Whats this? Two posts in as many days? Madness!

[lorimt]

I'm curious. How much do you feel beholden to biology? Not, oh wow, biology has done some great stuff, but rather things like instinct or such impulses. I tend to think of myself as fairly independant of such things, nurture and personal goals taking a much stronger role in most decisions I make. Anyone else? Any particulars where you do or don't obey some sort of natural or biological demand? What sorts of things? I'm especially interested in personal choices or ideas rather than observations about humans in general.

(It just occured to me, and I realize I have no idea how typical my approach to such things actually is.)

EDIT:
In rereading, I can see I danced around what on earth I was talking about. Things like bobbzman wrote about. For example, I know that I will do something different just because I'm scared, or unhappy or whatever, even when unrelated to mood. Stuff like that, if that makes sense. Not just emotional response, but things where I'm more rationalizing an action than rationally deciding to do something, or feeling an impulse to do something even when it seems like a bad idea. ::mutters:: I'm not really talking about emotion, I'm just not sure how to distinguish this case. Stuff like sithjawa are good examples too, and not ones that occured to me originally.

EDIT THE SECOND:
I'm still not coherent. I'll try again some other time when I've had time to think, and wave my hands about while talking at people.

Comments

[bobbzman.livejournal.com]

Political party affiliation is strongly associated with geographic, ethnic, religious, and economic classes. Since these tend to remain moderately constant in most families between single generations, producing a "heritable" effect, I'd suggest that the case for a genetic basis is fairly weak (unless studies using actual marker genotypes across different populations have been done, in which case I'd be very interested in reading the paper).

[bobbzman.livejournal.com]

And by ethnic class, I mean in terms of social identity. Obviously there are strong genetic biases correlated with ethnic ancestry, but that's not what I see going on here.

[boojum.livejournal.com]

I've been calling this the "fruitcake recipes are heritable" definition of heritable. The original idea is someone else's, but I've forgotten who.

[boojum.livejournal.com]

I realized I was unclear. It's a perfectly valid type of heredity -- it just has nothing to do with genes, unlike blue eyes or a tendency to be tall or whatever.

[jibb.livejournal.com]

Memetic heritability?

[squirrelloid.livejournal.com]

well, these are all correllation arguments though, just like heritability is. Its not possible to claim that political party isn't inherited (at some level) in a true genetic sense; that hypothesis isn't refutable on the basis of 'it also corresponds to these things'. Now, i'm not going to argue that there's a neuron in our brain thats either republican or democrat, but i would argue that its likely there are ideological premises that push us towards one party or another, and these are heritable in a biological sense. Just think of some of the very axiomatic assumptions made by the ideology of each party. Those are probably tied (vaguely) directly to brain chemistry and genes.