Thought I would pass these on. A graduate student at Rice is trying to raise some funds for research, Genopolitics: Your Genes Affect How You Vote!. The methodology is a twin study:
To test this, I'll track how genes affect attitudes during the 2012 US Presidential election by running several surveys of twins. Why twins? Well, there are two kinds of twins: identical twins (called monozygotic, or MZ) and fraternal twins (called dizygotic, or DZ). MZ twins share 100% of their DNA, but DZ twins share only about 50% of their DNA just like normal siblings. Every twin is born around the same time as his or her co-twin, so each pair of twins shares a common upbringing. If politics is mostly about upbringing (as traditional theories would have us believe), then fraternal (DZ) twins should be just as similar on average as identical (MZ) twins. But if genes do ...
