Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Faculty, Texas A&M University, Bryan, TX, USA.
Twin Res Hum Genet. 2020 Apr;23(2):125-126. doi: 10.1017/thg.2020.30.
Professor Nicholas (Nick) Martin spearheaded initial investigations into the genetic basis of political attitudes and behaviors, demonstrating that behaviors that are perceived as socially constructed could have a biological basis. As he showed, the typical mode of inheritance for political attitudes consists of approximately equal proportions of variance from additive genetic, shared environmental and unique environmental sources. This differs from other psychological variables, such as personality traits, which tend to be characterized by genetic and unique environmental sources of variation. By treating political attitudes as a model phenotype, Nick Martin was able to leverage the unique pattern of observed intergenerational transmission for political attitudes to reexamine the quintessential assumptions of the classical twin model. Specifically, by creatively leveraging the nuances of the genetic architecture of political attitudes, he was able to demonstrate the robustness of the equal environments assumption and suggest corrections to account for assortative mating. These advances have had a substantial impact on both the fields of political science, as well as behavioral and quantitative genetics.
尼克拉斯（尼克）·马丁教授率先对政治态度和行为的遗传基础进行了初步研究，证明了那些被认为是社会构建的行为可能具有生物学基础。正如他所表明的，政治态度的典型遗传模式由来自加性遗传、共享环境和独特环境来源的方差的大致相等比例组成。这与其他心理变量不同，例如人格特质，其倾向于由遗传和独特环境变异源来表征。通过将政治态度视为一种典型表型，尼克·马丁能够利用观察到的代际传递中政治态度的独特模式，重新审视经典双生子模型的基本假设。具体来说，通过创造性地利用政治态度遗传结构的细微差别，他能够证明均等环境假设的稳健性，并提出纠正方法以考虑选择性交配。这些进展对政治学以及行为和数量遗传学领域都产生了重大影响。
