Biofoundationalism II: The Moral Genotype
You have more in common with political allies than you think
This essay can be read on a standalone basis. It builds on Part 1, Biofoundationalism I: Moral Foundations Utility Theory & Hypermoralization. I’ll link it at the end. Enjoy.
Bio = Biological
Foundation = The moral foundations that inform your political beliefs
Biofoundationalism = The biological nature of your morality. Which is to say, the biological basis for your political beliefs.
Your political stances are predicated on your morality. Moral foundations are not informed choices, they are expressions of value judgements, and are a direct result of how your brain is engineered. These inherent neurological differences are what produce conservative and liberal phenotypes, because morality is a genotype.
This essay will begin with a psychological primer and framing, then review neurological data that corroborates these statements. It will finish with implications, illustrations, and potential rejoinders.
PLEASE NOTE: This essay is not nearly as long as the scrollbar suggests. I’ve curated research in here and you don’t have to read all of it if you only want to see the conclusions, which I’ve summarized for you after the research. This essay, insofar as the parts that are my writing and reasoning, is only about half as long as it looks.
The information and conclusions you’ll find in here are worth your time. If internalized and understood correctly, it should alter the essence of how you interpret and engage with political dialogue and those around you. It should disturb and inspire you. The realizations profoundly changed me as I was slowly exposed to them.
In case you’re interested, I listened to this song on loop while writing this essay, and variations of the same song for the entire Biofoundationalism series. Just like you pair wine with steak, perhaps you can pair the author’s audio environment with the reading to enhance the overall experience. Hopefully the artwork sets the mood for you too. Aesthetic consumption.
You have more in common with political allies than you think.
Temperament → Moral Foundations → Values → Political Beliefs
Politics is the study and strategy of human coordination. How you believe humans should be coordinated and organized is based upon the values you believe society should embody. Unsurprisingly, people have very different views on what values should be prioritized.
Where do values come from?
Values come from your moral foundations. I will use “morality” and “moral foundations” interchangeably.
These are the moral foundations and what they emphasize:
If political beliefs come from values, and values come from your morality, then where does your morality come from? We cannot honestly propose that books and “facts” bestowed us with the right morals; however if we assume political beliefs are an educated choice, we are implicitly saying this is the case.
The Moral Genotype
Your political views are directly derived from, and an expression of, your moral foundations. This is why political and social “truths” are so contentious and divisive: they’re fundamentally conflicting forms of moral emphasis.
Even when confronted with the same facts, we still don’t agree on what should be done, because we all don’t value the same things, because we all don’t have the same temperaments, because we all don’t have the same neurology.
What is temperament: an animal’s innate predispositions, habits, and emotional patterns. Its natural and enduring personality traits and tendencies. Temperament encompasses various aspects of emotional, social, and behavioral responses to stimuli and situations. Your temperament has an unassailable biological basis: influenced by genetic, neurobiological, and physiological factors.
You do not control your temperament, it controls you.
This essay is not a postmodernist “truth and morality are relative” message; it’s a neuro-architectural explanation as to why people so often disagree on what “truth” even means. A theory of mind of The Other is elusive because their mind is genuinely structured differently. We speak competing moral languages.
I know you’ll probably say morality is absolute; however the other guy, the one who believes different things than you, he also thinks this. So whose morality is wrong? Where does that leave us? The “Evil Team” vs “Good Team”? Of course our team is the virtuous and pure one. Right.
Political discourse will continue to be a wheel-spinning waste of time if this is our perception of The Other. To like or dislike it does nothing to help us navigate it; what’s productive is attempting to understand it.
A man’s interpretation of truth is downstream of his morality, and his morality is downstream of his temperament, and his temperament is a direct, explicit, observable, measurable output of his amygdala size, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) activity, and insula activation patterns. These are not the same for everyone. Your moral language originates from here.
We can predict your political beliefs with 83% accuracy with only a brain scan. We don’t need to know anything else about you. Don’t need to know your opinions, favorite books, where you went to school, none of it. And this is without AI. This hard reality cannot be ignored.
The raw physical architecture of your neural tissue illuminates your beliefs without you saying a word.
This should not be discouraging, it should be inspiring. The human condition deserves to be honestly recognized, exalted, and does not need us to protect it with principled deceptions.
Biofoundationalism’s systemization and empiricism should alter your relationship with political discourse by recalibrating your conceptualization of the conversation you’re actually having. It should give you pause. The true disagreement within political dialogue is almost never the nominal point of contention; it always runs deeper.
In this essay we are peering into the depths together, and unafraid of what we find. The following will help with its internalization and acceptance.
