The Republican Brain (22 page)

That's what makes the results so stunning. As one part of the Berkeley study, preschoolers were first assessed at ages 3 and 4 for their personalities, and then were asked, much later at age 23, a battery of political questions. That's how the researchers learned that children who later turned out to be conservatives had been observed as “uncomfortable with uncertainty, as susceptible to a sense of guilt, and as rigidifying when experiencing duress.” The later-life liberals, meanwhile, had been described as children as “autonomous, expressive, and self-reliant.” In other words, wrote the researchers, what centrally separated the future conservative children from the future liberal ones was that the former were seeking to “over-control” their environment, whereas the latter were seeking to “under-control” it.

Order and chaos, yin and yang—right there in the sandbox.

We've come a long way. Not only have we learned about the psychological underpinnings of political ideology—and seen how strong the evidence is that our political views are rooted, at least in part, in personality and psychological needs. We've also sought further confirmation of this insight in the 100 billion neurons of the brain (and the 100 trillion connections between them) and the more than 3 billion DNA base pairs that make up the human genome.

Not surprisingly, once you reach these realms, the search becomes vastly more difficult. These are the cutting edge areas of modern biological science, where real revolutions are expected to occur in the 21st century, as our powers of scientific computation steadily increase. No wonder we don't have all the answers yet from political neuroscience or political genetics.

What's surprising, in fact, is that we have such suggestive answers at all. “If you had called me four years ago and said, what is your view on whether Republicans and Democrats have different brains, I would have said no,” said the University of California-San Diego's Darren Schreiber. Now, he sees it differently. It appears that people are partly making their political brains, and partly inheriting them, but the sum total of the process is measurable divergences in brain structure or in brain functioning. The result is that, in looking at those brains, we can already pinpoint consistent differences, between left and right, in key regions.

I've said plenty already about the high degree of scientific uncertainty that remains in this field, so I won't further belabor it. The more I learn about the science—reading the studies and interviewing those who are designing them so I can understand what's written between the lines of their research papers—the more I grow convinced that it all points in an obvious direction. But at the same time, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if we don't yet have the right overarching theory or organizing concept to unite all of the evidence—and if, in the next decade, much of this evidence winds up being reorganized into a different paradigm that nobody has thought up yet.

The evidence will still be there, of course. There's just too much for it all to be wrong. How it's all ultimately interpreted, though—that could certainly change. And that's something that, as good liberals, we have to be ready for.

In closing this chapter, I think it is necessary to consider what it might mean, in an evolutionary sense, to find that people's genes and brains vary in a way that leads to different tendencies in politics. If you find evidence that a human trait has a genetic basis, it is natural to inquire why that is—and whether evolution through the process of natural selection might have “put it there.”

Asking about whether evolution “intended” for us to be liberals and conservatives is a lot like asking whether it “intended” for us to be religious and irreligious. In evolutionary terms, what you are actually asking is whether politics (or religion) is an
adaptation
: a direct product of Darwinian natural selection, one that exists because it increased our ancestors' chances of surviving until they reproduced. For any trait, there's always another possibility as well: It could be a
by-product
, a feature that arose more accidentally, because of other adaptations.

For an example of a trait that is a by-product, consider the redness of our blood. As the renowned Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker explains:

Is there some adaptive advantage to having red blood, maybe as camouflage against autumn leaves? Well, that's unlikely, and we don't need any other adaptive explanation, either. The explanation for why our blood is red is that it is adaptive to have a molecule that can carry oxygen, mainly hemoglobin. Hemoglobin happens to be red when it's oxygenated, so the redness of our blood is a byproduct of the chemistry of carrying oxygen. The color per se was not selected for . . . Random stuff happens in evolution. Certain traits can become fixed through sheer luck of the draw.

When considered in this context, it seems exceedingly unlikely that the evolutionary process had Republicans and Democrats “in mind.” Nor were liberals and conservatives probably part of the endgame. As I've noted, the concept of a left-right divide originated in the French Revolution, not much more than 200 years ago. By contrast,
Homo sapiens
with complex tools, hunting styles, and symbolic art forms originated in Africa about 160,000 years ago.

Evolution did, however, build brains that were capable of intricate social interactions, ingenuity, and creativity—and of course, beliefs and opinions and group identification (including defending the in-group and attacking the out-group). And it did this in a context when life was certainly more difficult, often more brutal and violent, than it was today.

