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| 5/25 |
| 2006/3/14-16 [Politics/Domestic/Gay, Politics/Domestic/Immigration] UID:42235 Activity:moderate |
3/14 Progressives are so much less likely to have children. Conservatism
to rule for decades to come. We're screwed. Really screwed.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20060314/cm_usatoday/theliberalbabybust
\_ Isn't it ironic that those who make the biggest deal of
evolution, fail its only test so pathetically? --Alanis
\_ The basic fallacy here is the idea that children always have the
values of their parents. This is demonstrably false.
\_ I'm your number one fan! That's such a great phrase! I think
you should use it at least 3 times per motd!
--Basic Fallacy Guy's #1 Fan
\_ Please demonstrate, with statistics and not with anecdotes.
please.
\_ Are social mores the same as they were 100 years ago?
\_ |R' - R| < |R' - Dnom|, where R' = f(R), but |R' - R| != 0.
\_ C'mon, all you need is one example to disprove an "always".
You still want one example?
\_ Fair enough. But you're still in trouble so long as it's
more heritable than the nominal D/R split.
\_ '50s = Prudes
'60s = Hippies
'90s = Old hippies
'00s = ?
We already have one example of Prudes producing Hippies.
You need to argue that there is an overwhelming force
which prevents Hippies from being produced from Prudes
again.
\_ Now, there are certainly anecdotal examples of '60s
hippies turning capitalist and conservative in middle
age. Again, please post statistics and not anecdotes.
\_ You want statistics on the production of Hippies
from Prudes in the '60s? You don't believe this
to have occurred without statistics?
\_ I want statistics that says political
attitude is or is not heritable. Here, I'll
make your job easier for you.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr04/beliefs.html
"[T]he idea that a behavioral system has a
strong genetic component is hardly an issue
anymore", or how about "the data suggest an
interplay of both genetic and environmental
factors in people's attitudes toward, for
example, sex, politics and religion,
with environment playing a stronger role".
Now, where do the genetics come from, and
who controls formative environmental factors?
\_ Sigh. If social mores didn't change over
time, we'd still be worshipping animals
and sacrificing each other to the moon
god.
\_ |R' - R| < |R' - Dnom|, where R' = f(R),
but |R' - R| != 0. And you should talk
to some wiccans and other neo-pagans.
\_ This correlation also applies to education levels, and high
\_ Again, I give you good science and you
reply with faulty logic. What did you
study in college?
\_ Anyway, this article essentially
agrees with both me and you. The
only dumb part of this thread is
your use of "Republican" and
"Democrat." I think the terms
you're looking for are "religious"
and "secular." The flaw in the
article's argument is that they don't
compare relative populations of
religious baby-producers and secular
baby-busters. I'm willing to bet
that the baby-producers are both a
smaller segment of the population, and
overwhelmingly immigrants of color.
\_ So you agree with the article that
attitudes toward politics has a
genetic component, in other words
children tend to inherit the
politics of the parents? Thanks for
playing.
\_ The article didn't say anything
about genetics, and you just
avoided everything that I said.
Thanks for playing.
\_ Wow. "[T]he data suggest an
interplay of both *genetic*
and environmental factors."
[emphasis added] Whatever
you studied in college, I
guess it was neither logic
nor reading comprehension.
The article also said
"people's attitudes toward...
politics," so your argument
that it's not about politics
is also patently wrong.
Do you have anything to say
beyond lies and obfuscation?
\_ for posterity, at least
three ppl are participatng
in this sub-thread
\_ However, we are all
commenting about the
same article, and
claims about what the
article did or did not
say can be resolved.
\_ Your question is seriously flawed, and
already probably caused a boatload of
confused discussion.
\_ What do you mean by "heritable"?
http://m-w.com:
heritable 1 : capable of being inherited or
of passing by inheritance
inheritance 1 a : the act of inheriting
property b : the reception of genetic
qualities by transmission from parent to
offspring c : the acquisition of a
possession, condition, or trait from past
generations
Obviously it is not 1(a). Are you talking
about 1(b) or 1(c)?
\_ This correlation also applies to education levels, and hig
standard of living. Cf. Europe and Japan.
