2016 Postmortem

I don't think I would define conservatism as a symptom of PTSD. Conservatism is an approach to life, not a symptom of a disease. It is just a measure of risk one is willing to take.

As I wrote elsewhere, I am very liberal in my thinking and voting, but conservative in my personal choices. On the surface, a Ayn Randian would look at my political liberalism and say I'm looking for the "nanny state" to do my thinking for me. Were I asked, however, I would say I trust the combined observation and collaborative thinking of many viewpoints and the resulting decisions over any one individual, no matter how intelligent that one individual is. And it turns out I am right; recent studies (forget now where I saw this, maybe a PBS program on the group mind) have shown that decisions and choices made by large groups are usually more successful than those made by individuals, even when the groups are not the highest IQ and the individual is.

A specific example:personally, I prefer the virtual guarantee of a retirement income over the vagaries of real life with the risk of losing all my savings to fraud or a crappy bit of luck. Which would make my politically "liberal" support for Social Security a result of my "conservative," risk-averse approach to life.

So we have to be careful not to confuse conservatism in general with political conservatism, not to mention the extreme teaparty variation of conservative we see today.

Back to the nature versus nature, I have a pretty good, general idea of the function of dna and genes. Genes are molecules that provide the chemical recipe for the synthesis of proteins. The actual function of dna plus rna is really quite mechanical and interesting to look at closely. However, the development of neurological pathways is more than just genetic.

It is similar to muscle development. You may genetically inherit a tendency for big, bulky muscles, but if you sit in a chair in front of a computer all day, those muscles will not develop. Conversely, if you engage in daily practice of weight lifting, you will realize that genetic tendency toward big blocky muscles. On the other hand, if you spend a lot of time training for distance running, you will develop muscles more geared toward distance running, but you will likely never be as good at it as somebody with dna that provides a more streamlined, long-limbed body.

Likewise, your genetic tendency may be for example, to develop very good and sensitive hearing, but if you listen all day to classical music, your emotions and thinking will develop more in one direction, whereas if you listen all day to Rush Limbaugh, your emotions and thinking will develop more in another direction. In the first case, your "math muscle" and "aural pattern recognition muscle" and "equanimity muscle" are exercised. In the second, your "hate muscle" and "chaotic, illogical muscle" are exercised, while your poor "logic muscle" atrophies, lol.

In any event, the twin study in your post cites an example of only one pair of twins, which provides an idea but hardly proof. For statistical validity, it would require a minimum of 60 data points (i this case 60 pairs of twins looked at for "neatness" and "slobiness&quot and really requires many hundreds if not thousands to give a valid answer.

And it is, like many psychological studies, less data driven than anecdotal. I wonder if mother #2 would be considered a slob by most people, or if she only seemed like a slob to the exacting twin she raised. IOW, once you are relying on one individual's description and explanation of their personal experience, you are out of the realm of science. What constitutes "neatness?" What constitutes "a slob?" There is no one definition. Are the twins equally "neat?" and according to whom? How does that compare to the relative neatness of slobbiness of another set of twins, and their descriptions of their childhood? That is why psychology is considered a "soft" science. No matter how much they try to combine it with hard, measurable sciences, it really is comes down to one person's definition of a term versus another.