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Critique Of Dr. Charney

Analysis of Dr. Charney's Paper

The relationship between genetics and political behavior is still very new and unfamiliar territory and notable researchers from all over the world have, and still are, trying to figure out if and how much genes play a role in our political ideologies. In his paper Genes and Ideologies, Dr. Charney shows the flaws in methodology and research technique of fellow researchers who support the claims that political ideologies and attitudes are heritable. Though Dr. Charney's hypothesis is well supported and offers legitimate critiques to Alford, Funk, and Hibbing's studies, the absence of firsthand, direct studies supporting his hypothesis take away from the credibility of his conclusion.
To better comprehend the basis for Dr. Charney's critiques, it is important to understand the general thoughts on genes and political behavior in the field of genetics and politics. After the publication of Alford, Funk, and Hibbing's (hereafter referred to as AFH) studies, there have been researchers both supporting and opposing AFH's claims. Results from the studies used in AFH were undeniably interesting, and seemed to provide reasonable proof that genetics did indeed have a profound effect on predicting certain political behaviors. But these studies were also found to be flawed in many ways. Researchers and other people in the field of genetics and politics who oppose AFH's claims use these flawed studies to their advantage. Basically, the relationship between genetics and politics and also the methods used to study them is universally recognized to be fairly unstable, solely based on the fact that both genes and political behavior are so complex.
In his paper, Charney focuses on the specific experiments used by researchers who claim that political behavior is heritable. By critiquing these experiments, he provides a basis for his hypothesis that complex and politically relevant attitudes cannot all be credited to genes, and the studies that...