Thinking like a biologist again


This morning, my wife and I went to the gym, and because the weather the past few days has been the worst — there’s a thick layer of slick ice beneath all the snow — we decided to walk rather than take the car. That may have been a mistake. It’s dangerously slippery for feet as well as wheels, and Mary did take one unpleasant fall (but she’s OK!). It was slow plodding, but the one good thing is that it took us long enough to do the hike that I caught up with my podcasts.

So, as I was picking my way carefully across the glaciers that are our sidewalks, I listened to this episode of Serious Inquiries Only, “Are We Headed for Another Depression? with Dr. Robert S. McElvaine”. Spoiler: the answer is probably, by the way. But they were talking about the history of our two political parties, and how even, over a hundred years ago, the Republican economic policy was all about rewarding the rich and allowing the benefits to trickle down, while the Democrats were all about rewarding the poor and middle class and allowing the benefits to rise up. They cite Bryan’s Cross of Gold speech, which is mostly about monetary policy and is ineffably boring to me, but does include this paragraph:

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Reagan didn’t invent trickle-down economics, it’s been the nasty heart of the Republican party for a long time. They’ve been wedded to evil economic policy for a long time.

But then they also pointed out that the Democrats of that time, especially the Southern Democrats, endorsed wicked social policies, being against civil rights and equality, but then as we all know, in the Sixties, thanks to the infamous Southern Strategy, the Republicans adopted the regressive civil rights stance of the Southern Democrats, and there was a major recombination event. Before 1960, the Republicans had bad economic policy + better (at least, neutral) social policy and the Democrats were better economic policy + terrible social policy. After the Recombination Event of the Southern Strategy, Republicans were bad economic policy + terrible social policy, while the Democrats were better economic policy + better social policy.

OMG, I thought, this was elementary genetics. This is bog-standard theory for one of the benefits of recombination — it can combine deleterious alleles at different loci into single individuals who can then, by their elimination by natural selection, purge the gene pool of multiple bad alleles at once. For example, as mentioned in this recent paper.

Current theory proposes that sex can increase genetic variation and produce high fitness genotypes if genetic associations between alleles at different loci are non-random. In case beneficial and deleterious alleles at different loci are in linkage disequilibrium, sex may i) recombine beneficial alleles of different loci, ii) liberate beneficial alleles from genetic backgrounds of low fitness, or iii) recombine deleterious mutations for more effective elimination.

Cool beans! Now the Southern Strategy makes biological sense to me, at least.

All we need to do is purge the country of the Republican party, and we clean out two deleterious traits at once. That’s something to look forward to, anyway.

Comments

  1. says

    There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

    … and both approaches enshrine inequality; it’s part of the underlying assumptions of those political landscapes. Basically, it’s capitalists arguing about whether the workers are being exploited too much, or whether they can take a harder squeezing before they finally rebel. “Under Soviet System man exploits man, under capitalism: just the opposite!”

  2. lotharloo says

    Were the pre-Southern strategy Democrats as incompetent as the current ones? Or did they lose some of their ‘political competence alleles’ during the recombination?

  3. Jack Gorman says

    Well, if we look at the nation as the ecosystem and the party as the organism, the contemporary GOP platform is apparently quite successful in exploiting its environment. The fact that it will eventually flood its host environment with toxins that cause it to collapse is a longer-term problem that the party’s genotype is not equipped to deal with.

  4. archangelospumoni says

    Yes, but what about Zenzazzi!!

    This summarizes today’s Roypublicans.

  5. Scientismist says

    PZ says:

    Before 1960, the Republicans had bad economic policy + better (at least, neutral) social policy and the Democrats were better economic policy + terrible social policy.

    So I lived through that era and completely misunderstood what was happening? The Republicans of the 1950’s supported (or were at least neutral on) my civil rights? The Lavender Scare was not led by conservative Republicans? Tail-gunner Joe McCarthy and his closeted self-hating gay lawyer Roy Cohen were Democrats? Senator Dirkson (R) was joshing when he said a Republican victory in November ’52 would mean the removal of “the lavender lads” from the State Department? RNC Chair Guy George Gabrielson just misspoke when he said (April, 1950) that “sexual perverts who have infiltrated our Government in recent years” were “perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists”? Homophiles in the ’50’s who wanted to promote their own human and civil rights should have joined the GOP instead of Mattachine? I spent 1/3 of my life in the closet for no good reason? /s

    You’ve got to be kidding.

  6. tccc says

    I highly recommend Yaktrax Pro for the ice. I wear them as needed and make sure the older folks in my life have them or something similar. You do need some hand strength to put them on and off your shoes, but it is not too bad.

  7. Mrdead Inmypocket says

    @5 Scientismist
    Heyo, Scientismist. Glad to hear there is at least one other person here who has, ahem… a well seasoned perspective. I was born in 1924! Killer Diller, does your comment read like yesterdays headlines. I can remember all that on the good days. However.

    So I lived through that era and completely misunderstood what was happening?

    I think he was strictly referring to Republican’s social policies on race. Hence the Southern strategy reference specifically.

    White, cis, male, ankle biters like PZ tend to have a skewed perspective on “better” and “worse”, historically. He means well though, no reason to snap your cap. All they have is what was written. And what was written has tended to be written by apologists who like to think of themselves as good and decent. The thought terminating cliche of “lesser evilism” is pretty pernicious, it’s hard to shake off. He’s constantly grinding his grain though, which is key. Give PZ another twenty years and he’ll be the better for it I think. He’s good people.

  8. jack16 says

    For slippery ice. You might be interested in the “screw shoe” method (google). Cheap and handy if you’ve an old pair of shoes. I suggest dipping the screws in white glue (Elmer’s) prior to insertion.
    jack16

  9. unclefrogy says

    well if the republican party has managed to gather a majority of the destructive ass holes unto its bosom and sink with out a trace, the democratic party will have to split in two a left leaning party and a moderate right leaning party.
    The “deplorables” will have to decide what they want to do because I have no real hope that they will vanish from the face of the earth just diminish in power until they rise again, hopefully when we have passed through what ever it is we are headed for.
    uncle frogy

  10. says

    The Republican Party might die off, but they have a remarkable way of regenerating themselves. Big money always has a way of protecting bad policy if it happens to benefit the those who hold onto it.

    We have to figure out some way of counteracting all the fake news on social media. One political party is benefiting from the boondoggle. The other is not. Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube are NOT cleaning up their acts. And so progressive forces are going to have an uphill battle.

    Of course social media is useful for organizing, as it was in the teacher and public employees strike in West Virginia, but it’a a double-edged sword now. And only the side that cuts us is being sharpened.