Immaculate Conception and the Blank Slate
Why does the same information evoke such radically different conclusions for people? Does one side have truth, and the other just needs better facts? What if the facts are identical? How are the takeaways still diametrically opposed? And why does it so often fall along political lines?
Why are political exchanges basically some variation of this:
"Wow, you actually were unaware of this FACT? Also you failed to mention this FACT and another FACT that undermines your whole world view. Read a book!"
"Aha foolish you are for completely ignoring these little-known FACTS over here. Which when viewed in conjunction with this FACT, shows you to be nothing more than a chimp in shoes!"
- A quote from the essay Yarvin, Rufo, and Endless Factual Sediment
It’s because you’re dealing with a natural dyad. One with opposing parts that seeks parity through productive opposition.
The masculine and feminine are a dyad: this is expressed morphologically.
The conservative and liberal are a dyad: this is expressed cognitively.
We’re comfortable with a morphological/sexual dyad as it’s impossible to deny while staring an Adam’s Apple and pendulous breasts in the face. Sane minds don’t protest that men and women have disparate innate traits and physical abilities that are rooted in biology.
Yet we are deeply uncomfortable with a cognitive dyad: since it explicitly endorses fixed neurological differences we’re hardwired to have. Physical differences we accept, cognitive ones…. man we hate dealing with those.
It’s unsettling to internalize, as it completely undermines the dogma that you are a blank slate. We can’t stand being told we have predetermined programming, as it’s definitionally limiting to our sense of self. We like hearing we can become an astronaut, physicist, or elite musician if we just put in the work.
Just like morphological dyads, cognitive dyads also exhibit different traits. Both dyads have been engineered by nature to behave this way.
We avoid this topic because it contravenes the core tenets of Blank Slate Theory, which is a presupposition of pure religious faith, masquerading as secular goodthink. This theory informs basically everything you’ve been trained to think about human capabilities and biodiversity. Whether you’re rightwing or leftwing, both adhere to Blank Slate gospel in their own way.
Blank Slate Theory is a religious origin story. It’s the liberal democracy version of Immaculate Conception.
Just as Jesus was immaculately conceived without sex as the son of God, citizens in a liberal democracy are immaculately conceived without genetic differences as blank slates.
In the liberal democracy genesis tale, everyone emerges from the womb as gray goo, with nothing biologically ingrained. Able to be molded into whatever policy makers deem best. The Immaculate Conception Blank Slate precept is a fiction used to advance all kinds of harmful fabrications about the human condition and our organic variation. We lie about our innate differences, rather than embrace them. We pretend, rather than confront.
Genetic configuration is neoliberal Original Sin, and the Blank Slate doctrine serves as our secular baptism, washing away the stain of biological determinism.
A significant majority don’t dispute most of Blank Slate as a falsehood. A noble lie. An adaptive fiction. This is to say, we recognize the role of genetics. But, we are often selective with our genetic recognition as it suits our priors.
If you’ve found this blog, you’re likely not so naive to think evolution stops at the neck. If asked, you’d probably say Blank Slate Theory is nonsense in respect to intelligence and temperament. I agree, however, I take its application one step further.
You accept some people are temperamentally violent, shy, extroverted, aggressive, talkative…. you are at peace with this reality, seeing as there’s no fable that says you learned any of this in school. We recognize they’re subconscious and part of one’s personality. We know personality does not come from you being an informed, learned person. It’s not a choice.
We do not object to personality being a confluence of innate temperamental traits. Which is to say, genetic.
You understand children of smart parents tend to be smart too. That neuron counts and synapse quality and quantity are a genetic gift, or curse. That IQ so obviously and abundantly speaks to intellectual abilities and other positive corollaries that to deny it is to deny yourself credibility.
You understand an NBA player’s fast-twitch fibers and long limbs provide him abilities you will never possess, no matter how hard you train. You see professional athletes and the coordination, speed, and strength they’re blessed with, and you intuitively comprehend not all men are created equal on the field of play.
We do not object to intelligence and athleticism being overwhelmingly genetic.
The aforementioned examples are all refutations of Blank Slate Theory across the mind and body.
Biofoundationalism simply observes the same incontrovertible genetic realities, and is consistent with their application.
The belief that the political is an acceptable form of Blank Slate Theory, and is distinct from the temperamental rather than synonymous with it, exists because the political is the only one that we believe operates consciously, and can be changed with the right facts and arguments.
Just as neurons inform your IQ and fast-twitch fibers your athleticism, the amygdala, ACC, and insula dictate how you neurologically process the world around you and its information. Our recognition of the role of genetics cannot be selectively applied.
