Abstract
Recent literature has presented significant findings in the field of political psychology regarding the evolutionary connections between rightists and leftists. Michael Ryan’s book, The Genetics of Political Behaviour: How Evolutionary Psychology Explains Ideology, is the result of such efforts, attempting to explore the relationship between psychology and politics through an evolutionary psychological framework. For this purpose, the author compiles an extensive range of literature regarding neuroscience, genetics, and psychology in order to explain the biological differences between rightists and leftists that lead to ideological differences. With the help of this theoretical framework, the author details how specific personality traits that are attributed to leftists or rightists have shaped human history and the future of civilisation, economy, and religion.
The book is comprised of 12 information-packed chapters discussing the differences between rightist and leftists, mainly analysing the role of genetics and environment in shaping personality traits. The principal argument of the book is that rightists and leftists differ not only ideologically, but also biologically, because they react differently to events – such as the perception of threats that result in developing specific traits – and these are the key sources of ideological differences. Existing empirical studies compiled by the author demonstrate that leftists are more cooperative, open to experiences, solution-oriented, and have more abstract thinking abilities and greater mental representation; rightists, on the other hand, are more fearful, competitive, sensitive to threat, intolerant to uncertainty, and supportive for the status quo and order. Although some scholars have previously discussed that traits result from acculturation, the author’s evolutionary psychological approach handles traits in relation to the harmonisation of genes and environment. This refers to personality traits as stemming from biological factors such as brain region differences and genes, but they are completed when they take an adaptive form based on the environment.
Based on biological differences between rightists and leftists, the author analyses historical transformations, religion, economics, geography, art, and civilisation by pointing to two critical constituents in the shaping of human history: genetics and environment. Brain regions – the amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex, and anterior insula cortex – and responsible genomes constitute the biological differences between rightists and leftists. The amygdala is responsible for threat perception, aggression, and male rivalry, which are associated with rightists, and the largeness of the amygdala affects fear and aggression. In contrast to rightists, leftists have a larger anterior cingulate cortex, which handles cognitive control, behavioural flexibility, and pro-social emotions. The book largely focuses on genes, emphasising the activation of genes in the environment through the evolution of different adaptive behaviours, namely historical transformations. Thus, genes are activated as a response to environmental conditions, coping with stresses and threats by altering the human being’s role and direction. In this context, one can analyse becoming a rightist or leftist related to our adaptations to archaic environments, developing specific traits accordingly.
The book’s greatest contribution to the literature is establishing a link between these traits and human history, filling an important gap in the political psychology literature by looking beyond context-dependent interpretations, drawing a holistic picture regarding the bond between evolutionary practices of our civilisation outputs and personality traits. Our ancestors with conservative traits shaped early human history and developed adaptive traits for avoiding existing danger in early human history. Since brain region differences in our ancestors shaped human history, leftists with enlarged anterior cingulate cortexes and developed mental representation abilities became more creative, reflective, adaptable, and social than rightists, more flexible in finding solutions for the vital issues of acquiring necessities in the period when conservatism was the natural rule of our species – 200,000 years ago. The situation has changed because the human being has evolved to incorporate leftist traits, removing the constant, fearful anxiety by developing more pro-social emotions, such as empathy, and more reflective cognitive abilities; this created the ability to cope more efficiently with threats, which allows for a critical transformation in human evolution. With their developed ability to think abstractly, leftists generated more solutions against the archaic environment that had caused anxiety and threatened survival, becoming evolutionary winners through adaptation.
I would recommend this book for academic readers with backgrounds in political science, neuroscience, or psychology, because the terminology regarding genomes and brain regions make this book difficult for general readers. Eventually, the framework used suffers from limitations. Although the author addresses the theory being overgeneralised, as well as the neglecting of sociocultural circumstances, by finding examples from across the world and cultures, the framework inherently leads to biological determinism and generalisation. It seems, however, that the author was well-prepared for critiques on evolutionary psychology because of the enormous effort to embed theory into political and social phenomenona.
