If you are organised, self-disciplined, and more likely to follow rules, you are more likely to be conservative. If you are an extrovert, if you are open to experiences, if you focus on change as an opportunity rather than a problem, you are more likely to be liberal. If you are afraid of death, you are probably a conservative.

These are some of the findings of an emerging branch of political science that challenges what pundits tell us about caste and class and the way we vote. It takes cues from biology to say that there is increasing evidence that our political behaviour — whether we are conservative or liberal — could have its roots in genes. A provocative article in the latest issue of New Scientist cites several studies that indicate political positions are “substantially determined by biology and can be stubbornly resistant to reason.”

This has implications on campaigns. The magazine quotes John Alford, a political scientist at Rice University in Houston, Texas: “Trying to persuade someone not to be a liberal is like trying to persuade someone not to have brown eyes. We have to rethink persuasion.”

Next month, Ira Carmen, professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Gene Robinson, professor of entomology, are organising the world’s first “Conference on Biology and Politics,” underwritten by the National Science Foundation. Carmen has invited 50 geneticists, politics researchers and neuroscientists to the conference.

Carmen’s latest book Politics in the Laboratory: The Constitution of Human Genomics, predicts “the birth of a new political science informed by evolutionary theory and DNA propensity.”

... contd.