A potential proxy for mutational load is positively related to certain leftist beliefs, and public opinion has shifted both between and within cohorts.
Couldn’t just the effect of left wing propaganda since the 60s and 70s have an effect of society also? Genetics certainly places a role but we seem to forget that people are animals and they have to adapt to a changing environment and might have to put on a face to mask their real beliefs as a self defense mechanism especially with the rise of people being afraid to express socially conservative views of being cancelled by society.
Yes, the cultural onslaught has been intense in pop culture. Anyone who watched TV or movies from the 1960s on witnessed the erosion of conservative cultural attitudes/standards and the introduction of blatant Leftist propaganda. Of course, Leftists might argue that this change just reflects the higher IQs of the writers, directors, etc. but cultural attitudes aren’t directly linked to high IQs in the sense that you need to be high IQ to enjoy gays or gay culture.
The fact that a high IQ is genetically correlated with leftism is inconvenient for both conservatives and liberals and raises a huge number of interesting questions.:
1. Does this fact mean that the stereotypes of conservatives about the "liberal elite" fully correspond to reality?
2. Does this fact mean that dark-skinned people are GENETICALLY not quite able, on average, to support truly leftism - all sorts of feminisms, gay rights, internationalisms. Does this mean that blacks always support the left only for purely selfish reasons in the spirit of "taking more money from the white state" and "raising our race to the top of society, and lowering whites"?
3. How many people in society exist with real left-wing views? A minority of 30% white liberals?
4. Are white liberals, uh, a "superior race"? They have the highest IQ, literally whiter skin[ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-020-09635-0 ]and as a result of a high IQ, white liberals are likely to have lower rates of crime, abortion, and the like.
5. Can we say that, in fact, all the groups that leftists usually defend - the black people, the working class, the outsiders of society - in fact despise their liberal views?
6. Has this correlation of IQ and leftism existed in the past? It seems that the aristocrats really were much more supporters of feminism, sexual freedoms and multiculturalism than the commoners. Was the New England WASP elite more liberal than ordinary white Christian Americans?
7. Does this mean that defending conservative views, often using racial realism, evolutionary psychology and intelligence research, is absolutely useless, because it is literally a call to "stick to the views that stupid people hold"?
8. Does this mean that, in fact, leftist views are absolutely correct - after all, such ideas are held by people with high IQs, that is, those who are banally better able to analyze information?
Views held by the aristocrats of yore are what we call today social conservatism. They were liberal for that time, but today, they're conservative. Religiosity, for instance, was seen as a mark of civilization by the higher classes a mere couple centuries ago.
Also, smart people are attracted to intellectual stimulation, which leftism provides in the form of proposed social change. They're also more likely to be better off, and so feel better able to afford liberal attitudes both personally and around them.
Re: #4: Liberals do see themselves as superior such that there is a whiff of “egalitarian Nazism” when they speak of the lower (white) orders. Of course, many Jews are represented among the liberal elite, especially within the cultural quarters, and they are hostile to conservative whites, so their cultural attitudes might be disproportionately influential. The cult of the marginalized is probably also traceable to Jewish influence (but not exclusively) as they want to stigmatize all “bigotry” as a rampart against anti-Semitism (this appears to have back-fired somewhat). Liberals are also higher in neuroticism, which tends to induce pathological altruism (“There but for the grace of God, go I”).
African-Americans have exceeded whites in rates of mutation accumulation. Its likely that support for leftism among African-Americans is genuine. Blacks are more likely to identify as LGBTQ+ than whites. American Blacks have managed to match whites in fertility a significant evolutionary mismatch when considering their mean IQ. Blacks also favor more lighter-skinned African-Americans which includes African-Americans with more white ancestry. Out-breeding depression or whatever suggests that this promotes poor genetic health (I don't know much about it).
In modernized environments darker-skinned people generate an asymmetric trend of mutation accumulation when compared to lighter-skinned people. This can be solely explained by their faster life-cycles. Exposure to modernized environments prevents them from producing adaptively viable fertility earlier than groups with slower life-cycles.
