What i find amazing is that if the heritability of politics is so robust–and I agree, it would happen via personality–why is this so widely ignored?

Because people don’t want to know.
And especially razib khan and other conervatives doesn’t want to know.
America’s dirty little secret is that one of the two major parties in America is religious and race-based.
And the negative correlation between religiosity and IQ is well documented.

The disposition toward conservatism and liberalism does not manifest in absolute tendencies

In contemporary America this is manifestly false.
There may be overlap between the distributions, but the within group variance is narrowing, resulting in radical partisanship and profoundly absolutist tendancies. The between distribution gap is widening, while the within group variance is shrinking, resulting in political polarization.

These days, if you disagree with someone on a particular issue, the default response is to find some reason why they are evil or stupid, or have the wrong genes or are trying to modify human nature.

There is a biological basis for human behavior. It seems as if only conservatives dispute that.

The problem here is that razib is a conservative explaining the heritability of political ideology. He cannot exclude his own bias long enough to note that this is an emergent phenomenon and not static. There is a growing chasm of separation between the two sides. For example Salam-Douthat stratitification on cognitive ability results in fewer and fewer individuals with conservative tendency in academia.
Grand New Party page 152.
This is not a new thesis, the savannah principle hypothesis and the U of Toronto study point to the same conclusions.
I would argue that there is not just genetic tendency but memetic tendency. People are rewarded for different attributes on different sides of the aisle. Conservatives value loyalty, obedience, ancestor worship (Hayek), authoritarian impulse, accumulation of wealth. Liberals value education, intelligence, altruism, social justice, innovation, future worship, as opposed to ancestor worship….entirely different value sets.
Conservatives and liberals self select, based on political genetic tendency. For example conservatives get social capital for NOT having a “fancy” education. In gaming this is called rubberband theory. Social levelling for IQ and education makes the game more fun to play for conservatives.
The other big difference is that there are incredibly few third culture intellectuals on the conservative side…possibly none. The nature of conservativism is preservation of the status quo, defering to the authority of the past as risk management. That means the theories of first culture intellects like Hayek and especially free market economics are accorded disproportional weight, because they results of these philosophies are anti-empirical– ie, they do not work as intended.

@Jinchi
“So the Republican “War on Science” is due to the Leftward shift in scientific expertise because liberals have more gray matter in the ACC?”
No, but AGW denialism is REWARDED on the right hand of the aisle and MOCKED on the left. It pays off in social capital, and makes playing the politics game more fun.

@Mooney You should know that until recently razib denied a biological basis for the heritability of political tendency. He is being whelmed by data showing the opposite.

Because political choices are dominated overwhelmingly by where people sit in society, not by their genetics.

My problem with this series of posts is that you’ve been conflating terms. So,

( liberal = Left = Democrat ) and ( conservative = Right = Republican )

I realize that this is standard everyday usage, but if you’re going to start arguing genetics you need to be much more precise than that. Liberal and conservative are personality traits. Left and Right are ideological markers. Democrat and Republican are partisan identifiers.

So the Republican “War on Science” is due to the Leftward shift in scientific expertise because liberals have more gray matter in the ACC? That’s where you’ve lost me. These aren’t the same things, even if we treat them the same in conversational shorthand. Denial of climate science isn’t an inherently conservative position. It just happens to be the position of today’s Republican party.

I have no doubt that emotional and personality traits are in part heritable, but this does not map directly to political choices.