Get Ready for Genopolitics

At Gene Expression, blogger Piccolino comments on a paper in Science last week about "genopolitics" (some of the comments to his post call it "poly-bi"), or research relating genetic variation to political leanings. While it's a good study, he says, he's not sure what hard evidence is available to make the connection between genes and voting behavior. "The deeper question is this: what does it mean that a complex trait such as voting, the strength of partisanship, or attitudes toward abortion, say, are heritable, beyond the obvious but important implication that we can't interpret parent-child associations in environmental terms?"