Black Americans and Non-Whites in general are far less likely to have Woke Leftist beliefs (like Race Denialism and Gender Fluidity) than White Western people, and it's actually White Americans who have a higher % of LGBT folks by a small degree.
It's only since the late 2000s that Black American fertility declined (though still higher than Whites) while for Whites the decline was much earlier.
The "favoritism" for lighter skin Blacks only applies to Women, either way this doesn't translate to greater reproductive success since darker skinned Black women have more children on average
I think that's mainly due to the sexes being less in relation with each other than they used to. Typically, women get influenced towards the right by their boyfriends, husbands, fathers, or brothers. Except now they have fewer of all of these, and so they're more likely to stick to their default worldview.
It's possible that mutational load has a female sex bias. X (female) bearing spermatozoa have more genetic content subject to mutation than do Y (male) bearing spermatozoa. Though I think the effect is minor due to how little the quantity of genetic information differs between them.
A more feasible reason for this polarization is the character of hyper-conformity amongst women which is normal but is exploited by the social epistatic nature of leftism.
Agree on the point of women being more conformist but this has always been the case. I’m not aware that it has increased as a driver although it clearly has in presentation. I’d say that the increased presentation is due to ideological change by feminism rather than mutational load although I suppose that the latter could have supercharged commitment to something like feminism.
All things considered, writers in this area need to do a more comprehensive analysis and either acknowledge gaps in their theory or explain them before pressing the print button.
Mutational load is very intriguing for a right-wing point of view, so I suspect that the basis of this far from proven theory is not great theorising and observation, but a desire to prove that left-wing attitudes are genetically inferior. If there's anything to the mutation load theory, it's to be expected in the high-fertility lower classes with below-average IQs, which should lead to more conservative cohorts in the future.
Academia, where one would expect to find more above average IQ individuals than in the general population, has always been the birthplace of left-wing theory and the home of most of its adherents. This should at least suggest a correlation (see this article) between left-wing politics and IQ, not the other way around. To associate right-wing attitudes with above-average IQ and left-wing attitudes with below-average IQ, without considering the evidence against this hypothesis, may not be so clever in the first place, but due to confirmation bias and self-deception.
The more interesting question is why so many intelligent people are receptive to left-wing radicalism, despite its flaws.
<<why so many intelligent people are receptive to left-wing radicalism, despite its flaws>> - more years of schooling and being socialised into chilling any contrary impulses (self-censorship). At a guess.
I will probably write a response article. My immediate comments here though, as I read:
>Mutational pressure has increased over the last sixty years (due to a combination of rising parental age and declining infant mortality).
This is not needed although it would help the theory! Alternatively, selection pressure against leftism could have fallen. I think there's evidence of both these happening.
>Mutational load causes leftist political beliefs.
Yes, more specifically, the average causal effect of an additional de novo mutation on leftism must be above a certain magnitude such that we find a paternal age - leftism causal partial correlation > .06.
>Bronski points out that leftism is correlated with paternal age and mental illness – two potential proxies for mutational load. A major problem with his theory is that there’s another potential proxy for mutational load, namely IQ, which is positively correlated with certain leftist beliefs.
Only paternal age is a proxy for mutational load. Even if mutational load has an effect on IQ and mental illness (I think it does), the correlation between leftism and those things can be basically anything. If the paternal age effects on mental health and leftism are both .1, then you'd expect just a .01 correlation between leftism and mental health under the most neutral assumptions. But this can change to anything under genetic correlation, population stratification, and other things all mixing together. So, for example, I know it would seem leftism and IQ correlate positively -- I think this is due to population stratification mainly -- higher IQ people assortatively mating heavily (literature says the spouse correlation is about .4 for IQ), and selection pressures being weaker among these people, mutation pressures being higher. We know higher IQ men breed later in life, which means they'll give more mutations to their offspring. It's also possible that there's an interaction between leftism and IQ on fertility, changing the selection pressure.
>Since IQ is an obvious potential proxy for mutational load, his theory predicts that such views should be negatively correlated with IQ
So this is not the case, my theory doesn't predict this. The thing I just said it what I think and it seems to be consistent with all of your evidence on IQ and leftism in this article.
