In a special issue of Trends in Genetics from the fall of 2012, a summary article sought to review “the genetics of politics,” focusing on genetic models that purport to expand our understanding of “attitudes, ideologies, and pro-social political traits, including voting behavior and participation.”Footnote 1 The tone of the article is contentious and defensive, the authors clearly disturbed by just how much a focus on the social determinants of political behavior have dominated the field. The piece seeks to engineer a sharp turn by summarizing a body of literature indicating “that genetic influences account for a substantial proportion of individual differences in political traits.”
John Hibbing sets out to raise the level of the dialogue about the role of current moves to insert more biology into political science. He correctly describes the general resistance of his discipline to accept neurobiology as a useful additive to the explanation of political behavior. For Hibbing, some of that resistance can be explained by supervisor stodginess and antiquated disciplinary norms of the Old Guard who are inhibiting talented and inquisitive young scholars from valuable research projects. (p. 475). He then goes on to frame the larger problem of such disciplinary resistance as attributable to ignorance and misconceptions.
To characterize one's critics or adversaries as ignorant or misguided is likely to generate more heat than light. At the same time, Hibbing makes a number of important substantive claims, and this forum provides a useful setting to engage those issues in a way that hopefully generates some light.
While it is true that some social scientists have little understanding of what goes on in the biological sciences, the last few decades have witnessed an explosion in several corridors of social science research where anthropologists and sociologists have gone into biological laboratories to study just how bench scientists carry out research projects. These researchers have engaged in long-term observations, examining the domain assumptions of the very categories deployed in biological research on human populations, and later documenting the sequence from hypothesis-generation to published reports.Footnote 2 What was once a black hole out of which came published findings regarded as products of pure scientific reasoning is now itself the subject of scrutiny and empirical investigation. We now know, for example, that what human geneticists call “founder populations” are far more porous for socio-political reasons than previously imagined,Footnote 3 up-ending any simple notion of what constitutes a coherent circumscribable human genetic population.
Hibbing is right to point out just how easy it is to mistakenly conflate biology with genetics, when the distinction is vital to explanations of complex human behaviors and conditions—from health and illness to crime and violence to educational achievement. A good example is the combination of hypertension and congestive heart failure. While heart disease may have a strong biological explanation, it is frequently misconceived as explainable by genetics.Footnote 4 Hibbing is also correct to debunk notions of single-gene determination of phenotypical expression, whether it is Parkinson's disease or voting behavior—and his discussion of why it is important to distinguish biological and genetic explanations is a useful heuristic.
However, his characterization of neurobiology's potential contribution to political science exhibits tension and even contradiction. On the one hand, he sees biological inclusion as simply an additive or a complement to traditional political theorizing and empirical investigation. Yet he acknowledges an extremely important point that underscores what is most problematic about that orientation, namely that in different societies, and even in different periods in a single society, there are such considerable fluctuations in political attitudes and behaviors that we cannot consistently and coherently map the usable labels of conservative or progressive when examining what he would call surface-level issues indexing political behavior. On the other hand, appreciating the implications of such variation, he makes the far stronger claim that biological inquiry can get at “the more fundamental political orientation” of the individual. For Hibbing, the bigger promise of biology is to get at the “bedrock dilemmas and not issues-of-the-day”: “Whether the United States should join the Allies to battle fascism in Europe is an issue-of-the-day; protecting society from out-group threats is a bedrock dilemma of politics … Whether to repeal the Bush era tax cuts for millionaires is an issue-of-the-day; distributing societal resources is a bedrock dilemma of politics” (p. 480).
The tension here is palpable. If biology simply furnishes an additional variable to the explanation of whether one favors taxes on millionaires, that could be seen as complementary to political theory. But if biology is going to get at the fundamental bedrock of how diverse individuals regard the distribution and redistribution of resources, then we are talking paradigm shifts in political understanding.Footnote 5
Since there is no space to address each of Hibbing's “ten misconceptions,” I will focus my attention on the fundamental point at issue between those who wish to see more biological research on political behavior and their opponents, which is captured in Hibbing's critique of his Misconception #3, the view that the biological explanation of social behavior is “reductionist.” Indeed, he inverts the charge of reductionism and aims it back at “environmentalists”: “I would like to suggest that political scientists who do not incorporate biology are the more “reductionist” in this sense of the term. If biology is set totally aside, the discipline finds itself back in Skinnerian behaviorism … It is difficult to imagine anything more reductionist than theory built solely on environmental explanatory variables” (p. 478). Indeed, in his exuberance to place the blame of determinism on “the other side,” Hibbing argues that environmental determinism is a bigger threat to the social sciences than biological determinism, since geneticists and biologists incorporate the environment into their work but old-school behavioral scientists do not incorporate biology into theirs.
