Greetings, all A friend sent me an email saying that an
Indian member of parliament had declared India to be the world’s ‘back-office’
and China its manufacturing center. I wrote back: The Indian member of parliament may have
been whistling while walking past the cemetery…China and other Asian
countries are underbidding Indian software companies. It all rolls downhill. I
am concerned that many Americans think they are impervious to this, and
continue to think we have some corner on innovation or whatever that will
always be ours. Instead, people from all over the world are just as smart and
just as educated as Americans – and, if stereotypes hold true, work
harder. So the future is not rosy. As the US continues to make it hard for
foreigners to come here for advanced education, the impetus will increase for
local universities to improve their offerings. I went to a seminar with Clyde Prestowitz,
and he is even more pessimistic. He has just written a book called, IIRC, 3
Billion Enrepreneurs. It is about the astonishing economic rise of India and
China and other Asian countries. Perhaps what we will see is first, a global
class of very smart AND highly effective people who can land great and
well-paying jobs just about anywhere in the world, and, second, settled labor
pools all competing against each other in an impoverishing race-to-the-bottom. Which category are we in? Which will our
children be in? Cheers, Lawry From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Cordell, Arthur: ECOM Subject: Some
Politics May Be Etched In the Genes Health & Fitness; SECTF Some
Politics May Be Etched In the Genes
21 June 2005 Political scientists have long held that
people's upbringing and experience determine their political views. A child
raised on peace protests and Bush-loathing generally tracks left as an adult,
unless derailed by some powerful life experience. One reared on tax protests
and a hatred of Kennedys usually lists to the right. But on the basis of a new study, a team of political scientists is
arguing that people's gut-level reaction to issues like the death penalty,
taxes and abortion is strongly influenced by genetic inheritance. The new
research builds on a series of studies that indicate that people's general
approach to social issues -- more conservative or more progressive -- is
influenced by genes. Environmental
influences like upbringing, the study suggests, play a more central role in
party affiliation as a Democrat or Republican, much as they do in affiliation
with a sports team. The
report, which appears in the current issue of The American Political Science
Review, the profession's premier journal, uses genetics to help answer several
open questions in political science. They
include why some people defect from the party in which they were raised and why
some political campaigns, like the 2004 presidential election, turn into verbal
blood sport, though polls find little disparity in most Americans' views on
specific issues like gun control and affirmative action. The
study is the first on genetics to appear in the journal. ''I thought here's
something new and different by respected political scholars that many political
scientists never saw before in their lives,'' said Dr. Lee Sigelman, editor of
the journal and a professor of political science at George Washington
University. Dr.
Sigelman said that in many fields the findings ''would create nothing more than
a large yawn,'' but that ''in ours, maybe people will storm the barricades.'' Geneticists
who study behavior and personality have known for 30 years that genes play a
large role in people's instinctive emotional responses to certain issues, their
social temperament. It
is not that opinions on specific issues are written into a person's DNA.
Rather, genes prime people to respond cautiously or openly to the mores of a
social group. Only
recently have researchers begun to examine how these predispositions, in
combination with childhood and later life experiences, shape political
behavior. Dr.
Lindon J. Eaves, a professor of human genetics and psychiatry at Virginia
Commonwealth University, said the new research did not add much to this. Dr.
