Joe Rogan & Sebastian Junger - Political Opinions are Genetically Determined?

Hello, freak bitches. I read an amazing book called Our Political Selves, I think it was called, that about half of our political opinion is genetically determined. So genetically determined. Yeah, so, which makes sense. So liberalism and conservatism, basically liberalism is concerned with fairness within the group and equality within the group and an acceptance of outsiders for possible inclusion in the group. Capitalism is focused on hierarchy and sort of law and order and a suspicion of outsiders. And they're very, very powerful evolutionary, adaptive evolutionary reasons for both of those worldviews. And they've done studies with identical twins that were adopted at birth and compared them to fraternal twins. And there's a far higher concordance of a political opinion in identical twins that were adopted at birth and put in different kinds of families than with fraternal twins. So that means that our political, apparently it's around 50% of our political beliefs are genetically determined, which means that those beliefs had adaptive value in our evolutionary past, which means that the argument, I'm right, you're completely wrong and you shouldn't exist is a false argument. The country actually needs both parties very, very badly and that a healthy society has conservatism and liberalism in a kind of dynamic tension where yes, they might fight, they might argue, but they are roughly proportional in the population and equal weight is given to those two competing values. Was it taken into consideration that when these people are adopted, that growing up adopted without your biological parents puts you in a certain mindset automatically? And that maybe it wasn't necessarily a genetic thing, but it was a circumstantial or a nurture thing? Well, they compared identical twins who were genetically identical, of course, that were adopted to fraternal twins who were adopted. You understand? Yes. And fraternal twins are not genetically identical. Right, but they still come from the same body. They still come from the same... No, no, no, but their DNA is different. Right. Sure. Right. They're two individuals. Yes. Right. So both sets of twins were adopted. Right. So they all went through that, whatever that is, that process, the effects of that, whatever they are. One shared DNA, exact duplicates of their DNA, the other set of twins don't. They're fraternal. So the twins that shared identical DNA were far more likely to have the same political beliefs than the fraternal twins. In other words, the genetic component was influencing their beliefs and the environmental component was not as much compared to the fraternal twins. It's an amazing book. And it really... To me, it makes sense. Like both worldviews clearly were needed to keep our society healthy and strong and safe. A country that was run completely by liberals would get overrun by the enemy state next door immediately. A country that was completely run by conservatives would never get overrun by the enemy, but it would be a heartless and brutal society where the poor weren't taken care of and et cetera, et cetera. So you can't have one or the other. You need both in a dynamic tension. So it makes genetic sense that it works that way. Just like there would be genetic variations and all sorts of different aspects of people, height and personality and all those different things. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of character traits, right? I mean, they're partly genetic and they're partly determined by experience. So courage or whatever, generosity, sensation seeking is a genetic trait. But you can... Your impulse towards sensation seeking is also determined by your experiences in life. I don't know what the proportions are, but in terms of political belief, it's roughly 50-50. Your experience in life is about 50% responsible for your political beliefs and the other 50% is genetics. We're always looking for one reason, right? We're always looking for nature or nurture. We're not looking at this just whole soup of different entangled influences that create a person. Yeah. And it's really interesting when I tell people that genetics determine half of their political view, they get really upset. They want to be completely self-determining, right? I mean, people want to think that they are completely...whatever they are, they've created themselves. And certainly something as emotional as political belief, they don't want to think that it's wired into their DNA at all, but that's the truth of it. Well, just determinism in general. I mean, I remember the first time it was ever really deeply explained to me by Sam Harris. I was rejecting it, like almost instant...realizing I was. Like I didn't want to just be open-minded about it. I wanted to go, you know, you could pull yourself up. You could figure...you do what you...your willpower. You decide what you want to do with your life, but not really necessarily. I mean, listen, when I was young, I was a really good distance runner, right? And I ran half mile, mile, up to 10,000 meters marathon, whatever. I ran 4.12 for the mile, which is a pretty decent time in college. That's very fast. I really wanted to be like the fastest miler in the world, right? And I trained as fast as anyone has ever trained, as hard as anyone's ever trained. And I...my ceiling was 4.12. I mean, that was genetically determined. You know, sorry. Like you can run 130 miles a week, like I did, for months on end and still not go to the Olympics. Yeah. There's no doubt about it. I mean, as a mixed martial arts commentator, the big factor that you can't do anything about is power. Some people are born with striking power, and it doesn't make any sense. They have...they look exactly the same. They look just like a person who can't hit nearly as hard as them. Right. Right. Yeah, I mean, my understanding is the sort of sequencing of muscle groups in coordination that result in that kind of power is amazing. It's bone structure as well. There's a lot of variables. Bone structure. There's actually the geometry of the shoulder, like how wide your shoulders are in terms of the hips to waist ratio. There's a lot of different factors. No kidding. Yeah. That's one of the reasons why men can hit so much harder than women. It's literally the shape of the hips. Women's hips are wider. The legs go inward more. It's a different sort of mechanical advantage. Which is probably connected to the speed you can throw a baseball at. Yeah. Oh, for sure. It's a very skeletal. Yeah. Apparently, boys and girls can throw pretty much the same until puberty and then it really splits. And so it's probably for that reason.