I've read that conservative is the new gay, but might there actually be a "conservative gene"? What if conservatives are "born that way" as activists maintain gays are? Wouldn't that make conservatives the members of a legitimate identity group worthy of the full range of legal protections?

Lest anyone laugh at the absurdity, the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof takes the deterministic view quite seriously, and he is citing studies which purport to document things like the conservative blink rate. No really:

Researchers have found, for example, that some humans are particularly alert to threats, particularly primed to feel vulnerable and perceive danger. Those people are more likely to be conservatives.

One experiment used electrodes to measure the startle blink reflex, the way we flinch and blink when startled by a possible danger. A flash of noise was unexpectedly broadcast into the research subjects' earphones, and the response was measured.

The researchers, led by Kevin B. Smith of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, found that those who had a stronger blink reflex at the noise were more likely to take such conservative positions as favoring gun rights, supporting warrantless searches, and opposing foreign aid.

That makes intuitive sense: If you are more acutely sensitive to risks and more fearful of attack, you also may be more aggressive in arming yourself and more wary of foreigners.

Tom Maguire has a lot of fun deconstructing the latest of advances from "science":

Let's see - conservatives are more alert to danger and distrustful of foreigners. So it was conservatives that opposed NAFTA and every free trade agreement since then, fearful as they were of job losses and foreign competition.

And it is conservatives, fearful of the possibility of hurtful speech leading to violent action, that have advocated for speech codes on our nation's campuses.

It was fearful conservative educators who suspended a first grader for bringing a "spork" to school.

And (you guessed it!) it is conservatives, ever alert to threats and fearful of the possibility of global climate change caused by those polluting Chinese, that have led the charge for a global agreement on carbon emissions.

Ain't neuroscience grand?

The study that Kristof sites is also criticized here for a methodology so thoroughly flawed that the author calls it a "textbook example":

In sum, the authors support their conclusions through multiple acts of creative and tendentious redescription: They describe all of the relevant physiological and ideological variables as indicating a perception of threat, and then show that they are correlated. This is a textbook example of the fallacy of "misuse of hypothesis" or "persuasive definition": The authors define and characterize phenomena in a manner favorable to their hypothesis, but with little justification other than to support their hypothesis.

Anyway, I should point out that in the interest of fairness I took the Disgust Scale test which is linked in the paper Kristof cites. ("The Ick Factor: Disgust Sensitivity as a Predictor of Political Attitudes.")

Considering the admitted bias of the test's author (and the fact that registration is required), I suspect that most of the 45,000 or so people who have taken the test would be politically to the left of me.

Even so, my disgust scores are lower than the average (and my "animal reminder" levels are way lower):

The terms are explained here:

1) Core disgust: the "core" of the emotion, which is about defending the mouth from contamination by dirty or inappropriate things like body excretions, certain animals like rats and cockroaches, and certain foods, like ice cream with ketchup.

2) Animal-reminder disgust: things involving death, corpses, and violations of the external boundaries of the body, such as amputations. These things remind us that we, like animals, are mortal.

3) Contamination disgust: this kind of disgust is a defense of the whole body, not just the mouth, from contact with dirty or sleazy people.

I'll try not to throw my inner child out with the bathwater.