&gt; liberals and conservatives represent two different species<p>That is most definitely NOT what I said.  What I said what that it <i>might</i> be the <i>beginning</i> of a species split.  It will probably take at least a few hundred thousand years for that to play itself out.<p>And I also advanced a specific causal model: that genes and memes are competing for a common resource, namely, human bodies and the brains they contain.  The human brain is the phenotype of both genes and memes (hence &quot;nature&quot; and &quot;nurture&quot;) and so it is entirely plausible that they could compete with each other over this resource, and that this competition could result in a species split.  Whether the split between conservative and liberal is a reflection of this or not is speculative, of course, but it&#x27;s also testable.  For example, you could see if political affiliation had a genetically heritable component, much like you can test if homosexuality has a genetically heritable component.<p>Sure, this idea is pretty far out there (this is an HN comment thread, after all, not a submission to Nature) but I think &quot;vapid&quot; is going a little too far.