In discussing the relationship between genetically influenced differences and educational attainment (EA), Burt employs the concept of downward causation. I note the similarities between Burt's concept of downward causation and the sociogenomics concept of vertical pleiotropy and argue that her discussion of downward causation introduces an unnecessary normative component. The core problem concerns not the appropriateness of phenotypes that influence EA but mistaken assumptions about which phenotypes are being predicted.

Duarte et al. draw attention to the “embedding of liberal values and methods” in social psychological research. They note how these biases are often invisible to the researchers themselves. The authors themselves fall prey to these “invisible biases” by utilizing the five-factor model of personality and the trait of openness to experience as one possible explanation for the under-representation of political conservatives in social psychology. I show that the manner in which the trait of openness to experience is conceptualized and measured is a particularly blatant example of the very liberal bias the authors decry.

The authors connect conservatism with aversion to negativity via the tendentious use of the language of threats to characterize conservatism, but not liberalism. Their reliance upon an objective conception of the negative ignores the fact that much of the disagreement between liberals and conservatives is over whether or not one and the same state of affairs is negative or positive.

Kurzban et al. argue that the experiences of “effort,” “boredom,” and “fatigue” are indications that the costs of a task outweigh its benefits. Reducing the costs of tasks to “opportunity costs” has the effect of rendering tasks costless and of denying that they can be inherently boring or tedious, something that “vigilance tasks” were intentionally designed to be.

Man Is by Nature a Political Animal: Evolution, Biology, and Politics. Edited by Peter K. Hatemi and Rose McDermott. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. 352p. $80.00 cloth, $27.50 paper.

Peter K. Hatemi and Rose McDermott's Man Is by Nature a Political Animal brings together some of the most important social scientists working at the intersection of political science, psychology, biology, and cognitive neuroscience. Given recent advances in cognitive neuroscience and given the proliferation of work in political science that draws on these advances, we have decided to invite a range of political scientists to comment on the promise and the limits of this line of inquiry. What can scientific developments in psychology, biology, and neuroscience tell us about “human nature”? Can these discourses reckon with the variation in time and space that has traditionally been at the heart of political science, perhaps even going back to the classic text from which Hatemi and McDermott derive their title, Aristotle's Politics?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

In an earlier article we challenged the findings of Fowler and Dawes (FD) that two genes predict voter turnout as part of a more general critique of “genopolitics.” FD now acknowledge that their finding of a “significant” direct association between MAOA and voting was incorrect, but claim to have replicated their finding of an “indirect” association between 5HTT, self-reported church attendance, and self-reported voting. We show that this finding is likely driven by population stratification and omitted variable bias. We then explain why, from the standpoints of genetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology, genopolitics is a fundamentally misguided undertaking; we also respond to FD's charge that some of our previous statements concerning genetics are “highly misleading,” “extremely disingenuous,” and “even incorrect.” We show that their criticisms demonstrate a lack of awareness of some basic principles in genetics and of discoveries in molecular genetics over the past 50 years.

My response is divided into four sections: (1) is devoted to a potpourri of commentaries that are essentially in agreement with the substance of my target article (with one exception); in (2) I address, in response to one of the commentaries, several issues relating to the use of candidate gene association studies in behavior genetics (in particular those proposing a specific G×E interaction); in (3) I provide a detailed response to several defenses of the twin study methodology; and in (4) I conclude with several reflections on that methodology and the conception of human nature it has fostered.

The science of genetics is undergoing a paradigm shift. Recent discoveries, including the activity of retrotransposons, the extent of copy number variations, somatic and chromosomal mosaicism, and the nature of the epigenome as a regulator of DNA expressivity, are challenging a series of dogmas concerning the nature of the genome and the relationship between genotype and phenotype. According to three widely held dogmas, DNA is the unchanging template of heredity, is identical in all the cells and tissues of the body, and is the sole agent of inheritance. Rather than being an unchanging template, DNA appears subject to a good deal of environmentally induced change. Instead of identical DNA in all the cells of the body, somatic mosaicism appears to be the normal human condition. And DNA can no longer be considered the sole agent of inheritance. We now know that the epigenome, which regulates gene expressivity, can be inherited via the germline. These developments are particularly significant for behavior genetics for at least three reasons: First, epigenetic regulation, DNA variability, and somatic mosaicism appear to be particularly prevalent in the human brain and probably are involved in much of human behavior; second, they have important implications for the validity of heritability and gene association studies, the methodologies that largely define the discipline of behavior genetics; and third, they appear to play a critical role in development during the perinatal period and, in particular, in enabling phenotypic plasticity in offspring. I examine one of the central claims to emerge from the use of heritability studies in the behavioral sciences, the principle of minimal shared maternal effects, in light of the growing awareness that the maternal perinatal environment is a critical venue for the exercise of adaptive phenotypic plasticity. This consideration has important implications for both developmental and evolutionary biology.

