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I will eventually write something about this subject. For now the main point is this: The dominant factor in political life is the fact that human beings are tightly bound into competing groups, and the force that binds groups together is feelings of mutual loyalty (see my book).
It's certainly true that the most important political groups are the families, tribes and nations that people are born into (although these groups do adopt outsiders as well).
But some loyalty groups have little to do with birth. Anyone who's served in the military knows people can develop life-long loyalties to a squad or a platoon based on having faced common adversity. When the other man risks his life for you, you don't care much where he was born.
Heck, human beings are sometimes capable of developing bonds of loyalty toward a dog or a horse. This bizarre fact tells you something important: Those feelings of mutual loyalty, which are the bedrock of political life, are not necessarily based on birth or kinship.
None of this is meant to deny the importance of birth into a family, clan, tribe, or nation. I have no sympathy for the claim that identies are basically fluid and determined by free choice. Most people inherit the loyalties that are central to who they are.
Still, the fact that many people do adopt new loyalty groups--even switching sides to join a rival family or nation--means that political loyalties cannot be *reduced* to birth into a given family, tribe or nation. Politics is not reducible to biology or genetics.
This isn't meant to disparage biology or genetics. These sciences can be useful in their own sphere. But every science is limited in what it can explain. It is usually impossible to reduce one science to another.
As a political theorist, my concern is to develop a vocabulary of concepts that is useful in permitting us to understand the political realm. I've repeatedly said that liberal political concepts miss the central features of political life, and so are insufficient to the task.
The insufficiency of liberal political concepts for describing the political world has created a vacuum that needs to be filled with better concepts. But those who want to fill that vacuum with concepts from biology don't understand the challenge any better than liberals do.
Biological categories weren't derived by observing human political life and so they can't describe human political life. At best they offer a partial view that, like the economic reductionism of the liberals, distorts politics and prevents us from understanding what we're seeing.
We political theorists have no easy way out. We can't reduce politics to biology, any more than we can reduce politics to economics. We'll just have to do the hard work of developing better concepts that describe political reality as it is.
