Specifically, referencing the work of researchers Amanda Friesen at Indiana University and Aleksander Ksiazkiewicz at Rice, he writes: “If these [political] predispositions are, as Friesen and Ksiazkiewicz argue, to some degree genetically rooted, they may not lend themselves to rational debate and compromise.”

But we already know that political debates don’t lend themselves to rational debate and controversy — and we don’t need genetic explanations to understand why. There are all sorts of well-known psychological factors, from social influences to confirmation bias to motivated reasoning, that can help explain why we get locked into our political views and tend not to be open to changing them.

Sure, maybe, genes underlie these explanations and are therefore a factor. But how big a factor are we talking here, and are they more worth highlighting than all the other stuff that determines our political views?