If you reject Blank Slate Theory, then I contend you already agree with the contents of this essay, you just don’t know it yet.
Biofoundationalism is partly a uniform repudiation of Blank Slate Theory, leveraging the same lattice of data and empiricism you’d accept in any other domain.
Now, let’s look at some brain scans.
Neurological Studies
If you’re not interested in reviewing these studies and just want to see a summary of their findings, you can skip ahead to the Research Summary section.
However, I’ve gone through many scientific papers, curated the high-impact information, and highlighted the most-pertinent parts below. It’s really not that long, and it’s the sort of thing that should haunt you in the best kind of way. It’s worth your time.
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Part 1: Brain Structure
Brain structure alone predicts political beliefs with 72% accuracy
From Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults
“Substantial differences exist in the cognitive styles of liberals and conservatives on psychological measures [1]. Variability in political attitudes reflects genetic influences and their interaction with environmental factors [2, 3]. Recent work has shown a correlation between liberalism and conflict-related activity measured by event-related potentials originating in the anterior cingulate cortex [4].
Here we show that this functional correlate of political attitudes has a counterpart in brain structure. In a large sample of young adults, we related self-reported political attitudes to gray matter volume using structural MRI.
We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala.
These results were replicated in an independent sample of additional participants. Our findings extend previous observations that political attitudes reflect differences in self-regulatory conflict monitoring [4] and recognition of emotional faces [5] by showing that such attitudes are reflected in human brain structure.
We characterized the extent to which these correlations between gray matter volume and political attitudes might permit us to determine the political attitudes of a single individual based on their structural MRI scan. We used the gray matter volume of anterior cingulate cortex and right amygdala from each individual to train a multivariate classifier [9].
The gray matter volumes of ACC and the right amygdala allowed the classifier to distinguish individuals who reported themselves as conservative from those who reported themselves as very liberal with a high accuracy (71.6% ± 4.8% correct, p = 0.011).
This suggests that it is possible to determine the self-expressed political attitude of individuals, at least for the self-report measure we used, based on structural MRI scans.
Highlights:
► Political liberalism and conservatism were correlated with brain structure ► Liberalism was associated with the gray matter volume of anterior cingulate cortex ► Conservatism was associated with increased right amygdala size.
Post amygdala.
Part 2: Neurocognition (Brain Activity)
Risk-taking behaviors and neurological activity (meaning which regions of your brain are activated during decision making) predict your political affiliations with 83% accuracy (!).
Just brain structure gives us 72% accuracy, and brain activity 83%.
Again, this is without AI.
From Red Brain, Blue Brain: Evaluative Processes Differ in Democrats and Republicans
“Liberals and conservatives exhibit different cognitive styles and converging lines of evidence suggest that biology influences differences in their political attitudes and beliefs. In particular, a recent study of young adults suggests that liberals and conservatives have significantly different brain structure, with liberals showing increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, and conservatives showing increased gray matter volume in the in the amygdala.
Here, we explore differences in brain function in liberals and conservatives by matching publicly available voter records to 82 subjects who performed a risk-taking task during functional imaging.
Although the risk-taking behavior of Democrats (liberals) and Republicans (conservatives) did not differ, their brain activity did.
Democrats showed significantly greater activity in the left insula, while Republicans showed significantly greater activity in the right amygdala.
A two-parameter model of partisanship based on amygdala and insula activations yields a better fitting model of partisanship than a well-established model based on parental socialization of party identification long thought to be one of the core findings of political science.
These results suggest that liberals and conservatives engage different cognitive processes when they think about risk, and they support recent evidence that conservatives show greater sensitivity to threatening stimuli.
These ideological differences between political partisans have been attributed to logical, psychological, and social constraints [4] and past scholarship has focused primarily on institutional political processes or individual policy preferences, rather than biological differences in evaluative processes.
But recent work has revealed physiological correlates of the differential responses to risk and conflict by liberals and conservatives.
Consistent with the previously identified attitudinal divergence, conservatives have more intense physical reactions to threatening stimuli than liberals [5]. Conversely, liberals had stronger physiological responses to situations of cognitive conflict than conservatives [6].
Physical reactions. Born with it.
“Republicans more strongly activate their right amygdala, associated with orienting attention to external cues. Democrats have higher activity in their left posterior insula, associated with perceptions of internal physiological states.
That differences in the processing of risk and uncertainty differentiate liberals and conservatives suggests an alternative way of conceptualizing ideology.”