>The negative association between IQ and social conservatism casts serious doubt on the claim that mutational load causes leftist political beliefs
I strongly disagree with this conclusion, therefore.
>Cohort or period?
I've been running with a study that says that views mostly don't change within a generation, but when they do they go further right on net. This is consistent with my hypothesizing here and there that the memetic environment has shifted right slightly, thanks to HBD and the internet and so on, softening the genetic decline. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/706889
I am interested in what you are citing and why it would contradict these studies. Because of my experience with HBD and the brain development fields, I'm starting off feeling a little incredulous toward contradictory studies.
That said, period effects can be explained by Social Epistasis Amplification. I have a mathematical model of this in my forthcoming book -- the parameters aren't estimated, but as long as the gene pool is going left, the shift can be amplified by the leftization of ideas springing from increasingly genetically leftist idea creators.
>David Ekstam examines change in attitudes to homosexuality and concludes that “both period and cohort effects have contributed to the increase in
The study is inconclusive, at least 1 of the three models is consistent with no period effect and only a cohort effect.
...
Okay without going over every study here, they seem good enough that it's not just researcher bias causing the results. There should be a meta analysis on this, looking at more than attitudes on homosexuality as well as pooling together the cohort and period effects, because I'm seeing a lot of deviation from study to study. It's looking like 30-50% cohort effect, the rest period.
This is actually decent evidence for genetic causation. With homosexuality particularly, we know gays themselves are becoming more common because paternal age as well as selection pressure are favoring bisexuals and homosexuals. The data is generally consistent with genetic change followed by a social amplification due to politics and so on -- individual's opposition to gays weakens as they accumulate in the gene pool because it's more costly and the ideas will all be gayer on average. Whereas a pure idea model makes barely any logical sense, and an environmental toxin model would predict pure period effects unless you add an epicycle about fetal/childhood chemical sensitivity.
>The evidence reviewed above is not inconsistent with a weak version of Bronski’s thesis whereby the rise of leftism is partly explained by genetic changes
I would say instead "the evidence reviewed above is not inconsistent with a modified version of Bronski’s thesis whereby the rise of leftism is explained by genetic changes followed by social epistasis amplification".
>It is far from clear that mutational load causes leftist political beliefs.
My priors on finding a paternal age effect under a good family level design haven't changed much except that it's slightly more likely we find an effect size that explains 30-60% of the shift left instead of 100%, the rest being due to social epistasis amplification.
>Period effects cannot be due to genetic changes because they involve multiple cohorts simultaneously shifting their beliefs.
Under SEAM, the ultimate cause is genetic change. So, in a sense, it's theoretically possible for period effects to be caused by temporally preceding cohort effects which are genetic in origin.
>Mutational pressure may have made a small contribution to the rise of “leftism” (i.e., the decline of social conservatism) over the last sixty years. But it seems very unlikely to be a major contributor.
The notion that Leftist are "spiteful mutants" is just pseudoscientific cope from the Alt-Right. The other way around is closer to the truth as mutation load is more common among the Right than it is among the Left.
Also, All of Western Civilization since the Enlightenment has been a constant move towards Leftism and the most Intelligent Westerners are disproportionately Left Wing
It can be observed in everyday life. The more left-wing a group of people is, the uglier, the more neurotic, and the weirder they appear and behave. The men just look weak, and the women unfeminine. The typical leftist so not meets society's standards of desirability that he understandably rebels against them and tries to lower them. Right-wingers, in contrast, just look stronger, more comfortable in their shoes, and all-around healthier.
The average Right Winger isn't much better, and as noted in the article Conservatives have higher mutation rates than Leftists do on average.
Also, White Western people are the most Left Wing group of Humans on the planet and Western Civilization since The Enlightenment has been a constant march towards the Left so what does that tell you?
Perhaps “progressive” in a literal sense—as in linked to progress—but not progressive as the word is used today (interventionist/collectivist). But the early defenders of economic liberty were (classical) liberals, not leftists. Leftists were socialists, not pro-capitalist—until their dream crumbled. But, again, much credit is due to leftists for shifting to the right. So I don’t think you are correct to say that there has been a march to the “left” (Is woke left?) except with regard to cultural/racial issues. But, ironically, this is where high IQ has often failed to deliver sensible views, so the Left doesn’t look so good overall.
