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Jonathan Weiner’s tale of how Seymour Benzer’s discovery of the connections between genes and behavior in fruit flies may sound like a strange commentary on American politics but political behavior is still behavior.
The three words of the title refer to behavior genes found in both humans and fruit flies:
Time is the period gene. Virtually all fruitflies and other critters have a 24 hour circadian rhythm some mutants do not. Humans normally have a 25 hour circadian rhythm but with a lot of learned and innate variance. Nightowls such as the hero of this book, Seymour Benzer, are sufficiently common that they are not thought of as mutants. This is not true of other species. Without knowing the name of another multi-cellular species you can confidently predict that 99% of the adults have the same wake-sleep cycle. Without a doubt circadian rhythm variance can be correlated with political preference I just don’t happen to know what the correlation is. Gene surgery paid for by national health care will change the political landscape drastically. Just because I don’t know the correlation does not mean the advisory committees of the RNC and DNC do not know what it is.
Love is the fruitless gene. Fruitflies who are male and fruitless mutants form conga lines in fruitless attempts to engage in homosexual intercourse. This is the much touted gay gene that humans purportedly have. Only it is not a simple on-off switch in humans most obviously in the fact that there are bi humans. Reports of bi fruitflies or any other simple creatures are very rare. Some birds seem to be bi in fairly high frequencies and also many harem keeping species among mammals such as goats but generally the rule is straight or gay. Humans have so many layers of input that even with identical twins if one twin is gay then it is basically a coin flip as to whether the other twin is gay. (correlation of .5) But checking another source the picture gets even muddier. In “Freakonomics” economist Andrew Francis analyzed the effects on sexual preference of HIV/AIDS Levitt and Dubner considered the negative correlation between having a relative diagnosed with AIDS and Homosexual behavior significant. So in humans some people are born with a sexual preference, some get their preference permanently imprinted in early childhood and some can change their preference. Does this mean that everybody has legitimate verifiable evidence for their theories of sexual preference? You betcha!
Memory is the dunce gene. Dunce mutants are considered stupid by other fruitflies. These suckers are too stupid to keep their leg away from a shock. Normal but decapitated fruitflies can accomplish this task. Study of the dunce gene led to the Creb gene. Two copies of creb and supergenius fruitflies result. Idiocracy to the contrary what makes anyone think that the sexual marketplace does not properly price Intelligence genes? This will be one of the key factors in future political debates: how much should government aid in non-sterilizing genetic “improvements”?
Bringing in two other sources: Matt Ridley and Steven Pinker; it turns out that there are large numbers of genes that affect political preferences. The best predictor of an adopted child’s voting patterns is the voting pattern of their biological parents. However there is a huge wild card in the deck.
As with Apple getting premium prices for their computers being a minority confers an advantage. Apple computers are at vastly lower risk from viruses than MS or UNIX/LINUX computers. In living organisms this is known as “The Red Queen” effect. Matt Ridley’s book of the same name goes into the details of how this works. In perhaps oversimplified form, being a minority will, all other things being equal, increase variance of return. Because the highly defective do not make it out of the chute the carriers of minority genes that are born tend to be superior to those with normative genes.
To take an example that is in the news, autism scares the crap out of people. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) sounds like all pain and no gain and ASD tends to afflict the children of high performers like Dan Marino, why is this? Well theory and history would indicate that high performers are very high function ASD people themselves such as Einstein, Newton and Archimedes in math. Or just read upon Autism or Asperger’s syndrome (a form of ASD) and then watch Dan Marino or record holding Poker champ Phil Helmuth on TV and come to your own conclusions. For that matter the nerd/geek genius stereotype is a good guide to high function ASD behavior. Autism Speaks seems hell bent on dropping average IQ about 5-10 points with their pursuit of a genetic cure for ASD. (Some of the predisposing genes are known.) “Good” genes may not be good for your kids and grandchildren. If a gene or genes is spreading rapidly as ASD genes are purportedly doing there is a reason for it no matter how bad it looks at first glance. If it is declining in frequency no matter how good the gene appears to be then something is wrong with it.
Did you know that there is a gene that confers immunity to both HIV and Bubonic Plague? I have no idea what is wrong with this gene but if a plague pandemic that wiped out an estimated 25% of the world’s population did not make it the default gene of even populations that reside in the East African and Burmese plague rodent reservoirs (”Plagues and Peoples” W. H. McNeill) I am fairly sure something is wrong with that gene. I don’t know what but the results of the HIV epidemic in East Africa and Southeast Asia convince me that there is something seriously wrong with that gene.
I also don’t know the upsides and downsides of the genes that predispose people to vote Republican, Democrat, Libertarian or Green but I would really like to know before gene therapy funding becomes a major federal budget item.