\_ The article didn't really talk about this, but liberals could be
adopting all the unwanted kids that conservatives won't let hap-
less women abort. |
| 5/25 |
|
| news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20060314/cm_usatoday/theliberalbabybust USA TODAY Opinion The liberal baby bust By Phillip Longman Tue Mar 14, 6:56 AM ET What's the difference between Seattle and Salt Lake City? There are many differences, of course, but here's one you might not know. In Seattle, there are nearly 45% more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19% more kids than dogs. click here This curious fact might at first seem trivial, but it reflects a much broader and little-noticed demographic trend that has deep implications for the future of global culture and politics. It's not that people in a progressive city such as Seattle are so much fonder of dogs than are people in a conservative city such as Salt Lake City. It's that progressives are so much less likely to have children. It's a pattern found throughout the world, and it augers a far more conservative future - one in which patriarchy and other traditional values make a comeback, if only by default. Childlessness and small families are increasingly the norm today among progressive secularists. As a consequence, an increasing share of all children born into the world are descended from a share of the population whose conservative values have led them to raise large families. Today, fertility correlates strongly with a wide range of political, cultural and religious attitudes. In the USA, for example, 47% of people who attend church weekly say their ideal family size is three or more children. By contrast, 27% of those who seldom attend church want that many kids. In Utah, where more than two-thirds of residents are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 92 children are born each year for every 1,000 women, the highest fertility rate in the nation. By contrast Vermont - the first to embrace gay unions - has the nation's lowest rate, producing 51 children per 1,000 women. Similarly, in Europe today, the people least likely to have children are those most likely to hold progressive views of the world. For instance, do you distrust the army and other institutions and are you prone to demonstrate against them? Then, according to polling data assembled by demographers Ron Lesthaeghe and Johan Surkyn, you are less likely to be married and have kids or ever to get married and have kids. Do you find soft drugs, homosexuality and euthanasia acceptable? Europeans who answer affirmatively to such questions are far more likely to live alone or be in childless, cohabiting unions than are those who answer negatively. This correlation between secularism, individualism and low fertility portends a vast change in modern societies. In the USA, for example, nearly 20% of women born in the late 1950s are reaching the end of their reproductive lives without having children. The greatly expanded childless segment of contemporary society, whose members are drawn disproportionately from the feminist and countercultural movements of the 1960s and '70s, will leave no genetic legacy. Nor will their emotional or psychological influence on the next generation compare with that of people who did raise children. Single-child factor Meanwhile, single-child families are prone to extinction. A single child replaces one of his or her parents, but not both. Consequently, a segment of society in which single-child families are the norm will decline in population by at least 50% per generation and quite quickly disappear. But among children of the baby boom, nearly a quarter descend from the mere 10% of baby boomer women who had four or more kids. This dynamic helps explain the gradual drift of American culture toward religious fundamentalism and social conservatism. It turns out that Europeans who are most likely to identify themselves as "world citizens" are also less likely to have children. Why couldn't tomorrow's Americans and Europeans, even if they are disproportionately raised in patriarchal, religiously minded households, turn out to be another generation of '68? The key difference is that during the post-World War II era, nearly all segments of society married and had children. Some had more than others, but there was much more conformity in family size between the religious and the secular. Meanwhile, thanks mostly to improvements in social conditions, there is no longer much difference in survival rates for children born into large families and those who have few if any siblings. Tomorrow's children, therefore, unlike members of the postwar baby boom generation, will be for the most part descendants of a comparatively narrow and culturally conservative segment of society. To be sure, some members of the rising generation may reject their parents' values, as often happens. But when they look for fellow secularists with whom to make common cause, they will find that most of their would-be fellow travelers were quite literally never born. Others will view them as the death of the Enlightenment. Either way, they will find themselves living through another great cycle of history. Phillip Longman is a fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It. This essay is adapted from his cover story in the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine. |
| www.apa.org/monitor/apr04/beliefs.html "The idea that individuals' biological characteristics might predispose their experiences seems so obvious it's surprising it hasn't been studied more." James Olson University of Western Ontario behavioral GENETICS Are beliefs inherited? Research shows some attitudes are rooted in genetics, though environment is still key. BY TORI DeANGELIS Print version: page 50 Social psychologists have long held that attitudes--whether about America's role in Iraq or the importance of one's physical appearance--are largely the product of environmental forces, a combination of upbringing and culture. But a handful of studies show not only that attitudes are partly, though indirectly, heritable, but that attitudes with high heritability influence people's actions more strongly than those with weaker genetic bases. Indeed, highly heritable attitudes, such as political persuasions, may even steer our choices of the social "niches" we carve out for ourselves, such as where and with whom to live, according to one line of psychological research. "When I first started this work in the 1970s, the definition of an attitude was a response conditioned 100 percent by an individual's experiences," notes University of Georgia social psychologist Abraham Tesser, PhD, who has conducted innovative studies on the social implications of highly heritable attitudes. "I think the zeitgeist has changed