Liberalism itself is the original Left Wing ideology, nearly every modern political ideology is a spinoff of Liberalism, especially those on the Left. Classical Liberals like John Locke were the original SJWs.
The obsession with "freedom" and "equality" and the tendency to politicize the personal are defining features of all Western politics and it began with Classical Liberalism
Classical liberalism is not Leftism. If it were, Leftists would not refer to classical liberals like Milton Friedman as “conservative”. Leftists have become more liberal in their embrace of markets and repudiation of socialism. I applaud their transition. Hopefully they will go further.
Classic Liberals are only "Conservative" compared to Post-Hegel Leftists because Western thought and politics are constantly moving leftwards with each generation
The march of Western Civilization has been towards capitalism, which is associated with the “right”. But credit is due to the Left for correcting in the right direction. As far as cultural attitudes, Orwell, a man of the Left, famously mocked the nudists and fruit juice drinkers that the Left attracted. IQ and neuroticism are correlated.
When societies get rich, people's attitudes become less rigid towards merit, personal responsibility, and various other standards of civilization, because they feel they have enough resources to maintain order without having to be as socially conservative. Social conservatism -- as in, family stability and involvement, religious discipline, and social hierarchy -- is a very efficient and cheap way to maintain an orderly society, but it comes at the cost of lower-status groups feeling resentment and as well as producing a more austere society.
"The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure and Social Systems" is a book by Emmanuel Todd that explores the thesis that different marriage patterns lead people to have different "common sense notions" about how The State should function (at least as parliamentarians call it (alternatively we say "The Government" in a presidential systems (parliamentarians use "the government" to refer to what presidential systems call "the <name> administration"))).
According to Mr Todd, when young adults exogamously marry and then join large communal living situations, authoritarian Communism tended to arise there in the 1900s (Russia and China both had this pattern in 1905). When small nuclear families were the norm in many places around the planet, Communism had almost no traction. And so on. It isn't a perfect thesis, but it kinda checks out. And if that is a huge predictive driver of where political sentiment and institutional outcomes land, then the radical re-arrangement of romantic norms in the US in the late 1900s should logically cause *some* kind of political re-arrangement, right?
Americans used to marry early and stay married basically for life and have the right to divorce (which was only exercised very rarely, by people who experienced the choice as a huge personal failing). Now FORMAL (old fashioned) marriage is rare, late, and... often temporary! Certainly no one is shunned socially "from all of society" anymore, just because they get divorced. Also, men are forced by the state to pay child support to every woman they have a baby with, which gives rise to "de facto polygamy" (but without all the wives living together) and in this new kind of de facto marriage, divorce by men is 100% illegal, and divorce would be insane for the women (since the totality of the "marriage" is just "getting checks in the mail" (ad who says no to free money?)). If Todd is correct, then radical changes in marriage patterns in the US sort of *must* be doing *something* to the politics. It wouldn't be that surprising if something in this ballpark explains the crazy new swings in opinion among the illiberal left (and perhaps also the illiberal right which is ALSO downstream of no-longer-collapsing-but-now-just-collapsed marriage norms).
If one used the United States Congress as a proxy for the populace, it would be impossible to tell which political leaning, left or right, is the most stupid. But perhaps I am confusing stupid with evil.
I'm not going to take either side, not worth the effort. But I will say that this article reminded me of the "Hot Hand" theory and its debunking, which was then properly debunked itself. If your confused or don't know about the hot hand then you can see a fine example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvI3uxw7Uks
Couldn’t just the effect of left wing propaganda since the 60s and 70s have an effect of society also? Genetics certainly places a role but we seem to forget that people are animals and they have to adapt to a changing environment and might have to put on a face to mask their real beliefs as a self defense mechanism especially with the rise of people being afraid to express socially conservative views of being cancelled by society.