The problem with this way of framing the problem is that it misses the workings of “emergence” in the interaction of causal factors. If we see environmental variables as a series of concentric circles that start with the family, then community, then region and nation-state (including simultaneously such variables as race, religion, gender, and class), then we can understand the interaction of those variables as “emergent” in a way that is very different from a simplistic Skinnerian model of stimulus-response but also from Hibbing's grand claims for identifying “bedrock” sources of behavior.
Reductionism versus Emergence in Science
Within the realm of scientific discourse about human attributes and human behavior, there have always been two sharply competing versions of how to best account for a full range of phenotypical expressions, clinical manifestations of disorders and diseases, and a dizzying array of behaviors (from alcoholism to sex preference, from intelligence and scholastic achievement to crime), including political attitudes and behaviors.
A reductionist strategy attempts to explain the phenomenon under investigation in terms of a unit interpreted as the most essential to explain the phenomenon. It follows that the unit presumed to be the more essential is likely to be the more powerful predictor, and thus the mantle of the “more scientific” moves in the direction of the more reductionist claim. Even though scientists typically acknowledge the limits of reductionist approaches, there are structural reasons in the organization and production of scientific knowledge that help explain why an emphasis on reductionist strategies has dominated much of scientific inquiry into human behavior for the last several decades,
In sharp contrast to reductionism is the idea of emergence. Every student who has encountered chemistry (and vials of chemicals) knows that “emergence” is a key element in both scientific thought and human experience. Emergence, quite simply, is the idea that the phenomenon to be explained emerges out of the interplay of the component elements, and that, most importantly, the phenomenon cannot be explained by reference to an analysis of the component parts separated from each other. An obvious example is an explosion. Nothing much of interest occurs when a vial of nitrogen is a few inches away from a vial of glycerin. But placed together, a phenomenon emerges that cannot be explained with assumptions about locating “a cause” in either of these two single isolated constituent elements—an explosion.
Or even more prosaically, there is water, which is not “caused” by either hydrogen or oxygen. Philip Anderson, who won a Nobel Prize in 1977 for his work in condensed-matter physics, wrote what is widely regarded as the most persuasive account of “emergence” that appears in the scientific literature:
A water molecule is simple enough, with two small hydrogen atoms attached to one large oxygen atom. The now well-understood principles of atomic physics govern the behavior of this molecule. However, when “billions upon billions” of those molecules are in the same pot: Suddenly you've got a substance that … has collectively acquired a property, liquidity, that none of them possesses alone … there's nothing in those well-understood equations of atomic physics that even hints of such a property. The liquidity is “emergent.”Footnote 6
And just as liquidity is emergent (that is, not to be explained by its elementary constitutive parts), so too is water vapor. Heating the liquid produces a phase transition into vapor, and the spiral goes upward: “Take your water vapor out over the Gulf of Mexico and let it interact with the sunlight and wind, and it can organize itself into an emergent structure known as a hurricane.”
Anderson went on to point out that “life itself is an emergent property” as is the mind, the product of billions of neurons obeying the biological laws of living cells. And as he notes in that paper: “At each level of complexity, entirely new properties appear. (And) at each stage, entirely new laws, concepts, and generalizations are necessary, inspiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry.”Footnote 7
But why go on about this emergent-reduction distinction? Almost everyone genuflects to the idea that emergent strategies of explanation are legitimate in scientific inquiry. Here we come to a sharp divide. Some of the most important aspects of political behavior are not amenable to a strategy that ignores the emergent character of that behavior. Just as Hurricane Sandy can only be understood as the kind of emergent phenomenon that Philip Anderson described, so too are “the political hurricanes” such as the landslide re-election of Roosevelt in 1936 (61 percent to 36 percent). A similar overwhelming re-election was won by Reagan in the 1984 landslide (58 percent to 40 percent), occasioned by quite different political wind-currents. Anderson noted that we can learn nothing about hurricanes from examining hydrogen atoms or even water vapor independent of the configuration of forces noted above. The massive shift in US political landscape occasioned by FDR's 1936 election, for example, cannot be understood by examining the component levels of fMRI among isolated constituent individuals responding to selected images in a laboratory setting. Such shifts are societal level tsunamis, and the emergent frame for analysis must include the context of a Great Depression partly “caused” by the confluence of the 1929 crash of the stock market and the cascade of events and massive unemployment that ensued. Robert Cooley Angell's Reference Angell1936 account of how families coped during the Great Depression is a compelling documentation of the emergent convergence of economic and psychological depression that leads to political depression.Footnote 8 In a similar way, Reagan's 1984 landslide was an emergent conflation of the coming to fruition of the Southern Strategy, dwindling government coffers and the related assault on welfare, the sunset of the Civil Rights Movement, and generalized fear arousal caused by surging crime rates. In isolation, none of these atom-like elements can explain the massive shifts in political winds in the short 48-years between 1936 and 1984.
