Many of the conservative protectors of science here fight very hard against the non standard ideas expressed by the progressive free thinkers. Surprisingly enough, this intransigence in thinking is a result of genetic determinism at birth. These conservatives can’t help it. They are trapped by their brains.
At the age of three, conservatives display a genetic predisposition toward closed minded thinking.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... al/280677/
For instance, at the ages of three and four, the “conservative” preschoolers had been described as “uncomfortable with uncertainty,” as “rigidifying when experiencing duress,” and as “relatively over-controlled.” The girls were “quiet, neat, compliant, fearful and tearful, [and hoped] for help from the adults around.”
The progressive mindset is also predetermined at birth. For example:
“Likewise, the Blocks pinpointed another set of childhood traits that were associated with people who became liberals in their mid-twenties. The “liberal” children were more “autonomous, expressive, energetic, and relatively under-controlled.” Liberal girls had higher levels of “self-assertiveness, talkativeness, curiosity, [and] openness in expressing negative feelings.”
“In psychology, there are a few standard personality traits that have been measured across truly diverse human groups. They belong to a well-tested and widely accepted inventory called the “Big Five” personality dimensions. Specifically, these traits are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (it’s easy to remember them because they spell out OCEAN). The first three dimensions (O, C, and—to a lesser degree—E) correlate fairly well with left-right voting. Therefore, these traits can serve as a universal yardstick for measuring the dispositions of disparate cultures, which would otherwise be difficult to compare in reference to specific political issues.
Psychologist Robert McCrae, with the help of his colleagues from numerous countries, has collected measures of these Big Five dimensions from nearly 28,000 people from 36 distinct cultures around the world. The participants represented the Indo-European linguistic family, as well as the Uralic (Finland, Hungary, Estonia, etc.), Dravidian (South India), Altaic (Turkic, Mongolic, etc.), Malayo-Polynesian, Sino-Tibetan, and Bantu (Sub-Saharan Africa) ethno-linguistic groups.
Variation in these Big Five personality traits was greatest within cultures. This finding makes intuitive sense, since a given population has a bell-shaped distribution of left-right political orientation. Moreover, Big Five dimensions such as Openness and Conscientiousness also form bell-shaped curves within a population.
There is a chance that these facts could be explained by culture or by the direct effect of the environment. However, they suggest that populations around the world have personality distributions that are genetically adapted to their ancestral environments.”
What an MRI Can Show
“The researchers noted that the amygdala has an emotion-processing function, which could explain why conservatives are more sensitive to threatening facial expressions than liberals are. This variation in the amygdala likely corresponds to differences in our perceptions of human nature, and these perceptions constitute one of the three personality clusters that underlie political orientation.
Finding Ourselves in the Big Picture
All right, so perhaps there are physiological differences between liberals and conservatives. Does this mean it’s possible to think about political conflict from a biological perspective? Surely politics is a uniquely human phenomenon that our species has developed long after we evolved fully modern “hardware,” right?
Not so, according to one of the world’s most renowned primatologists. Academy of Sciences member Frans de Waal has written a book called Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes. His book describes the complex political life of our closest living relatives. De Waal recounts in detail how chimpanzees form alliances between small groups of high-status individuals. And he tells of their betrayals and realignments, and of the brutal murders of chimpanzees fighting for social status (and mating opportunities) within a troop.
In one case, political rivals went far beyond simply killing an alpha male named Luit; they even ripped off Luit’s toes and fingernails, and pounded out his testicles. Most chimp violence occurs between males, however females indirectly support male candidates for high positions by cheering and even intervening during conflicts.
In addition to rudimentary political factions within their troops, chimpanzees have personalities that are meaningfully similar to ours. Groups of human caretakers have separately scored large numbers of chimpanzees on the Big Five factors, and their independent ratings of each dimension coincide with each other for individual apes.
The importance of this discovery is not just that chimps have variable personalities; rather, it’s that they are the only animals known to have traits analogous to all of our Big Five factors (in addition to a sixth factor of their own called Dominance). Biologists have found personality traits similar to Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Extraversion across some twenty primates and other mammals.
But Openness is less common; for example, it’s only partially present in the semi-social orangutan. And full Conscientiousness has only been found so far in humans and chimpanzees. Openness and Conscientiousness, as we’ve just learned, are the personality dimensions that best correlate with left-right voting in human beings.
Science is just beginning to piece together the great puzzle of political orientation. As we look at these and other findings that are emerging from fields like genetics, neuroscience, and primatology, one thing is already strikingly clear: Our political orientations are deeply ingrained natural dispositions, molded within each of us by powerful evolutionary forces. Indeed, these personality traits, and the left-right spectra that arise from them, are intimately connected to the natural history of our species.
This post is adapted from Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us.”
This is a truth emerging here in this thread. I began to think along these lines of the importance of dominance and control in emotional thinking when the argument of ideas devolved into the recrimination of Lasagna and Tiramisu. This brought to mind a long ago remembered taunting of a group of first graders in the school yard who belittled and bullied a poor nonconforming target to force that poor beleaguered wretch to toe their line. Apes and man, they both unknowingly think and reason with the passions of uncontrolled bestial emotion and the need for dominance.
Stupidity, ignorance, arrogance and pride will keep man confined to the jungles of his emotions. The verdict of posterity will judge justly as she sees fit. The most precious secrets of the universe will not yield to the baseness of emotion. These ultimate and ennobling truths will only be revealed when evolution elevates a new breed of men from the baseness of their ape beginnings to the heights and purity of the better angles of their natures