Passably reasonable HBD.
Abstract
The US has seen a linear decrease in the proportion of conservatives in each generation for at least 90 years. Sarraf et al. [5] have suggested that this is related to increases in mutational load due to relaxed selection pressures on humans in industrialized environments. We provide additional evidence for this hypothesis: leftists have older fathers than non-leftists, and those with older fathers are more likely to be leftist. Since male gametes acquire about 2 mutations per year, while female gametes mutate much more slowly, traits that are changing due to mutational pressure are expected to be more common in offspring from older fathers. Additionally, we show that older fathers themselves are not more leftist than younger fathers, suggesting that the paternal age effect is not due to differences in breeding patterns between leftists and non-leftists.
The paper was reviewed by two pseudonymous individuals. Well, given that I am reviewing it here pseudonymously, I should not make an issue of that, but then my blog does not pretend to be an academic journal. As someone who has reviewed, in real life, many hundreds of papers, for more than 150 different academic journals, I will make some comments about the Bronski work. As Dutton has already mentioned it, and as HBD is not an area of interest to me apart from criticizing it, I will make this brief, and concentrate more on the side issues I find more relevant. You can, and should, read the paper yourself and come to your own conclusions. As it is written in a simplistic style (see below), it should be understandable to those without a STEM background.
This, a minor point from my STEM perspective is with the writing. The style is aimed at a general, layman audience; it is not written in the typical style of an academic scientific paper, and some of the explanations given, particularly at the beginning, are obviously aimed at people with little understanding of biomedical science (HBDers?). Also, the punctuation at times seems off, but that may be more of a British, rather than American, style.
Executive Summary – I believe that the author is on to something; I believe the effect discovered is most likely real. The author should be commended for this work. However, it is flawed in some ways; see below.
Methods
If leftism is related to mutational pressure, we expect for there to be a paternal age effect for leftism. In other words, leftists should have older fathers on average. The object of this study was to test the hypothesis that leftists have older fathers. We also wanted to see if older fathers are more likely to be leftist, to rule out older fathers simply having more leftist genes, without de novo mutation playing a role.
It was discovered that leftists do have older fathers and that older fathers are not more leftist, favoring the de novo mutation hypothesis.
Conclusion:
Based on the results, we conclude that there is compelling evidence for a paternal age effect for leftism. The next step is molecular confirmation. Studies which confirm the role of de novo mutation in being more leftist than parents, as well as studies which show increasing polygenic scores for leftism associated traits like openness and individualizing through time can molecularly confirm the role of mutational load and genetics more generally in the rise of leftism. The decline of asabiyyah seems to be a general feature of empire decline. We propose that the mechanism of asabiyyah decline is in fact mutational load increasing leftism in a population, potentially alongside immigrant gene flow. Further quantitative studies investigating the universality of the rise of features of leftism like feminism (decreased fertility, increased female driven sexual selection), homosexuality, and mass immigration of foreigners can further confirm this view.
I agree that the data are consistent with the conclusion. But let us consider some limitations of the paper, both those cited by the author and some I note.
Limitations
Key limitations of this study include the treatment of leftism and paternal age as a binary variable, and the lack of data on potential confounders like religiosity and birth order effects.
Those are valid, and moderately serious, limitations.
Also, some claim theories of more or less complicated mechanisms of environmental effects of ideas on behavior. The present author does not find this framework generally supported or valid…
Is it up to him to say?
…and therefore is not generally concerned with measuring religious participation as an important variable, but it is relatively common and other researchers (Rutherford, 2020) who seriously believe in it will want to rule out environmental hypotheses.
That is bizarre from an academic STEM viewpoint – dismissing an alternative hypothesis by claiming that you do “not find this framework generally supported or valid” and then telling others who “seriously believe” in the alternatives should test it. It would have been better to have spelled out, in detail, why the author “does not find this framework generally supported or valid,” followed by proposing tests of the various hypotheses.