Yes, the cultural onslaught has been intense in pop culture. Anyone who watched TV or movies from the 1960s on witnessed the erosion of conservative cultural attitudes/standards and the introduction of blatant Leftist propaganda. Of course, Leftists might argue that this change just reflects the higher IQs of the writers, directors, etc. but cultural attitudes aren’t directly linked to high IQs in the sense that you need to be high IQ to enjoy gays or gay culture.
The fact that a high IQ is genetically correlated with leftism is inconvenient for both conservatives and liberals and raises a huge number of interesting questions.:
1. Does this fact mean that the stereotypes of conservatives about the "liberal elite" fully correspond to reality?
2. Does this fact mean that dark-skinned people are GENETICALLY not quite able, on average, to support truly leftism - all sorts of feminisms, gay rights, internationalisms. Does this mean that blacks always support the left only for purely selfish reasons in the spirit of "taking more money from the white state" and "raising our race to the top of society, and lowering whites"?
3. How many people in society exist with real left-wing views? A minority of 30% white liberals?
4. Are white liberals, uh, a "superior race"? They have the highest IQ, literally whiter skin[ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-020-09635-0 ]and as a result of a high IQ, white liberals are likely to have lower rates of crime, abortion, and the like.
5. Can we say that, in fact, all the groups that leftists usually defend - the black people, the working class, the outsiders of society - in fact despise their liberal views?
6. Has this correlation of IQ and leftism existed in the past? It seems that the aristocrats really were much more supporters of feminism, sexual freedoms and multiculturalism than the commoners. Was the New England WASP elite more liberal than ordinary white Christian Americans?
7. Does this mean that defending conservative views, often using racial realism, evolutionary psychology and intelligence research, is absolutely useless, because it is literally a call to "stick to the views that stupid people hold"?
8. Does this mean that, in fact, leftist views are absolutely correct - after all, such ideas are held by people with high IQs, that is, those who are banally better able to analyze information?
Views held by the aristocrats of yore are what we call today social conservatism. They were liberal for that time, but today, they're conservative. Religiosity, for instance, was seen as a mark of civilization by the higher classes a mere couple centuries ago.
Also, smart people are attracted to intellectual stimulation, which leftism provides in the form of proposed social change. They're also more likely to be better off, and so feel better able to afford liberal attitudes both personally and around them.
https://vdare.com/posts/is-liberalism-caused-by-genes-for-iq
I would also like to remind you that financially conservative views are ALSO negatively genetically correlated with IQ upon careful study.
Re: #4: Liberals do see themselves as superior such that there is a whiff of “egalitarian Nazism” when they speak of the lower (white) orders. Of course, many Jews are represented among the liberal elite, especially within the cultural quarters, and they are hostile to conservative whites, so their cultural attitudes might be disproportionately influential. The cult of the marginalized is probably also traceable to Jewish influence (but not exclusively) as they want to stigmatize all “bigotry” as a rampart against anti-Semitism (this appears to have back-fired somewhat). Liberals are also higher in neuroticism, which tends to induce pathological altruism (“There but for the grace of God, go I”).
African-Americans have exceeded whites in rates of mutation accumulation. Its likely that support for leftism among African-Americans is genuine. Blacks are more likely to identify as LGBTQ+ than whites. American Blacks have managed to match whites in fertility a significant evolutionary mismatch when considering their mean IQ. Blacks also favor more lighter-skinned African-Americans which includes African-Americans with more white ancestry. Out-breeding depression or whatever suggests that this promotes poor genetic health (I don't know much about it).
In modernized environments darker-skinned people generate an asymmetric trend of mutation accumulation when compared to lighter-skinned people. This can be solely explained by their faster life-cycles. Exposure to modernized environments prevents them from producing adaptively viable fertility earlier than groups with slower life-cycles.
Black Americans and Non-Whites in general are far less likely to have Woke Leftist beliefs (like Race Denialism and Gender Fluidity) than White Western people, and it's actually White Americans who have a higher % of LGBT folks by a small degree.
It's only since the late 2000s that Black American fertility declined (though still higher than Whites) while for Whites the decline was much earlier.
The "favoritism" for lighter skin Blacks only applies to Women, either way this doesn't translate to greater reproductive success since darker skinned Black women have more children on average
Would mutational load affect the sexes differently? How come females and males have drifted in opposite directions politically?
