In defense of behavior genetics
Stuart Ritchie, the author of Intelligence: All That Matters and Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth, has written a trenchant critique of The […]
The twilight of American behavior genetics
Many people, including some prominent scientists, have emailed me about the review of K. Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery in The New York Review of Books: Why Biology Is Not […]
Genetic correlation between friends
There is an interesting, and sexy, line of research which suggests that people who are non-related friends are genetically more similar than you’d expect. For years people have been telling me privately that this is not likely to be robust, and probably just really really subtle structure (friends of mine). But most of these were […]
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 16: Blueprint, a conversation with Robert Plomin
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 16: Blueprint, a conversation with Robert PlominCorrelation on a scatterplotThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Podcasts) we discuss behavior genetics with Robert Plomin, one of the e…
Almost no one is a genetic determinist except in your Communist imagination
Next summer I’m going to be giving a talk at the ISIR meeting. I’m a little bemused about this since, to be honest, I don’t talk much about behavior genetics and intelligence anymore. Until August of 1998, I had rather conventional views for someone of my education and social background on psychometrics. Then I read […]
Drawing on the slate of human nature
Some of you have been reading me since 2002. Therefore, you’ve seen a lot of changes in my interests (and to a lesser extent, my life…no more cat pictures because my cats died). Whereas today I incessantly flog Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human […]
Your impatience is in your genes! (well, some of it)
Nature Neuroscience has a short communication which is very intriguging, Genome-wide association study of delay discounting in 23,217 adult research participants of European ancestry. How’d they get such a large sample size? Collaborating with our friends at 23andMe. That being said, the abstract leaves a little to be desired: Delay discounting (DD), the tendency to […]
Your impatience is in your genes! (well, some of it)
Nature Neuroscience has a short communication which is very intriguging, Genome-wide association study of delay discounting in 23,217 adult research participants of European ancestry. How’d they get such a large sample size? Collaborating with our friends at 23andMe. That being said, the abstract leaves a little to be desired: Delay discounting (DD), the tendency to […]
Liberals will never disappear (neither will atheists)
In Quillette Hrishikesh Joshi and Jonny Anomaly* ask Are Liberals Dying Out? Since the piece has been shared a fair amount (judging by my Twitter timeline), I thought I should respond to why I don’t think that is a major concern. Let me jump to their last paragraph: Nevertheless, despite cultural trends, the best available […]
Applying intelligence to genes for intelligence
Carl Zimmer has an excellent write up on the new new Nature study of the variants associated with IQ, In ‘Enormous Success,’ Scientists Tie 52 Genes to Human Intelligence. The issue with intelligence is that it’s a highly polygenic trait for which measurement is not always trivial. You need really large sample sizes. It’s about ten […]
Just because it’s not hereditary does not mean you can affect it
A comment below from John: Love to see a post about which human traits worth caring about are notable for having little or no hereditary component. It is all good and well to know what we cannot change, but it makes more sense to focus personally and as a parent on those things that aren’t […]
Gene surfing with David Dobbs
Over at National Geographic David Dobbs of Neuron Culture has an eminently readable and engrossing piece up, Restless Genes. I have never really read about ‘allele surfing’ on the wave of demographic expansion in the way that Dobbs’ rendered it. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to produce that sort of spare but informative prose. […]
Distributing the origins of human will
In The New York Times David P. Barash writes about how parasites might influence our behavior. This should not be too shocking an idea to readers of this weblog, I’ve blogged about Toxoplasma gondii before, on which there has been a raft of publi…
An evil disposition
The thread below on the possibility of pedophilia being a biologically mediated tendency rapidly degenerated, to no one’s surprise. As I didn’t have the time to engage in strict moderation I had to close it. And I don’t want to reopen…
Pedophiles: born that way?
Gawker published a piece on the neurological problems which might result in pedophilia, and naturally a lot of shock and disgust was triggered. The piece is titled Born This Way: Sympathy and Science for Those Who Want to Have Sex with Children. This i…
A political animal in the genes
Trends in Genetics has a review article, The genetics of politics: discovery, challenges, and progress. The main reason I point to these sorts of papers isn’t that I think they’re revolutionary. Usually they aren’t. Rather, the public…
The heritability of impulse control
The above figure is from a paper I stumbled upon, Genetic and environmental influences on impulsivity: a meta-analysis of twin, family and adoption studies:
A meta-analysis of twin, family and adoption studies was conducted to estimate the magnitude …
The heritability of impulse control
The above figure is from a paper I stumbled upon, Genetic and environmental influences on impulsivity: a meta-analysis of twin, family and adoption studies:
A meta-analysis of twin, family and adoption studies was conducted to estimate the magnitude …
The poverty of inheritance
Virginia Hughes has an important post up at The Last Word on Nothing, What Americans Don’t Get About the Brain’s Critical Period. In it she reiterates just how stupid the “Baby Einstein” culture is. The post is important to me specific…
A horrible “natural experiment”
Spanish Baby-Snatching Victims Seek Answers and Justice:
Most of these stolen children were entrusted to the care of Catholics loyal to the regime. The aim behind this was to rid an entire people of the “Marxist gene,” at least according t…