""ideology is affected not just by social factors, but also by a dopamine receptor gene called DRD4." That and how many friends you had during high school.""
so we have social factors, how many friends you had at high school and DRD4.
the research is seriously flawed.
how do you define a 'friend'? how many friends are required?
what are the social factors? what percentage of social factors to number of friends?
these are variables that are impossible to determine.
at least with dopamine we know where we are.
"Dopamine has many functions in the brain, including important roles in behavior and cognition, voluntary movement, motivation, punishment and reward, inhibition of prolactin production (involved in lactation and sexual gratification), sleep, mood, attention, working memory, and learning."
so an extra dopamine receptor is an advantage that may explain this....
Liberals and Atheists Smarter? Intelligent People Have Values Novel in Human Evolutionary History, Study Finds
Liberals and atheists smarter? Intelligent people have values novel in human evolutionary history, study finds
"ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2010) — More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds.
The study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values. The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years."
"Evolutionarily novel" preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess. In contrast, those that our ancestors had for millions of years are "evolutionarily familiar."
"General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions," says Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. "As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles.""