I think that's mainly due to the sexes being less in relation with each other than they used to. Typically, women get influenced towards the right by their boyfriends, husbands, fathers, or brothers. Except now they have fewer of all of these, and so they're more likely to stick to their default worldview.
Totally agree but those are all social factors.
It's possible that mutational load has a female sex bias. X (female) bearing spermatozoa have more genetic content subject to mutation than do Y (male) bearing spermatozoa. Though I think the effect is minor due to how little the quantity of genetic information differs between them.
A more feasible reason for this polarization is the character of hyper-conformity amongst women which is normal but is exploited by the social epistatic nature of leftism.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-017-0084-x
Agree on the point of women being more conformist but this has always been the case. I’m not aware that it has increased as a driver although it clearly has in presentation. I’d say that the increased presentation is due to ideological change by feminism rather than mutational load although I suppose that the latter could have supercharged commitment to something like feminism.
All things considered, writers in this area need to do a more comprehensive analysis and either acknowledge gaps in their theory or explain them before pressing the print button.
Mutational load is very intriguing for a right-wing point of view, so I suspect that the basis of this far from proven theory is not great theorising and observation, but a desire to prove that left-wing attitudes are genetically inferior. If there's anything to the mutation load theory, it's to be expected in the high-fertility lower classes with below-average IQs, which should lead to more conservative cohorts in the future.
Academia, where one would expect to find more above average IQ individuals than in the general population, has always been the birthplace of left-wing theory and the home of most of its adherents. This should at least suggest a correlation (see this article) between left-wing politics and IQ, not the other way around. To associate right-wing attitudes with above-average IQ and left-wing attitudes with below-average IQ, without considering the evidence against this hypothesis, may not be so clever in the first place, but due to confirmation bias and self-deception.
The more interesting question is why so many intelligent people are receptive to left-wing radicalism, despite its flaws.
<<why so many intelligent people are receptive to left-wing radicalism, despite its flaws>> - more years of schooling and being socialised into chilling any contrary impulses (self-censorship). At a guess.
I will probably write a response article. My immediate comments here though, as I read:
>Mutational pressure has increased over the last sixty years (due to a combination of rising parental age and declining infant mortality).
This is not needed although it would help the theory! Alternatively, selection pressure against leftism could have fallen. I think there's evidence of both these happening.
>Mutational load causes leftist political beliefs.
Yes, more specifically, the average causal effect of an additional de novo mutation on leftism must be above a certain magnitude such that we find a paternal age - leftism causal partial correlation > .06.
>Bronski points out that leftism is correlated with paternal age and mental illness – two potential proxies for mutational load. A major problem with his theory is that there’s another potential proxy for mutational load, namely IQ, which is positively correlated with certain leftist beliefs.
Only paternal age is a proxy for mutational load. Even if mutational load has an effect on IQ and mental illness (I think it does), the correlation between leftism and those things can be basically anything. If the paternal age effects on mental health and leftism are both .1, then you'd expect just a .01 correlation between leftism and mental health under the most neutral assumptions. But this can change to anything under genetic correlation, population stratification, and other things all mixing together. So, for example, I know it would seem leftism and IQ correlate positively -- I think this is due to population stratification mainly -- higher IQ people assortatively mating heavily (literature says the spouse correlation is about .4 for IQ), and selection pressures being weaker among these people, mutation pressures being higher. We know higher IQ men breed later in life, which means they'll give more mutations to their offspring. It's also possible that there's an interaction between leftism and IQ on fertility, changing the selection pressure.
>Since IQ is an obvious potential proxy for mutational load, his theory predicts that such views should be negatively correlated with IQ
So this is not the case, my theory doesn't predict this. The thing I just said it what I think and it seems to be consistent with all of your evidence on IQ and leftism in this article.
>The negative association between IQ and social conservatism casts serious doubt on the claim that mutational load causes leftist political beliefs
I strongly disagree with this conclusion, therefore.
>Cohort or period?