Predictability:
“A simple model of partisanship that includes mother’s and father’s party accurately predicts about 69.5% of self-reported choices between the Democratic and Republican party (see Table S1 in Appendix S1).
A classifier model based upon differences in brain structure distinguishes liberals from conservatives with 71.6% accuracy [15].
Yet, a simple two-parameter model of partisanship using activations in the amygdala and the insular cortex during the risk task significantly out-performs the longstanding parental model, correctly predicting 82.9% of the observed choices of party.”
Your politics can be predicted with 72% accuracy by brain structure, and 83% accuracy by brain activity.
Post amygdala.
Part 3: Disgust Sensitivity
From A Neurology of the Conservative-Liberal Dimension of Political Ideology
“This review summarizes personality, evolutionary and genetic, cognitive, neuroimaging, and neurological studies of conservatism-liberalism and discusses how they might affect political ideology.
There is increasing evidence that neurobiological factors mediate where people fall on a general conservative-liberal axis that involves social, cultural, religious, economic, and other domains, as well as political ideology.
Many studies now indicate that differences between extreme conservatives and extreme liberals are not entirely due to differences in socioeconomic, cultural, or other learned attributes, or rational consideration of the issues.3
Conservatism-liberalism is also associated with differences in personality, attention, memory, perception, emotional reactions, problem-solving, and response choices.4 (Personal comment: This is a long-winded way of saying “temperament”)
Although neurobiological mechanisms affecting conservatism-liberalism are not clearly deterministic, some investigators suggest an evolutionary protective origin, with some situations favoring more conservative orientations and others permitting more liberal ones.4
What emerges from this highly variable literature is evidence for a normal right-sided “conservative-complex” involving structures sensitive to negativity bias, threat, disgust, and avoidance.
This part is kind of funny:
“This conservative-complex may be damaged with brain disease, sometimes leading to a pathological “liberal shift” or a reduced tendency to conservatism in political ideology.
Further support for neurobiological mechanisms comes from clinical observations of patients with acquired brain disease.
Neurological disorders that affect socioemotional areas of the frontal lobes and adjacent regions can change where one falls on the conservative-liberal spectrum, primarily toward the liberal.5
Part 4: The Behavioral Immune System
Continued from A Neurology of the Conservative-Liberal Dimension of Political Ideology
“Evolutionary psychologists stress that politics and alliances are necessary in order to influence one’s position in social groups and the direction of one’s group4 and have proposed the parasite-stress theory as a major driving force for the evolution of conservatism-liberalism.26,27
The parasite-stress theory views people as having inherited parasitically modified behavioral tendencies aimed at avoiding those who bring the greatest risk of infection and transmitted disease to one’s social group. Those who do not conform to in-group norms and members of outgroups with unfamiliar cultures and behaviors bring the greatest risk of infection and are avoided the most.
In other words, parasitic stress may promote in-group collectivism or “groupishness” and group social norms,28–30 as well as conservative social and sexual attitudes and distrust of strangers,26,30–32 all of which defend against the effects of parasites.32
This “behavioral immune system” works through a basic instinct to avoid contamination via the experience of disgust from disease-laden cues and people who may harbor infectious agents.30,33
In comparing political conservatives with political liberals, investigators report greater disgust sensitivity, especially for contamination disgust and violations of the sense of purity,34–37 and greater functional MRI (fMRI) responses to images with a disgusting theme, such as mutilated bodies.38
Just showing people disease-related images can lead to increasing feelings of avoidance,39 and inducing disgust with disgusting images or sensations can both boost the physiological immune response and increase prejudice to outgroups.26,33,40
Inducing disgust can heighten the sense of moral violations and shift moral judgments to the conservative side.41
Part 5: Negativity Bias and Threat Perception
Continued from A Neurology of the Conservative-Liberal Dimension of Political Ideology
“The further one is on the conservative spectrum, the more likely one is to respond to negative aspects of environmental stimuli, as opposed to positive aspects.22–24,57
This “negativity bias” is evident in studies showing that negative images shown to political conservatives, compared with political liberals, results in a greater, faster, and longer attentional focus on the images and greater physiological measures of arousal to them, as well as a stronger tendency to avoid them.55,58
In addition to negativity bias, high conservatism is associated with a sense of threat or a perception of danger.1,10
Those with politically conservative versus politically liberal views perceive ambiguous faces as more threatening,16 respond to threatening stimuli with more aggression,1 and have greater blink startle responses and skin conduction responses to unexpected or potentially threatening images.59
On behavioral and eye-movement responses during a visual search task for happy and angry faces, political conservatism correlated with speeded detection of angry versus happy faces suggesting speeded response selection to the perception of threat.63
In a related study of websites and speeches, political conservatives tended to reference the known past, whereas strong liberals considered the uncertain and potentially more threatening future.64
Conservatives are genetically calibrated for threat detection.
