Heritability of Voting
June 27th, 2008IQ is heritable and now gnxp reports whether or not you vote is heritable.
Now, you may be asking yourself “Wait a minute, how can there be a gene for voting!?” Its pretty clear there’s no “voting” gene.
If you asked that question here, but you didn’t ask the same question of yourself regarding IQ, you fail the internet, i.e. start here.
(I do wonder though if there might be anything gained from disentangling phenotypes [in this case, conscientiousness, group orientation, gregariousness, etc] from observed behaviors [in this case, voting]. Do we just assume fitness weights of the phenotypes just integrate out or might there interesting interactions at this level that effect the heritability of behaviors? Suppose you only vote if you’re conscientiousness or group oriented. Selection works on these phenotypes, but not on voting behavior. Is it possible to get a joint distribution of the phenotypes such that voting doesn’t appear to be heritable from a statistical pov, but in fact is from a causal pov?
I’m pretty sure I mucked up this parenthetical… that’s why its a parenthetical.)