I've been running with a study that says that views mostly don't change within a generation, but when they do they go further right on net. This is consistent with my hypothesizing here and there that the memetic environment has shifted right slightly, thanks to HBD and the internet and so on, softening the genetic decline. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/706889
Also, openness correlates with leftism moderately. But openness falls a little when people age, yet newer generations start with much more openness. So again, all of the leftism accumulation seems to be between generations. https://journals.sagepub.com/cms/10.1177/09567976211037971/asset/images/large/10.1177_09567976211037971-fig3.jpeg
I am interested in what you are citing and why it would contradict these studies. Because of my experience with HBD and the brain development fields, I'm starting off feeling a little incredulous toward contradictory studies.
That said, period effects can be explained by Social Epistasis Amplification. I have a mathematical model of this in my forthcoming book -- the parameters aren't estimated, but as long as the gene pool is going left, the shift can be amplified by the leftization of ideas springing from increasingly genetically leftist idea creators.
>David Ekstam examines change in attitudes to homosexuality and concludes that “both period and cohort effects have contributed to the increase in
The study is inconclusive, at least 1 of the three models is consistent with no period effect and only a cohort effect.
...
Okay without going over every study here, they seem good enough that it's not just researcher bias causing the results. There should be a meta analysis on this, looking at more than attitudes on homosexuality as well as pooling together the cohort and period effects, because I'm seeing a lot of deviation from study to study. It's looking like 30-50% cohort effect, the rest period.
This is actually decent evidence for genetic causation. With homosexuality particularly, we know gays themselves are becoming more common because paternal age as well as selection pressure are favoring bisexuals and homosexuals. The data is generally consistent with genetic change followed by a social amplification due to politics and so on -- individual's opposition to gays weakens as they accumulate in the gene pool because it's more costly and the ideas will all be gayer on average. Whereas a pure idea model makes barely any logical sense, and an environmental toxin model would predict pure period effects unless you add an epicycle about fetal/childhood chemical sensitivity.
>The evidence reviewed above is not inconsistent with a weak version of Bronski’s thesis whereby the rise of leftism is partly explained by genetic changes
I would say instead "the evidence reviewed above is not inconsistent with a modified version of Bronski’s thesis whereby the rise of leftism is explained by genetic changes followed by social epistasis amplification".
>It is far from clear that mutational load causes leftist political beliefs.
My priors on finding a paternal age effect under a good family level design haven't changed much except that it's slightly more likely we find an effect size that explains 30-60% of the shift left instead of 100%, the rest being due to social epistasis amplification.
>Period effects cannot be due to genetic changes because they involve multiple cohorts simultaneously shifting their beliefs.
Under SEAM, the ultimate cause is genetic change. So, in a sense, it's theoretically possible for period effects to be caused by temporally preceding cohort effects which are genetic in origin.
>Mutational pressure may have made a small contribution to the rise of “leftism” (i.e., the decline of social conservatism) over the last sixty years. But it seems very unlikely to be a major contributor.
Still no better theory!
The notion that Leftist are "spiteful mutants" is just pseudoscientific cope from the Alt-Right. The other way around is closer to the truth as mutation load is more common among the Right than it is among the Left.
Also, All of Western Civilization since the Enlightenment has been a constant move towards Leftism and the most Intelligent Westerners are disproportionately Left Wing
The notion that Leftist are "spiteful mutants" is just pseudoscientific cope from the Alt-Right. The other way around is closer to the truth
It can be observed in everyday life. The more left-wing a group of people is, the uglier, the more neurotic, and the weirder they appear and behave. The men just look weak, and the women unfeminine. The typical leftist so not meets society's standards of desirability that he understandably rebels against them and tries to lower them. Right-wingers, in contrast, just look stronger, more comfortable in their shoes, and all-around healthier.
The average Right Winger isn't much better, and as noted in the article Conservatives have higher mutation rates than Leftists do on average.
Also, White Western people are the most Left Wing group of Humans on the planet and Western Civilization since The Enlightenment has been a constant march towards the Left so what does that tell you?
Perhaps “progressive” in a literal sense—as in linked to progress—but not progressive as the word is used today (interventionist/collectivist). But the early defenders of economic liberty were (classical) liberals, not leftists. Leftists were socialists, not pro-capitalist—until their dream crumbled. But, again, much credit is due to leftists for shifting to the right. So I don’t think you are correct to say that there has been a march to the “left” (Is woke left?) except with regard to cultural/racial issues. But, ironically, this is where high IQ has often failed to deliver sensible views, so the Left doesn’t look so good overall.