Post amygdala = show morality = show politics
Part 6: The Passion of the Insula
Continued from A Neurology of the Conservative-Liberal Dimension of Political Ideology
More reinforcement on the power of the amygdala and the influence of the insula. The prefrontal cortex shows up as well.
“Neuroimaging studies suggest that political ideology involves conservative-liberal differences in the amygdala, insula, and ACC.4,69,70
Just being interested in politics has increased activity in the amygdala and the ventral striatum,71 and encoding party preference activates bilateral insula and the ACC.69
Political conservatives, compared with political liberals, have greater gray matter in the right amygdala,72 and an fMRI study involving a risk-taking task shows that political conservatives have greater activity in the right amygdala.73
The association of political conservatism with the right amygdala,72 a structure that is bilaterally sensitive to emotional saliency, especially fear, suggests an increased processing of potential signals for threat.74
Although the anterior insula has a prominent role in the experience of disgust, brain responses to disgusting stimuli may show a more distributed pattern of differences between political conservatism and liberalism,38 consistent with a differential sensitivity for disgust among political conservatives.
The unexpected association of political liberalism with activity in the left posterior insula in one study may reflect an additional role of the insula in the expression of interpersonal trust.75
Finally, political liberals have greater gray matter and increased ERP activity in the ACC,12,72,73 consistent with a sensitivity for processing signals for potential change.
Your political expression is a phenotype, because morality is a genotype.
Moral genotypes produce political phenotypes. The environment dictates their expression. Biofoundationalism.
Post amygdala.
Genetic Research Summary
Recapping the evidence:
Amygdala Size and Activity
Conservatives: Larger amygdala, greater activation
Core function: Fear response, threat detection, negative-stimuli sensitivity, reactions to social and environmental cues.
What this means: Conservatives are wired to be more reactive to potential threats and uncertainties. This translates into a preference for stability, security, and tradition.
Liberals: Smaller amygdala, less active.
Lower threat responses, more willing to engage new things.
What this means: Liberals are more open to change and the unknown as a result of diminished threat sensitivity and reduced awareness of negative stimuli.
Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) Size and Activation
Liberals: Larger ACC, greater activation.
Core function: Processes conflicting information, monitors dissonance between automatic responses and goal-directed reasoning.
What this means: Liberals are more accepting of nuance, new perspectives, and ambiguity.
Conservatives: Smaller ACC, less activation.
Less willing to engage with ambiguity and uncertainty, more aware of potential threats that come with it.
What this means: Conservatives prefer clear, black-and-white distinctions and tend to stick with existing beliefs and the known past.
Insula Activity
Conservatives: Higher activation patterns in the right insula. This plays a key role in the Behavioral Immune System and disgust responses.
Core function: Processing disgust responses, especially moral disgust (i.e. things that feel impure or wrong). Linked to moral judgments, especially around purity and contamination
What this means: Conservatives have a heightened sensitivity to violations of sanctity (purity) and social norms.
Example: Strong reactions to topics like sexual deviance, immigration (outgroup members), and ingroup social standards (this is the sanctity/degradation moral foundation).
Liberals: Higher activation in the left insula, which is linked to empathy rather than disgust.
Core function: Processing social emotions, sympathy towards outgroup.
What this means: Liberals are more sensitive to perceived social injustice and inequalities.
Example: Support for social programs, refugee rights, and outgroup-focused causes that draw on sympathy/empathy (this is the care/harm moral foundation).
The insula tells two stories: it’s more active in conservative disgust responses, whereas it lights up in liberals when evoking empathy. Personally, I think this is more accurately described as a sympathy response, not empathy.
Threat Sensitivity and Physical Reactions
Conservatives have heightened threat sensitivity and greater physical reactions to stimuli (!).
Observable in their subconscious reactions to physical signals. Including faster blink startle movement and skin-conduction responses to unexpected or potentially threatening images.
This is one of the most-compelling pieces of evidence for the existence of political biology. Your ‘politics’ show up at the level of subconscious physical reaction.
You can make someone more liberal by disabling the posterior medial frontal cortex (as seen in brain-damage patients). It changes their views towards immigration and religion.
Your politics can be predicted with 72% accuracy by brain structure, and 83% accuracy by brain activity.
Conservative brains are wired for threat detection, stability, and ingroup purity (disgust response in insula).
Liberal brains are wired for flexibility, openness to new experiences, and social fairness (empathy/sympathy response in insula).
