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Hi Sherman,

My biggest problem in putting this stuff forward is in getting people to look at the whole body of work, which is what addresses all of this.

Let me go point by point.

“Any evolutionary or genetic issue based on differential reproductive success would take at minimum many, many generations to show up in a population.”

Actually, what I propose is a little more complex. There is a genetic foundation. Overlaid over this is an environmental effect. The neurochemical aspect of this, which molds the strategies, is dopamine sensitivity. This variation in dopamine sensitivity can vary in strength, based on use, allowing an individual to change their strategy (or more accurately see it changed for them by the enironment they face). In other words, make resources freely available, and you will flood your brain with pleasurable dopamine. Your brain, sensing the high dopamine signaling will downregulate dopamine receptor density, to bring signaling back in line, making you need more dopamine to feel normal, and become more hedonistic (and more Liberal). (It’s like how you need more and more steroids, once you start using them).

I show where the research describes how dopamine controls every facet of r/K in the paper at the site. A dopamine mutation is responsible for ideological predisposition. There is post at my site describing all of this, from a while back. Look in the sidebar at Fleshing out Dopamine’s Role. It links to Dennis Mangan’s brilliant speech on that, as well, if I recall.

By contrast, be put in a less resource rich environment, and dopamine is released less commonly, and you brain will up-regulate receptor transcription, and you will become more sesnitive to dopamine, making you more driven, focused, competitive, and task oriented, and this will even be seen on brain scans as you perform tasks.

So note, in humans, r/K is variable even in individuals over short periods, though there is also evidence for an epigentic effect based on maternal rearing, as well as genetic underpinnings as well. Think about today’s dopamine saturated enironment, and how we would go more K-Conservative, if all the reosurces and wealth dried up suddenly.

“Our present socio/economic/political environment is at most only a few generations old.”

Note, I am pointing out r and K are strategies for dealing with resource availability in nature. We have two psychologies in our political world which match identically. My case is that these ideologies are modern out-growths of these primitive strategies. That is it. I do NOT maintain these strategies are well adapted to our modern circumstance, or that this is all genetic. Only that one can see where these psychologies came from in our primitive history, if we look. We are still adapting.

“I find it extremely odd that you seem to be proposing that the historical expansion into new territories and other risk-taking was primarily by those we would today call liberals. The opposite seems a lot more likely to me.”

Again, this expansion initially was a choice between an overpopulated home territory with exhausted food supplies, where people were killing each other violently, and a similar territory nearby where there were no people, and greater amounts of food, since it was unpopulated. It wasn’t a choice between modern agriculture-based civilization, with all it’s legal protections, and a violent natural world where there was no “Whole Foods.” It was a choice between being in an environment where gangs Conservaties were free to kill you for being defective (and would), or heading to an empty area identical to the one you were in, but without the violence.

“Finally, “survival of the fittest,” which of course really means survival of the genes of the fittest, is totally turned on its head in modern societies. In every “advanced” society those who are most likely to pass on their genes are those who are least socially and economically successful by the terms of that society. There is a direct inverse relationship between economic success and reproduction. See the movie Idiocracy.”

Yes, again, free resource availability, and limited reosurce availability. r vs K. I maintain the Idiocracy is a result of the difference of an r-selected environment. In r-selection, once resources are freely available, it is all about producing “quantity over quality” in offspring, since every offspring can get resources, and doesn’t need to be fit, beyond being able to breed. We produce enough resources today to allow for generous welfare, EBT, Obama phones, etc. Free resources means the only selective pressure is how many kids you pop out. Idiocracy. r-selection.

Cut the resources (as will happen – these things are cyclic), and once welfare is gone, K-selection will return, favoring all the traits of Conservatism. Those who can function in groups, address threat, and compete in whatever competitions are going on for resources will succeed, and the welfarites, will gradually get killed back, no matter how many offspring they spawn.

The dude in Idiocracy, by getting the plants to grow using water, is what kept the whole Idiocracy alive. Had he not done that, competition would have ensued, favoring the more able, and those who won, would have been intelligent, capable individuals focused on producing a few offspring who were highly fit.

Of course, in reality, when everyone is having twenty kids, at some point, there would not have been enough resources, K-selection would have returned, and most of those idiots would have been killed, as they were gradually culled back by having to compete. It is inevitable.

The problem here is that, at least in the history of this country, expansion into new territory was not "risk-free" because unpopulated. In fact, I know of no case anywhere in recent millenia, with exception of the expansion of the Polynesians across the Pacific, where a group expanded into "unpopulated" territory. With that exception, every group was expanding into territory already populated, although often thinly. And their expansion was almost always resisted, though often not particularly effectively.

In this country, those who were on the bleeding (literally!) edge of the frontier were certainly not risk-averse. They were at much greater risk, and knew it, than those even a few miles back, much less those in the well-settled (and theoretically less resource-rich) areas.

Of course, in reality, when everyone is having twenty kids, at some point, there would not have been enough resources, K-selection would have returned, and most of those idiots would have been killed, as they were gradually culled back by having to compete. It is inevitable.

We will be seeing that shortly, in the global arena. Modern agriculture is getting better and better at getting more crops out of a given acre of land. Unfortunately, it takes money: money for fertilizer, money for herbicides/insecticides, money for machinery and fuel. You get to the point where the productivity of some of the population is not enough to get paid enough to buy food. And the willingness of the Western middle class to impoverish ourselves in order the feed the world is lessening.