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.

中文翻译：

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行为遗传学视角下的社会政治态度：尼古拉斯·马丁博士的贡献

Nicholas (Nick) Martin 教授率先对政治态度和行为的遗传基础进行了初步调查，表明被认为是社会建构的行为可能具有生物学基础。正如他所表明的那样，政治态度的典型遗传模式包括来自加性遗传、共享环境和独特环境来源的大致相等比例的变异。这不同于其他心理变量，例如人格特质，后者往往以遗传和独特的环境变异来源为特征。通过将政治态度视为模型表型，尼克·马丁能够利用观察到的政治态度代际传递的独特模式来重新审视经典双胞胎模型的典型假设。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，他能够证明平等环境假设的稳健性，并提出修正以解释各种交配。这些进步对政治科学领域以及行为和数量遗传学都产生了重大影响。