Unsurprisingly, this all maps on quite well to the Explore/Exploit tradeoff. Ever heard the saying “liberals start companies and conservatives run them”? Stereotypes are by far the most accurate, reproducible measures in all the social sciences. I wonder why…
I find this information to be both humbling and inspiring. And I hope you do too.
None of these are conscious decisions; they operate at a level we are entirely unaware of, which means the political is an extension of the biological. This information exists, and we willfully choose to ignore it.
Your body, your mind, your biology, cannot be denied. To do so is to deny nature.
You have a neural fingerprint. There is such a thing as political biology. A moral language embedded within you. Beautiful.
Causality
Basically every single piece of research I come across on this topic will ostentatiously include the same qualifier. If you venture into those research papers I shared, you’ll find a hedge in each that can be distilled down to essentially this (sassily paraphrased):
“We don’t know if these brain structure/activity differences make political stances innate. It might not be deterministic? Even though it really looks that way, if we admit this, the implications are incredibly uncomfortable. So we make zero claim on causality. The 50-50 split could just be a coincidence.”
I find refusal to attribute causality as intellectual cowardice. It’s borne from fear of the ramifications of admitting “political biology” is real. It unearths a third rail no one wants to touch.
It takes science to see these differences at the neural level; it takes courage to honestly identify what you’re looking at, and what it means. The former does not provide the latter.
The studies are observing natural reality, but the Blank Slate ideology is so thoroughly entrenched in us we’re blinded to what’s being communicated. Since the research can’t unequivocally confirm causality, academics manage to thread the needle of exposing truths of the human mind, while also leaving the Immaculate Conception myth untouched.
I contend you don’t even need the studies to see the nature of the cognitive dyad. The moral genotype.
Conservatism and liberalism can be realized self-evidently as a natural dyad, without the brain scans, because they are reliably distributed in societies that are allowed to express their collective morality.
Take a look at Western/European voting patterns, that omnipresent 50-50 electoral split. Now do male/female birth rates. How about the persistent presence of certain genetic disorders? Pick a natural pattern, any pattern. Why are all these distributions present in such a consistent manner?
If they were aberrations, individual choices, meaning not natural law and a form of genetic determinism, they would not be so constant. They would not be so predictably present. They would vary. And they don’t. This is how you know you’re dealing with a biological pattern, one that controls us. Not one that we control.
The very nature of a consistent distribution of human traits speaks to a natural phenomenon, not a man-made one.
We have little umbrage attributing so many human patterns to genetics and nature, save one. One is sacrosanct to everyone.
Biological traits and dyads are a result of genetic variation, however one set of traits, the cognitive dyad, it’s just… a bunch of sovereign individuals that keep happening to fall into the same distribution. Coincidence. Not genetic. Sure. Well, as a rationalist would say, “the Bayesian priors do not compute”.
The Blank Slate demands we presuppose such a ridiculous coincidence is possible. I believe it requires a religious degree of devotion to an ideal to subscribe to it. Immaculate Conception. We all have our myths. Some myths are societally shared.
The brain scans are unnecessary to see the genetic substrate of morality, but when you add neurology to the mix, the truth becomes undeniable. The patterns cannot be dismissed. They’re able to be witnessed if you understand a human is an animal too, and respect the biological nature of what we are.
Be humble. You are an animal, even if you’re indignant about it. Just as the cat, eagle, and wolf have their programming, so do all of us.
This is what I mean when I describe political allies as “temperamental kin”. There’s neural similarity that transcends nominal politics; you literally have closer brain structure to the guy who emphatically shares the same moral values as you.
You have more in common with political allies than you think.
Nature Doesn't Do Coincidences At Scale
The masculine/feminine and the conservative/liberal dyad are both critical to human coordination and flourishing. It’s juvenile to describe one as good and the other as bad; all you’re doing is telling on yourself as to how your brain works.
You are always voting your temperament. You are always advocating for an environment best suited to your abilities. You are always promoting your temperamental morality. You are the messenger for your neural architecture.
That eternal 50-50 split isn't democracy finding its balance; it's biology maintaining its equilibrium.
An illustrative quote from another essay of mine, Capitalism, Lions, and the Way of the Beaver:
“Smaller government resonates with the high-agency. Larger government with the low-agency. You are always voting your temperament... "what environment is best suited to my thriving" is embedded into your decision making, and political thinking, at a biological level.
A lion would support free trade and no income taxes, a giraffe votes for some protectionism and progressive tax rates. Understand this and you understand economic and political stances. Inside mankind there are many wolves, and they are not all hunters. But they all need food.”