Political scientists are making increasing use of the methodologies of behavior genetics in an attempt to uncover whether or not political behavior is heritable, as well as the specific genotypes that might act as predisposing factors for—or predictors of—political “phenotypes.” Noteworthy among the latter are a series of candidate gene association studies in which researchers claim to have discovered one or two common genetic variants that predict such behaviors as voting and political orientation. We critically examine the candidate gene association study methodology by considering, as a representative example, the recent study by Fowler and Dawes according to which “two genes predict voter turnout.” In addition to demonstrating, on the basis of the data set employed by Fowler and Dawes, that two genes do not predict voter turnout, we consider a number of difficulties, both methodological and genetic, that beset the use of gene association studies, both candidate and genome-wide, in the social and behavioral sciences.

I would like to thank Alford, Funk, and Hibbing, and Hannagan and Hatemi, for agreeing to write critical responses to my article, and I am grateful for the opportunity afforded me to respond.

There is a trend among behavioral scientists to view ever more complex attitudes or systems of belief as in some sense genetically determined (or “heritable”). Consistent with this trend is the recent article of Alford, Funk, and Hibbing titled “Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?” in which the authors claim to have demonstrated that when it comes to the transmission of political ideologies, genes count for more than environment. Their article has received an enormous amount of attention among political scientists and in the popular press. I critically evaluate the research technique on the basis of which the authors' support their claims and argue that it suffers from significant methodological flaws. Such flaws notwithstanding, I demonstrate that the authors' data do not clearly support their conclusions. I then question the cogency, from an historical and theoretical perspective, of proposing the existence of “liberal” and “conservative” “phenotypes” and “genotypes.” My argument has implications beyond the findings of Alford, Funk, and Hibbing, and applies to all studies that claim to have demonstrated the heritability of complex and politically relevant attitudes.

Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty. By Randy E. Barnett. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 360p. $32.50.

Libertarianism Without Inequality. By Michael Otsuka. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 168p. $39.95.

According to Randy Barnett in Restoring the Lost Constitution, “the original meaning of the entire Constitution … is much more libertarian than the one selectively enforced by the Supreme Court” (p. 356). This is because, Barnett argues, the way that the Constitution has been interpreted by the Court over the past seventy years, that is, from the beginning of the New Deal on, has eviscerated a number of clauses and amendments that were expressly designed to limit the power of both federal and state government to interfere with the basic liberties or “natural rights” retained by the people. His ambitious goal is to restore these amendments and clauses to their original meaning through an exhaustive exploration of that meaning.

A number of liberal defenders of nationalism argue that cultural-national membership is a vital component of individual identity. Notable among these liberal “identity nationalists” is Will Kymlicka, who defends minority national and cultural rights on the basis of the importance of such membership for persons' sense of identity. Kymlicka's conception of the liberal autonomous self, however, is radically at odds with his views concerning the importance of cultural–national membership. It also privileges national identity in such a way as to lend support to an extreme and illiberal form of nationalism, one that bases the priority of national obligations on the priority of national identity. By prioritizing national identity as Kymlicka does, other nonnational sites of identity formation, such as religious communities, may receive inadequate protection in a pluralistic nation-state.The author would like to thank three anonymous reviewers and the editor of the American Political Science Review for their many helpful comments and suggestions.

Theorists of democracy emphasize the importance of a public sphere, distinct from the apparatus of the state, where citizens can freely associate, deliberate, and engage in collective will formation. Discourse ethicists and deliberative democrats locate the public sphere within civil society and the manifold associations that comprise it. For Seyla Benhabib, the public sphere is constituted by the anonymous “public conversation” of civil society. By contrast, John Rawls has a much more limited conception of the public sphere. For Rawls, public reason, which establishes norms for democratic discourse, applies to a limited domain. I defend Rawls's view against the charge that it depends upon an untenable distinction between the public and nonpublic spheres. I argue that Rawls's more limited “liberal” conception better guarantees the heterogeneity of associational life in civil society. I then argue that Rawls violates his own principles by partially collapsing the public-nonpublic distinction with potentially illiberal consequences.