Oh, for Pete’s sake. Don’t Berkeley wacademics have better things to do than try to prove that “liberals” are genetically superior to “conservatives?” How to spot a baby conservative. (Hat tip: Ethel.)

Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.

At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals. …

In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids’ personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There’s no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings — the investigators were not looking at political orientation back then. Even if they had been, it’s unlikely that 3- and 4-year-olds would have had much idea about their political leanings.

A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.

The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective.

There you go! What more proof do you need that progressive political views represent the highest state attainable by human beings?

Block admits in his paper that liberal Berkeley is not representative of the whole country.

Truly, it is so. For it is in Berkeley that the übermenschen dwell in their greatest numbers.

UPDATE at 3/22/06 6:18:42 pm:

Jonah Goldberg rips this one apart: Do conservatives need psychological help?