Liberalism itself is the original Left Wing ideology, nearly every modern political ideology is a spinoff of Liberalism, especially those on the Left. Classical Liberals like John Locke were the original SJWs.
The obsession with "freedom" and "equality" and the tendency to politicize the personal are defining features of all Western politics and it began with Classical Liberalism
Classical liberalism is not Leftism. If it were, Leftists would not refer to classical liberals like Milton Friedman as “conservative”. Leftists have become more liberal in their embrace of markets and repudiation of socialism. I applaud their transition. Hopefully they will go further.
Classic Liberals are only "Conservative" compared to Post-Hegel Leftists because Western thought and politics are constantly moving leftwards with each generation
The march of Western Civilization has been towards capitalism, which is associated with the “right”. But credit is due to the Left for correcting in the right direction. As far as cultural attitudes, Orwell, a man of the Left, famously mocked the nudists and fruit juice drinkers that the Left attracted. IQ and neuroticism are correlated.
Capitalism itself was considered Leftist/Progressive back when it was a new idea
When societies get rich, people's attitudes become less rigid towards merit, personal responsibility, and various other standards of civilization, because they feel they have enough resources to maintain order without having to be as socially conservative. Social conservatism -- as in, family stability and involvement, religious discipline, and social hierarchy -- is a very efficient and cheap way to maintain an orderly society, but it comes at the cost of lower-status groups feeling resentment and as well as producing a more austere society.
"The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure and Social Systems" is a book by Emmanuel Todd that explores the thesis that different marriage patterns lead people to have different "common sense notions" about how The State should function (at least as parliamentarians call it (alternatively we say "The Government" in a presidential systems (parliamentarians use "the government" to refer to what presidential systems call "the <name> administration"))).
According to Mr Todd, when young adults exogamously marry and then join large communal living situations, authoritarian Communism tended to arise there in the 1900s (Russia and China both had this pattern in 1905). When small nuclear families were the norm in many places around the planet, Communism had almost no traction. And so on. It isn't a perfect thesis, but it kinda checks out. And if that is a huge predictive driver of where political sentiment and institutional outcomes land, then the radical re-arrangement of romantic norms in the US in the late 1900s should logically cause *some* kind of political re-arrangement, right?
Americans used to marry early and stay married basically for life and have the right to divorce (which was only exercised very rarely, by people who experienced the choice as a huge personal failing). Now FORMAL (old fashioned) marriage is rare, late, and... often temporary! Certainly no one is shunned socially "from all of society" anymore, just because they get divorced. Also, men are forced by the state to pay child support to every woman they have a baby with, which gives rise to "de facto polygamy" (but without all the wives living together) and in this new kind of de facto marriage, divorce by men is 100% illegal, and divorce would be insane for the women (since the totality of the "marriage" is just "getting checks in the mail" (ad who says no to free money?)). If Todd is correct, then radical changes in marriage patterns in the US sort of *must* be doing *something* to the politics. It wouldn't be that surprising if something in this ballpark explains the crazy new swings in opinion among the illiberal left (and perhaps also the illiberal right which is ALSO downstream of no-longer-collapsing-but-now-just-collapsed marriage norms).
If one used the United States Congress as a proxy for the populace, it would be impossible to tell which political leaning, left or right, is the most stupid. But perhaps I am confusing stupid with evil.
Edward Dutton has written on this and does podcasts on YouTube. You'd probably be interested in his thoughts.
I'm not going to take either side, not worth the effort. But I will say that this article reminded me of the "Hot Hand" theory and its debunking, which was then properly debunked itself. If your confused or don't know about the hot hand then you can see a fine example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvI3uxw7Uks
Is the hot hand real - it damn well is!
We have a sibling control study finding polygenic scores for intelligence to predict leftism more strongly than the between-family effect:
https://not-equal.org/content/pdf/misc/Edwards2024.pdf
You went too soft tbh