We are a species evolved for group strategy and collaboration. Your ancestors did not evolve alone; they were cultivated amongst each other, and they did not all fulfill the same role. This means our traits gestated over thousands of years to not be the same, but complementary. Different by design.
It’s wise to organize government under the false pretense that we all act as individuals, because it embeds accountability into our actions. When you allow everyone to act out their programming and be responsible for the results, it lets them best express their genetic predispositions in a sustainable way. Evidence for this is found in Scandinavia, where the more egalitarian a society is, the more the biological differences maximize.
However to take the individual adaptive fiction too far is to atomize people, leaving them vulnerable. You are not an island.
Nature does not see us at an individual scale; she incubated us as a collective. Hierarchies are how we organize, and dyads are how we balance: these necessarily require a biologically encoded set of genetic characteristics that are largely immutable and vary between people.
All people do not value all things in the same ways at all times. This is a strength for a society. No single man can uphold all six moral foundations equally, but a human collective can. All moral foundations have different utility in different environments; it’s to our benefit to have ethical variation between individuals within a nation.
We aren’t made to exist in isolation, but rather to orchestrate and live within groups. Our supplementary collective traits should be seen as complements to the group, as synergistically combative, a strengthening set of frictions. As nature’s desire to instill… balance. Equilibrium is found when countervailing forces are in parity.
Masculine and feminine do not exist in a vacuum, they evolved in tandem and act in concert with each other as supplementary companions, productively antagonistic, towards a shared goal of survival. This is the same for conservative and liberal. Political biology. Biofoundationalism.
We cognitively evolved to have contrasting morality just as we morphologically evolved to have contrasting physical characteristics; both dyads are conducive to our survival and prosperity. Healthiest when in counteracting competition with its other side. When one element overwhelms the other, a harmful dislocation has occurred.
When either dyad sees its counterpart as a tribalistic enemy, you’re in a decaying environment. A yin that views its yang as a predator. Extreme environments beget extreme moral expressions.
We are neurologically designed to have diverging values because they all contribute to the human cooperative in their own way. Nature expresses her will genetically, and we express ours temperamentally; the former determines the latter.
Our differences are implanted deep within us. They are not to be feared.
Nature be my god.
Concluding: AI and Biomarkers
Are you curious to learn more, or are you dismissive of this essay? If you’ve gotten this far, you probably skew the former. There are clues in this.
If I was building a cognitive profile of you, I could begin to triangulate your political beliefs based off your read time of this post. It suggests some openness to new ideas, which speaks to ACC activation when you’re faced with novel information. Just from the length of time you’ve spent reading, we can begin to extrapolate how you process information, which is a window into your neurology.
If I had data on your eye movement while reading certain parts, I could likely get a lens into which elements elicited small disgust responses. This would give us insula insight. Maybe not much, but some.
Just your reaction to my theory will inform on your temperament. To outline immutable biological differences and innate political thinking is to imply intrinsic human biovariation. Which indicates a whole gamut of other things that are not particularly pleasant to some. Supporters and detractors of Biofoundationalism will likely cluster along political (biological) lines.
You are what you are, and that is exposed in small ways you’re not even aware of.
Your temperament will be partly revealed if you'll even entertain the notion of a moral genotype, or run away from it on sight. Which is to say your receptiveness to this theory on political biology will… illuminate on your biology.
Everything about you is a biomarker. A prediction:
If how you react to a puff of air in your ear can guide us on what your political beliefs are, can you imagine what other subtle patterns exist that will tell us even more? How will we find this out? I know a guy. He’s unbelievably good at pattern-matching. In fact, it’s all he does.
Based on traits like the prosody and tenor of your voice, eye movement while watching a screen, how you slide your computer mouse, your startle response to someone knocking on your door, among other banalities, we’ll be able to figure out most of your core political beliefs and temperamental predilections. Your moral genotype roughly triangulated off gait analysis, music tastes, and linguistic patterns.
When AI is exposed to enough of these sequences, we won’t need the brain scans. And we certainly won’t need to ask you what you believe.
In the not-so-distant future, AI will be able to accurately extrapolate biotraits from subconscious behaviors. The mind and body are inextricably intertwined, and one cannot be concealed from the other. The ways of the brain will be revealed in the flesh in manners we can’t fathom, but will have to come to terms with.
It will be disrupting to our sense of selves when AI shows that ~95% of people can be accurately archetyped with only a handful of behavioral and verbal patterns.