Political Attitudes and the Synergistic/Emergent Aspects of Race
In a society where the structure of racial privilege has for so long shaped the stratifying practices that allocate resources—from jobs to educational access to bank loans—the political attitudes and behaviors of the population have undergone notable changes over the last half-century. Can biology and genetics help explain these shifts in the deepest and most enduring political problem of the nation? In a newspaper article published the day after the 2012 national election, the headline asked “Leaning Left or Right, Red or Blue? Answer May be in Your Genes.”Footnote 9 The article refers to the summary research paper by Hatemi and McDermott with which I began,Footnote 10 and concludes that “they found overall ideology does appear to vary with the genes, as do attitudes towards economics, race, and sex.”
We know that in the last few elections, the South went overwhelmingly Republican, while African Americans across the country have voted for the democratic candidate for president at about 90 percent since 1964. Might we have garnered some insight into this phenomenon by accessing the biological proclivities of Southern whites, even as an additive or complement to traditional political theory—for example, from Kevin Phillips' “Southern Strategy”? Could a research project design that would distinguish between what Hibbing calls bedrock issues versus issues-of-the-day get at why the white south, reliably democratic from 1886 to 1960, would so dramatically shift allegiance deploying biology? Or is there something “emergent” about the massive political winds that turned the white South so sharply towards the Republican party in the last half century? Was the overwhelming vote of whites for Republicans more about their biological/genetic race—or more about converging elements of a threat to group position irreducible to any single element even as incremental or additive—far less to “bed-rock biological race”? Has the overwhelming vote of African Americans for the Democratic Party been more about their sense of converging elements of a threat to group position irreducible to any single element?
To get a better handle on this distinction, I will conclude with an example of emergence and synergism as it relates to matters of race in America. The code word about the “role of government” in race matters maps very different by race, and the following example explains why.
For white conservatives, one familiar resonant cliché is that “the government” is providing “handouts” to free-loaders—as in Romney's 47 percent monologue. Yet there is a near inversion of this idea of the role of government when deploying the social category of race.
For several years, I was the principal investigator of a research project investigating how people in families with genetic diseases deal with those problems in their daily lives. The two most common inherited, potentially lethal, single gene disorders in the United States are sickle cell disease and cystic fibrosis. Cystic fibrosis occurs primarily among Americans of (North) European descent, and sickle cell disease occurs primarily among Americans of (West) African descent. This provided a somewhat unique opportunity to compare the variable penetration and meaning of genetic medicine in two populations differentiated by socially designated categories of race. The study combined fieldwork and observations in clinical settings, in support groups and in advocacy organizations serving individuals and families with sickle cell disease and cystic fibrosis.
In the course of the research, we discovered that when our African American interviewers made contact and interviewed African Americans with sickle-cell disease, or with family members who were carriers of the sickle-cell gene, we were better able to penetrate into the various layers of both the immediate and extended families for richly wide-ranging discussions of social and political issues (compared to conversations with white interviewers). That is certainly not a particularly surprising finding. However, the following finding is noteworthy. We also conducted group interviews, mainly of members of different families. These group members had in common the diagnosis of the genetic disorder somewhere in their families.
It was in these group settings that we discovered the powerful salience of race, and the synergistic feature of discussions about a race-related topic. The most important “concerns and issues” never surfaced for exploration with white interviewers, because the group being interviewed never framed the question about “the government and its intentions.” I refer here to what whites would be far more likely to see as “paranoid tendencies” on the part of African Americans regarding both the medical profession and the government interest in the health of Blacks. In each of the four groups in which there was all-Black membership, these “paranoid tendencies” surfaced and then escalated into a steep spiral as the “call and response” features of commentary and exchange occurred. That is, we heard over and over again notions of governmental conspiracies to do research on Black people, for biotechnology firms to try to make money by “practicing” on Blacks. These issues surfaced only in the Black groups, but also spiraled upwards into a cascade of larger and larger sets of imagery about “the government” and its role in health research relevant to Blacks in America. This is an example of “emergence” precisely because the political response noted here could only surface in the kind of synergistic manner Philip Anderson described.
From this perspective, the advances in our understanding of political behavior will come not from finger-pointing about which side is more reductionist or deterministic, but which framework is more amenable and conducive to an analysis of emergence as a phenomenon for investigation in the explanation of political behavior. And while Hibbing is surely right that biology “matters,” he is just as surely wrong if he means to claim that biological inquiry can identify the “bedrock” causes of complex social and political events and processes. For while such events and processes are always enacted by human individuals who are neurobiological beings, outside of artificially constructed laboratory situations or equally artificially imagined states of nature, such individuals are also always social and historical beings grappling with social facts not of their own choosing.
