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02/12/2008: "Values, methods are genetic not trained"

Many scientists believe how our brains work is influenced by our genes -- that to some extent we're hard-wired from birth to process information in a certain way.

This doesn't mean, these scientists say, genes dictate how we think; environment clearly plays a huge role. Nor does it mean there's a Republican gene or a Democrat gene. Scientists who espouse the genetics-politics connection say that probably hundreds of genes influence how we think and how we see the world.

"Political tendencies are like being left-handed or right-handed -- you're born feeling more natural using one hand or the other," says John Alford, a political scientist at Rice University. "It doesn't mean you can't switch -- for many years lefties were taught to be righties. But it's not easy."

[ Let's correlate it to degree of awareness of the world and we'll see that people who have their act together are neither left, nor right, but are realists who like traditional values and don't want to try to regulate the unregulatable. These are rare, these days, which is a cause and sign of our decline. ]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/02/11/politics.genes/index.html