Some additional limitations I observed:
The author only looks at male offspring. Perhaps that is done to eliminate the sex variable, but it does leave out half the population, which happens to be, on average, the more left-leaning half.
Then:
These were not the fathers of the first group, which we do not have access to. Instead, they are meant to be a representative sample of fathers from, approximately, the generation that produced the individuals from the first sample. The main hypothesis for the second sample is that fathers who had children at older ages were not more leftist than fathers who had children at younger ages. Given that the fathers of the first sample come from the same population as the fathers from the second sample, this would show that older fathers of the first sample are not more leftist.
I see this as a major flaw. The measurement of the political views of the “fathers” (and their wives, presumably the mothers of the offspring) were done on a different group of men than the actual biological fathers of the offspring analyzed. The author did not have access to the actual fathers and I cannot criticize the lack of data, given the limited resources of the study, and I understand that the author attempts to justify the use of the “mock fathers” by stating they come from the same population as the unknown real ones, but they are not the same people. The “mock fathers” may in fact be a good representation of the real ones, and an Occam’s Razor view would find that plausible. But from an extremely strict, scientifically sound, control all the variables, viewpoint, this is, as stated, a major flaw. The “fathers” and “sons” data sets were not actually genetically related (except for the possibility of a few overlaps by chance). It is theoretically possible that the real fathers and the “mock fathers” are different in some significant manner that would affect the results.
Participant age increasing, of course, predicts decreased leftism, since older people are less leftist. The odds ratios were 1.012 for each year of paternal age and 0.979 for each year of participant age.
It may be interesting to track leftism of offspring over time, to see if there are differences between leftism vs. age for people with younger or older fathers.
There is also the issue of confounding variables that have not been controlled for. One example would be socioeconomic status (SES). It is reasonable to speculate that men with higher SES become fathers later in life than those with lower SES, as the former group may be busy when younger with higher education, career, etc. The latter, lower SES, group would be expected to have a “fast-life, r-selected strategy,” consistent with younger parenthood. As a theoretical example, conservative fathers may have invested time in their younger adulthood building a business, establishing a lucrative professional career, etc. and then had children when older, in the context of enhanced personal wealth and a higher standard of living. Their sons growing up in the midst of inherited wealth and an easy life, protected from the harsh social realities extant today, would then be more liberal than their fathers, flitting around in college in the “humanities” and getting on the road to a hardcore leftist worldview. If this sort of scenario is common in one form or another, it could explain the trend in the absence of the mutational mechanism. I suppose if one were to spend time pondering the issue, other such confounders could be theorized.
Another point is that if the mutational hypothesis is correct, one would expect the leftist sons to have more physical/health problems than their rightist fathers (controlling for SES, etc.). And as the author says, molecular conformation ultimately will be necessary.
In summary, the findings are likely based on an underlying reality, but I wouldn’t classify the data and the conclusions as “high confidence.” It would be optimal if an academic with resources followed through on this idea, but I am not optimistic given academic bias.
Side Issues:
Those who study empire decline have argued that the lack of certain selective pressures contributes to behavioral change in a population over 10-40 generations (Turchin, 2018). This behavioral change is marked by a decline in asabiyyah, a term introduced by Ibn Khaldun which roughly translates to “groupishness.” Khaldun theorized that asabiyyah declined following an increase in wealth. Peter Turchin theorized that it increases through prolonged exposure to “meta-ethnic frontiers”, areas of ethnic tension, over the course of 10-40 generations. He claimed that high asabiyyah predicts empire formation, and rots after a race becomes a successful imperial ethnicity with a lot of wealth. In support of this, he showed that empires form more than 90 % of the time in meta-ethnic frontiers, and that empire decline tends to last about 20-40 generations (Turchin, 2018). Multi-level selection theory lines up with research on “moral foundations” which attempts to predict political views from deeper sentiments. These sentiments, of course, are highly heritable (49 % – 66 %), meaning there is a lot of potential for genetic change (Zakharin & Bates, 2023). Leftists have been shown to have depressed “binding” sentiments and increased “individualizing” sentiments (Graham et al., 2009) relative to conservatives. Binding sentiments essentially map onto “groupishness”, as they include group loyalty and sexual morality.