You may think I’m being hyperbolic. Here’s what it can already figure out, and this is with very dumb AI compared to what we’re going to soon see:
AI can reconstruct your face from your voice. It’s beginning to figure out what you look like from how you speak. I wrote about the research here.
AI can determine your race based off pixelated X-rays. The researchers have no idea how it’s able to do it. Medical consensus says determining race from X-rays is not possible, yet the AI can expose it. Such a “social construct” that it shows up in your bones...
AI can see your brain activity five seconds into the future. A mystic would refer to this as “precognition”. And yet, it’s not mystical, it is real. Patterns.
Don’t fight your humanity. Relish and recognize our intrinsic differences. Try to understand the real reason for our disagreements. What other choice do you have?
You have more in common with political allies than you think. And you have something to be grateful for towards your political adversaries, too. An unbalanced dyad yields a fractured society. You need them, they need you.
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Related essays:
Biofoundationalism I: Moral Foundations Utility Theory & Hypermoralization
One year ago to the month, I published the first essay of my Biofoundationalism series on Twitter. The series has since gotten traction (currently eleven essays), and I get messages on it often. I’ve discussed these concepts in recent podcasts, and it’s time for them to come to Substack. I’m not going to link to the original essays, because I don’t want…
Biofoundationalism III: Verbal Intelligence and Factual Sediment
This is Part III of the Biofoundationalism series and can be read on a standalone basis. The biological assertions in this essay will need more substantiating than what I’m providing here if you’re unfamiliar with them, and you can find that defense in
Biofoundationalism IV: Masculine Because You Have To, Feminine Because You Get To
This essay can be read on a standalone basis, though I recommend reading Biofoundationalism Part II: The Moral Genotype to fully internalize it. If my comments on genetic morality are new to you, the elaboration for those statements are found in Part II. All Biofoundationalism essays are linked at the end.
Gain Dependents, Gain Power
When you're dependent on someone, they wield power over you. The more dependents you have, the more power and influence you have. They do what you say, they are more loyal, because they have no other choice. They need you. When a child is dependent on its mother, it’s a healthy dynamic; when an adult is dependent on the state, it’s an unhealthy one, rip…
a clarifying point, because some have remarked in the comments on how political designations are inconsistent over time:
you'll note I use the terms 'conservative/liberal' and not 'republican/democrat' or other political branding.
when I say conservative, I mean the morality that experiences disgust responses in the insula and has a larger amygdala. I consider this a masculine moral genotype, producing a conservative political phenotype.
when I say liberal, I mean the morality that experiences a sympathy response in the insula and has a larger ACC. I consider this a feminine moral genotype, producing a liberal political phenotype.
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On definitions:
I consider 'conservative' appropriate terminology because it protects the ingroup, is hierarchical, emphasizes the behavioral immune system, and appeals to stability and the known past. this is inherently conservative (it seeks to "conserve"). whether or not tories, republicans, or other "rightwing" parties actually do this is not the point. the parties often shift over time. this is why I don't use political party nomenclature.
liberal is an appropriate term because it's open to new experiences, more intellectually flexible, more concerned with care/harm and less so hierarchies (thus more feminine). its outgroup emphasis is at the expense of "conservation" of ideals/standards and not as focused on threat detection. whether or not democrats or other "leftwing" parties embody this, again, is not the point. the nominal parties are prone to shifting over time.
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Additional thoughts:
the ability of these moral genotypes to fully express themselves as political phenotypes is always contingent on the environment; this is why I often say in my essays "the environment dictates the expression". for animal species, the environment dictates how genotypes express their phenotypes. I find it to be no different for humans.
the environment is very decadent in the west, this facilitates more pronounced feminine moral genotype expression, creating a more dominant liberal political phenotype. this can only happen in a backdrop of comfort and prosperity.
conversely, in environments trending towards hardship, poverty, or war, that environment allows masculine moral genotypes, resulting in dominant conservative political phenotypes, to take hold. the concept of hypermoralization, which is covered in Part 1, touches on this too.
no hedonism in poverty, no discipline in decadence.
I'll defend and elaborate on this in Biofoundationalism Part IV. it's not as byzantine as it seems, promise.
I wonder how much of these innate temperamental qualities can change based on external factors even when they're already ingrained. For example, regular meditation seems to increase the activity in the left and right insula and ACC. Similar to how people's views on certain topics skew more liberal after brain damage.
Similarly, how would something like CBT affect disgust responses in this way? I also think about in 2012 when same-sex marriage was being voted on in various states and it came out (heh) that people were much more likely to support it if they knew a gay person. I wonder what significance regular exposure has when it comes to the conservative instinct for disgust for certain behaviors?