the Right's schwerpunkt. Because one's belief on school prayer is the least open to non-sysmetic reeduction, it is very hard to change.

Earl Warren was an effects-based judicial population — an activist judge. His findings in many of his decisions, Brown v Board most famously, make little sense except in this context. He used law like President Bush uses facts: instrumentally in order to forward an agenda.

Unless Chief Justice Warren had a high discount rate — unless he didn't care for the long-term harm he inficted on liberalism as long as he got medium-term gains — Warren's actions were counterproductive and “stupid.” (I'm using the word “stupid” in the same sense it has in the phrase “strategic stupidity.” Perhaps “dangerously misinformed and/or miscalculating” would be more accurate).

As to empty insults…. I agree that generally, “religious right” may be as empty as term as “liberal.” Just as liberals have generally stopped using the term “liberal,” the political-religious stopped using the term “religious.” Witness Bush's “faith-” not (religion-) based efforts.

I do not believe the same thing has happened to the word “Conservative.” In an election where John Kerry, Howard Dean, and even Al Sharpton called themselves conservative, “conservative” was shown to be a word worth fighting for — not an epithat worth avoiding.

Of course, I agree that “there are mechanisms short of persuasion which lead to equivalent behavioral results.”

Last,

“AFAIK, genetic determinants of personality should be more, not less, important in younger children.”

Why?

I'll rework the computer science analogy here.. Just as people are influenced by their environment and genetic code, comptuers are influenced by their environment (from factors like humidity to social interaction with humans and other computers) and their code (whether hardware or software).

Just as we can say people have “genes” for certain behaviors, computers have code for certain actions. Sometimes in computers these are called “daemons” (from the Greek word meaning messenger), like the “printer daemon” on Macintosh computers which controls how word processor documents are printed out.

The code from the printer daemon is there from when the computer turns on. However, there is nothing that says its effects will be felt right away. Something has to change in the computer (like you opening up OpenOffice and clicking the “print” button) for that printer daemon to do anything.

If you wanted, you could call the printer daemon “latent code.” It only becomes visible when something changes.

Maybe the something that changed was in the environment — two hours after you turned your computer on, you pushed the print button. Or maybe it was physical — perhaps the power button on the printer itself was turned on, which enabled the printer daemon to create change.

In the computer example, we saw that without environmental (the little print icon being pushed on the computer screen) and physiological (the power button being turned on the printer on your desk) changes, the genetic code (the printer daemon) was latent (didn't do anything).

If I haven't lost you with my bad writing, let's change the analogy a bit..

Say your computer is programmed to scan your office computer's network continually from when it is turned on, print out a list of the most (or least) active computers as soon as it can, and then print out a new one every 10 minutes. When it comes out there are three deamons or continual processes running — a printer daemon in charge of the printing, a chronological demon in charge of keeping time, and a social daemon in charge of looking at other computers.

But you know what? Nothing will print on until a physical switch is turned — until the power button is presed.

Similarly, Dr. Hibbing's finding imply that the “physical switch” to turn on the “political daemon” isn't flipped until late adolescence.

Now, what if you unplugged your computer from the network, or snapped its wireless antena so it couldn't get wifi? Even if the printer is on it might just print blank paper, or maybe nothing at all. Because you changed the computer's environment by altering its connectivity, you also effected the final product.

Oops . But I'm not sure that it follows that it is “a center of gravity.”

Another point: why do you call Earl Warren “not smart”? Because he didn't necessarily base his actions on the strategic interests of liberal politicians?

I also think you're a bit cavalier about certain issues: liberal as an “empty insult” resonates with some portion of the population, but so does “conservative” and “religious right.”

I agree that persuasion, in terms of the internalization of new beliefs, is rare in political debate; but there are mechanisms short of persuasion which lead to equivalent behavioral results.

1) Why is this “In computer science terms, getEnvironment() and getGenes() are continually running parrellel processes of contiually running parrellel processes.” a useful analogy?

2) “Genetics are almost irrelevent in subject's political beliefs until the 20s.” Which cautions heavily against the argument; AFAIK, genetic determinants of personality should be more, not less, important in younger children.

However, personality trait X may express differently under different political cultures: think about the extremely rapid secularization of European politics in the 1960s. Thus, I find little reason here to conclude that Americans are immutably in favor of school prayer because of a genetic predisposition to think people who pray in school. That's a very tenuous jump to make from the raw correlative data.

Of course, there are known problems with fraternal vs. identical twin studies, and there are reasons to believe non-genetic factors explain higher convergence among the latter than the former. Indeed, if you go to various abstract databases and search for “twin studies” you'll find a lot of interesting debates about all manner of twin studies and how persuasive they actually are.

Thank you for your excellent comment.

During yesterday's lecture, Dr. Hibbing rejected the notion that political persuasion as a mechanism. He mentioned how that was his initial hypothesis and the original research supported it, but that such a thought became less tenable as more information became available.

I do not know if he has since written on that, or if that is merely the state of his current belief.

So while there are genetic factors for personality, and genetic factors for politics, they seem to be different genetic factors.

I agree that “personality trait X may express differently under different political cultures.” Indeed, that is why I wrote “The unique factors of American political culture make school prayer a center of gravity — what the Germans called a 'schwerpunkt' — in the defense of conservatism.” Clearly it would be possible to arrange the environment so that political persuasions come out differently. Environment makes sense in the context of genetics and vice versa — neither is freestanding.

In computer science terms, getEnvironment() and getGenes() are continually running parrellel processes of contiually running parrellel processes. They alter the global variables of the world — whether internal or external — and accept input from that world as well.

Nonetheless, while they are continually running their magnitude is continually varying. If I may bring in another big from yesterday's taught: Genetics are almost irrelevent in subject's political beliefs until the 20s. This may explain the relative ineffectualness of the Leftist control of education in Japan and other countries — it doesn't matter what you tell children, if it's adults who will be voting.