since the advent of the Human Genome Project--the idea that a behavioral system has a strong genetic component is hardly an issue anymore." page 46)--are consistently stronger in predicting attitudes than genetic ones, at least among adults. In addition, it's highly doubtful there are any specific genes for any given attitudes: Instead, attitude proclivity probably funnels through other mechanisms, such as personality, that spring from genes that influence a person's neurochemistry in areas such as impulse control, they say. For instance, to what extent does "assortative mating"--people's proven tendency to choose mates with similar attitudes--bias research results, since the partial heritability of attitudes may give children those tendencies? And what explains the fact that people's attitudes often shift as they get older? Is it the result of latent genetic proclivities emerging once a person leaves home, environmental factors, or both? In the broadest sense, the data suggest an interplay of both genetic and environmental factors in people's attitudes toward, for example, sex, politics and religion, with environment playing a stronger role, according to a major 1999 study in Twin Research (Vol. The team examined data on 29,691 subjects--including 14,761 adult twins and their parents, spouses, siblings and adult children--and concluded that the route to transmitting attitudes within families is complex, probably reflecting a mixture of assortative mating influences and direct parental transmission. The team also found that family environment played a greater role in attitude formation than in personality variables, strengthening the notion that personality has a stronger genetic component than attitudes. Transmission issues Recent studies build on this knowledge base. A 2001 study of 195 identical twin pairs and 141 fraternal twin pairs by social psychologist James Olson, PhD, of the University of Western Ontario and colleagues, for instance, adds to the range of attitudes studied--in the past, largely religious and political beliefs--and directly examines possible genetic factors that may influence attitude formation. Reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. To test this, the researchers included self-report questions about three sets of characteristics generally purported to have substantial genetic components: athletic ability, personality traits such as aggressiveness and sociability, and intelligence. They then examined how well the characteristics correlated at a genetic level with all 30 attitude items on their list. In several cases, individual attitudes did indeed correlate significantly with characteristics in a similar domain: Positive attitudes toward leadership and high levels of sociability were strongly related, for example, as were attitudes toward sports and levels of athleticism. The findings indicate how attitudes might be transmitted, says Olson. Genetic and biological factors lead to differential experiences among individuals, which in turn help create differential attitudes, he explains. An athletically gifted girl, for example, has more positive experiences with sports than others--she's chosen more often for teams and garners more praise from coaches and classmates. As a consequence, she develops positive attitudes toward sports. While on the surface it might seem that the girl's positive experiences led her to enjoy sports, those experiences were partly determined by her athletic ability, which is likely genetic, says Olson. "The idea that individuals' biological characteristics might predispose their experiences seems so obvious it's surprising it hasn't been studied more," he comments. That said, more work also is needed to separate cause and effect, he notes, since there's no proof that athletic ability precedes positive feelings about sports rather than the other way around, for example. Sorting out mating Another recent study lends greater precision to the respective roles of heredity and environment in attitude formation by looking at these factors in adopted and non-adopted youth and their siblings. Looking at young adoptees has two advantages: It factors out the assortative mating problem, since adopted youth don't share their parents' genes; and it provides a different perspective on gene-environment variables and interactions, since most previous studies have centered on adults, often on adult twins, notes University of Southern California psychologist Laura Baker, PhD, one of the study's co-authors. In the study, reported in 2002 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. By examining the differences between adopted and nonadopted youngsters in how similar their attitudes were to those of their parents, the team found a significant, though relatively small, genetic influence for conservatism in youngsters as early as the first year of the study, and almost no genetic link for religious attitudes. Conversely, they found large effects of the shared environment for both conservatism and religious attitudes. The results contradict earlier findings in several ways, Baker notes: For one, other studies have suggested that genetic influences on social attitudes don't emerge until adulthood, but the study finds such a link in youth. For another, earlier studies have noted genetic influences in religious attitudes, at least among adults, while the current study found none. For a third, the study discovered a big effect for the shared environment, probably the result of studying such a young population, Baker says. "Our findings on the shared environment may be a function of subjects' age and the fact that they're sharing more environments than adults do," Baker comments. In fact, the findings are similar to those on IQ, she says, where research shows a large shared environmental effect for children but not for adults. The findings highlight the need for more longitudinal research that tracks age-related changes in attitudes, Baker adds, since studies have examined either young people or adults but none have captured the transition in between. Such studies may better explain why attitudes change over time, she says. Real-life applications While the jury's out on how genes influence attitudes over time, it appears they may account for which attitudes affect our lives the most. The University of Georgia's Tesser has conducted a number of studies showing that attitudes found in previous studies to be highly heritable are stronger, more accessible and more reinforcing than those with lower heritability. In a 1998 study reported in Personality and Individual Differences (Vol. As a whole, Tesser's studies suggest that highly heritable attitudes may drive such high-stakes decisions as who to marry, how to earn a l... |
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