James Q Wilson står för dagens dos av pseudo-vetenskapligt skräp. Wilson tror uppenbarligen att generna styr över praktiskt taget allt. Inklusive våra politiska åsikter. Hur kommer han fram till detta? Han hänvisar, så klart, till tvillingstudier:

Three political science professors—John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John Hibbing—have studied political attitudes among a large number of twins in America and Australia. They measured the attitudes with something called the Wilson-Patterson Scale (I am not the Wilson after whom it was named), which asks whether a respondent agrees or disagrees with 28 words or phrases, such as “death penalty,” “school prayer,” “pacifism,” or “gay rights.” They then compared the similarity of the responses among identical twins with the similarity among fraternal twins. They found that, for all 28 taken together, the identical twins did indeed agree with each other more often than the fraternal ones did—and that genes accounted for about 40 percent of the difference between the two groups. On the other hand, the answers these people gave to the words “Democrat” or “Republican” had a very weak genetic basis. In politics, genes help us understand fundamental attitudes—that is, whether we are liberal or conservative—but do not explain what party we choose to join.

Detta är så sanslöst usel vetenskap att det får nästan teorin om global uppvärmning att framstå som trovärdig i jämförelse.