Our political beliefs and differences could thus be a by-product of these more core traits, varying within some natural range and interacting in different combinations in different people. A tendency to be distrustful of outsiders, say, or a tendency to want to try new things. Each, perhaps, comes in a variety of forms or degrees, and we all wind up somewhere on a spectrum—and these tendencies then predispose us to adopt certain political positions.

Political beliefs could also be partly influenced by physical traits that are far more basic to humans, and that were definitely acted on by natural selection.

As an example, consider male strength. In recent intriguing research by a group of evolutionary psychologists led by Aaron Sell of Griffith University, it was found that stronger men (as measured by bicep size, the amount of weigh they could lift at the gym in exercises like arm curls, and other measures) were more likely to show anger, had a greater history of getting into fights, and—politically—were more in favor of the death penalty, military spending, and the Iraq War. Male strength is surely an evolutionary adaptation. But these modern-day political offshoots of male strength would presumably be by-products, and more accidental. There was no such thing as modern large-scale war when we evolved, and there's no way one man's individual physical strength could determine the outcome in Iraq. Yet the stronger men in the study supported the Iraq invasion more.

According to Sell and his colleagues, here's how such a result could come about. If you're stronger, you “learn”—or at least, your brain calculates—that showing anger works as a negotiating technique (because you intimidate people), and that force works to resolve conflicts in your favor (because you beat up people). This then spills over into your view of the world, including your political views. “People have these intuitive gut feelings about whether or not force works,” says Sell, “and this stems from this evolutionary environment in which physical strength was a good predictor of your ability to survive and use aggression. So our modern minds are still designed that way.”

Not only does this suggest that conservatives could probably beat up liberals, if it ever came to that. It also implies, once again, that our political differences may be a by-product of actual evolutionary adaptations, and one consequence of plopping down evolved human beings in liberal democracies.

Yet despite the many reasons for thinking of politics as an evolutionary by-product, some thinkers—including Everett Young—suggest that evolution may have built us to vary in subtle but important ways because a society fares better when it has both “liberal” and also “conservative” tendencies in it. What would the core tendencies be? Something like maintaining order, versus generating innovation. Protecting and serving, versus creating and challenging. Once again, we're back to the yin-and-yang view of our politics.

One difficulty with such an account, though, is that our differences today seem highly dysfunctional, rather than functional. And there's an even deeper problem. This is a
group selection
theory, one that proposes that natural selection operated at the level of a group of individuals, to make it more fit to survive, rather than operating at the level of the individual or the gene. Such group selection theories have long been viewed skeptically in the field of evolutionary biology, although they have recently undergone a revival.

The truth is that very little is known about why political tendencies are so strongly influenced by our genes, and what evolution might have to say about that. It's an area where, surely, there will be many insights in the coming years.

The last four chapters have made it very clear that liberals and conservatives are different, in ways that extend far beyond explicit ideology. And these differences are highly pertinent to my analysis of why it is that we have such a war over the facts in the U.S.—and why one side, the liberal side, is usually right.

But the background against which all of this plays out is hardly a static one, either in the United States or anywhere else in the world. American politics in particular have changed dramatically over the last 40 years, and it would be stunning if this had no impact on the dynamics that interest us. Parties have changed, and people have changed parties. New institutions have grown up and the media have been exploded and rebuilt.

These changes surely work in
interaction
with the basic tendencies I've been surveying—tendencies for people to rigorously defend their beliefs, for instance, and for liberals and conservatives to approach the world differently. In other words, if you want to understand why Tea Party followers don't believe in global warming or the risks of breaching the debt ceiling, studying fundamental liberal-conservative differences will only get you so far. I contend that those differences are an essential part of the story—but still only
part
of the story.

In the next chapter, then, I will seek to interweave
nature
and
nurture
—or
psychology
and the
environment
—when it comes to the relationship between liberals, conservatives, science, and facts.

Notes

111
Let's begin
In preparing this chapter I have greatly benefited from many conversations and exchanges with Andrea Kuszewski. Her own take on the matter, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Liberals and Conservatives,” can be found online at
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2011/09/07/your-brain-on-politics-the-cognitive-neuroscience-of-liberals-and-conservatives/
.