Eaves was not involved in the study but allowed the researchers to analyze data
from a study of twins that he is leading. Still, he said the findings were plausible, ''and the real significance
here is that this paper brings genetics to the attention to a whole new field
and gives it a new way of thinking about social, cultural and political
questions.'' In
the study, three political scientists -- Dr. John Hibbing of the University of
Nebraska, Dr. John R. Alford of Rice University and Dr. Carolyn L. Funk of
Virginia Commonwealth -- combed survey data from two large continuing studies
including more than 8,000 sets of twins. From
an extensive battery of surveys on personality traits, religious beliefs and
other psychological factors, the researchers selected 28 questions most
relevant to political behavior. The questions asked people ''to please indicate
whether or not you agree with each topic,'' or are uncertain on issues like
property taxes, capitalism, unions and X-rated movies. Most of the twins had a
mixture of conservative and progressive views. But over all, they leaned
slightly one way or the other. The
researchers then compared dizygotic or fraternal twins, who, like any
biological siblings, share 50 percent of their genes, with monozygotic, or
identical, twins, who share 100 percent of their genes. Calculating
how often identical twins agree on an issue and subtracting the rate at which
fraternal twins agree on the same item provides a rough measure of genes'
influence on that attitude. A shared family environment for twins reared
together is assumed. On
school prayer, for example, the identical twins' opinions correlated at a rate
of 0.66, a measure of how often they agreed. The correlation rate for fraternal
twins was 0.46. This translated into a 41 percent contribution from
inheritance. As
found in previous studies, attitudes about issues like school prayer, property
taxes and the draft were among the most influenced by inheritance, the
researchers found. Others like modern art and divorce were less so. And in the
twins' overall score, derived from 28 questions, genes accounted for 53 percent
of the differences. But after correcting for the tendency of politically like-minded men and
women to marry each other, the researchers also found that the twins'
self-identification as Republican or Democrat was far more dependent on
environmental factors like upbringing and life experience than was their social
orientation, which the researchers call ideology. Inheritance accounted for 14
percent of the difference in party, the researchers found. ''We
are measuring two separate things here, ideology and party affiliation,'' Dr.
Hibbing, the senior author, said. He
added that his research team found the large difference in heritability between
the two ''very hard to believe,'' but that it held up. The
implications of this difference may be far-reaching, the authors argue. For years,
political scientists tried in vain to learn how family dynamics like closeness
between parents and children or the importance of politics in a household
influenced political ideology. But the study suggests that an inherited social
orientation may overwhelm the more subtle effects of family dynamics. A
mismatch between an inherited social orientation and a given party may also
explain why some people defect from a party. Many people who are genetically
conservative may be brought up as Democrats, and some who are genetically more
progressive may be raised as Republicans, the researchers say. In
tracking attitudes over the years, geneticists have found that social attitudes
tend to stabilize in the late teens and early 20's, when young people begin to
fend for themselves. Some
''mismatched'' people remain loyal to their family's political party. But
circumstances can override inherited bent. The draft may look like a good idea
until your number is up. The death penalty may seem barbaric until a loved one
is murdered. Other
people whose social orientations are out of line with their given parties may
feel a discomfort that can turn them into opponents of their former party, Dr.
Alford said. ''Zell
Miller would be a good example of this,'' Dr. Alford said, referring to the
former Democratic governor and senator from Georgia who gave an impassioned
speech at the Republican National Convention last year against the Democrats'
nominee, John Kerry. Support
for Democrats among white men has been eroding for years in the South, Dr.
Alford said, and Mr. Miller is remarkable for remaining nominally a Democrat
despite his divergence from the party line on many issues. Reached
by telephone, Mr. Miller said he did not see it quite that way. He said that his
views had not changed much since his days as a marine, but that the Democratic
Party had moved. ''And
I'm not talking about inch by inch, like a glacier,'' said Mr. Miller, who
makes the case in a new book, ''A Deficit of Decency.'' ''I'm saying the thing
got up and flew away.'' The
idea that certain social issues produce immediate unthinking reactions comes
through in other political research as well. In several recent studies, Dr.
Milton Lodge of the State University of New York at Stony Brook has shown that
certain names and political concepts -- ''taxes'' or ''Clinton,'' for example
-- produce almost instantaneous positive or negative reactions. These
intensely charged political reflexes are shaped partly by inheritance, Dr.
Lodge said. It
may be the clash of visceral, genetically primed social orientations that gives
political debate its current malice and fire, the study suggests. Although the two broad genetic types, more conservative and more
progressive, may find some common ground on specific issues, they represent
fundamental differences that go deeper than many people assume, the new
research suggests. ''When
people talk about the political debate becoming increasingly ugly, they often
blame talk radio or the people doing the debating, but they've got it
backward,'' Dr. Alford said. ''These genetically predisposed ideologies are
polarized, and that's what makes the debate so nasty. ''You
see it in people's eyes when they talk politics. You can hear it their voices.
After about the third response, we all start sounding like talk radio on some
issues.'' The researchers are not optimistic about the future of bipartisan
cooperation or national unity. Because men and women tend to seek mates with a
similar ideology, they say, the two gene pools are becoming, if anything, more
concentrated, not less. ----------------------------------------------- |
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