A political animal in the genes

Trends in Genetics has a review article, The genetics of politics: discovery, challenges, and progress. The main reason I point to these sorts of papers isn't that I think they're revolutionary. Usually they aren't. Rather, the public domain has totally forgotten about this domain of study. Most of the informed and high-toned discussion presumes that almost everything of worthy note is socially constructed. If not, then the counterpoint is a crude caricature of genetic determinism which is refutable in a blink of the eye. It's as if someone was commissioned to paint R. Daneel Olivaw, and ended up using crayon to sketch out the Frankenstein monster. For example, in sex differences the public debate veers between evolutionary psychological Leave It To Beaver, pre-scientific cultural traditionalism, and de facto Blank Slatism. On the one hand you have to deal with people who use "scare quotes" around the "highly speculative" "hypothesis" that males have a greater tendency toward inter-personal physical aggression than females (including in the comments of this blog, so spare with lectures about how this is a marginal perspective; I'm pretty sure I talk to people about behavior genetics a lot more than you do, though if not I'd like to hear from you!). Set against this you have an elevation of a particular specific and historically contingent nuclear family structure in the post-World War II West as normative by the laws of biology. Never mind that you need to leave the hearth to gather, and that someone must have been minding the farm when citizen soldiers were away at war.