“Political conservatives have sometimes favored genetic explanation of behavior and intelligence while liberals have more often favored environmental explanations.”
There are many examples involving politicizing nature vs. nature issues, but an especially notable example favoring genetic explanations of behavior are the devastating events in Nazi Germany. The propaganda aimed towards building a greater Germany by extinguishing all inferior races that is, people other than the “superior” Aryan race-so that a genetically pure race woould be maintained. This, unfortunately led to history’s most notorious and devastingact of human immorality- the Holocaust.
An example of political leaders favoring nenvironmental expectations in behavior was the founding of Communism, which believed that humans were highly malleable adn docile. Because there was great confidence tha tpeople would work together for greater productivity, some regimes accompainied their revolution with massive indoctrination efforts. For example, in the Cultural Revolution of China and the two Russian Revolutions, efforts resulted disastrously, however due to lack of an individual economic incentive, accompanied by a terribly toll of human deaths from cruel punishments and miseravle lives, initiated by the attempts to “reeducate” the majority.
DeWaal contend that “suppressed categories of people, such as minorities and women” should feel threat both from biological determinism and from an environment...