Does this help answer the Italian Question – why Italians are, in general, atomized individualists who exhibit a propensity to ethnic self-abasement, why the tend to be lazy hedonistic cowards, and why when grouped together in a large group (i.e., Italy and Italian institutions) they tend to be catastrophically inept? I have previously speculated that the Italian stock became exhausted because of the Roman Empire, and the loss of Italian asabiyyah could also correlate to Frost’s concept of “genetic pacification.” Thus, as a result of the Roman state, 2,000+ years of genetics, and historical exhaustion, the depleted Italian stock is low in asabiyyah and is genetically pacified.
By the way, the asabiyyah metric is not a reason to favor ethnonationalism over Pan-Europeanism, despite the “empire” connection to declining asabiyyah. First, a Pan-European Imperium would not be an empire per se, but a voluntary confederation of nations. Second, “meta-ethnic frontiers” would exist between “the West” and “the Rest” so that asabiyyah-boosting “ethnic tension” would certainly exist. Third, asabiyyah has been in free-fall in the individual nations of “the West” independent of empire, so empire is not the most relevant factor. Any decline in selective pressure, such as “Western” wealth and standard of living, and particular cultural aspects (favoring the weak and botched over the strong; a culture of de facto and de jure Bioleninism), could be responsible.
There is also E. O. Wilson’s idea of the “multiplier effect” (Wilson, 2000). “A small evolutionary change in the behavior pattern of individuals can be amplified into a major social effect by the expanding upward distribution of the effect into multiple facets of social life. Consider, for example, the differing social organizations of the related olive baboon (Papio anubis) and hamadryas baboon (P. hamadryas). These two species are so close genetically that they interbreed extensively where their ranges overlap and could reasonably be classified as no more than subspecies. The hamadryas male is distinguished by its proprietary attitude toward females, which is total and permanent, whereas the olive male attempts to appropriate females only around the time of their estrus. This difference is only one of degree, and would scarcely be noticeable if one’s interest were restricted in each species to the activities of a single dominant male and one consort female. Yet this trait alone is enough to account for profound differences in social structure, affecting the size of the troops, the relationship of troops to one another, and the relationship of males within each troop.” In other words, there is ethological reason to believe that political behaviors are the most sensitive to changes in the genome. Minor changes in behavior can result in large changes to the aggregate social structure. Civil rights, feminism, and gay marriage may seem like radical steps that are hard to explain with small mutational pressures, but the multiplier effect can in theory make small individual changes result in huge aggregate changes to a society.
This would also explain and answer the Italian Question as well. The collapse of Italian asabiyyah and resulting sociopolitical consequences do not need to be due to large genetic-behavioral changes, nor necessarily traits exhibited by the vast majority of the population. Consistent small effects, exhibited by a large fraction of the population, exerted over long time periods by large numbers of people, influenced by historical events, could result in significant differences in ethnic mass social-cultural behavior, such as what we observe with The Inadequate Italian.
The multiplier effect is a double-edged sword. This, it makes degeneration occur quickly and such degeneration can be induced by small (genetically-encoded) cognitive and behavioral changes. However, it also means that minor changes for the better with respect to cognition and behavior can be multiplied over mass society to effect positive societal-cultural-civilizational outcomes. Of course, given the role of sociopolitical and sociobiological entropy in civilizational sociopolitical thermodynamics, degeneration is always easier than regeneration; the civilizational free energy change favors a tendency toward easier, more spontaneous, higher-entropy degeneration.
But if one puts in the effort, if one puts in the energy, one could move in the direction of lower-entropy societal regeneration. Eugenics can assist in this regard. Thus, Italians, or any other group, could exhibit marked group improvement by shifting heritable mental traits in a direction of higher asabiyyah and lower genetic pacification (and higher IQ, etc.).
eginotes 