Society seen through genes
Over the past few months more and more articles like this one in the The New York Times are coming out, Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do’:
Jessica Schairer has so much in common with her boss, Chris Faulkner, that a visitor to the day care center they…
Heritability of behavioral traits
As a father the content of my conversations with friends and acquaintances has changed somewhat. Whereas in my offline life discussions of behavior genetics rarely came up, now they loom large implicitly and explicitly. Though the vast majority of peop…
Heritability of behavioral traits
As a father the content of my conversations with friends and acquaintances has changed somewhat. Whereas in my offline life discussions of behavior genetics rarely came up, now they loom large implicitly and explicitly. Though the vast majority of peop…
Genes can be criminogenic
As a follow-up to my post below, I just wanted to check some recent literature on crime and heritability. I found this, Heritability, Assortative Mating and Gender Differences in Violent Crime: Results from a Total Population Sample Using Twin, Adoptio…
Why marriage & fatherhood might not matter as much as you think
While I was on blogging hiatus single motherhood and the whole Dan Quayle flap came back into the news. Here’s Mitt Romney:
The American culture promotes personal responsibility, the dignity of work, the value of education, the merit of service, …
What if you are more likely to be a psychopath?
In the comments below Nathaniel Comfort asks:
What I do, as a historian, is take something apparently simple and make it more complicated. I wonder about how your curves, e.g., would be applied in real life. *Specific* couples, *particular* children–…
Genes are overrated, genetics is underrated
A few days ago Nathaniel Comfort pointed me to this post, Genetic determinism round-up. If you are curious go read Comfort’s whole post. I honestly didn’t enjoy it very much, I think I got what he was saying, but there were all sorts of cir…
The bell curve of personality?
I stopped reading much in the area of personality and behavior genetics a few years back. The main reason is I had a really hard time believing there were very good quantitative measures of many of the traits. A secondary issue, though probably nearly…
Genes: still a pretty big deal
Many people say that having children gives you a much better sense of the power of genes in shaping behavior. At least in the abstract sense that is not true in my case. I accept the “conventional wisdom” from behavior genetics that “…
Most Reported Genetic Associations with General Intelligence Are Probably False Positives
The title says it all, and I yanked it from a paper that is now online (and free). It’s of interest because of its relevance to the future genetic understanding of complex cognitive and behavioral traits. Here’s the abstract: General intelligence (g) and virtually all other behavioral traits are heritable. Associations between g and specific […]
Introducing “genoeconomics”
A new paper (open access) in The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Molecular Genetics and Economics. The authors introduce the term “genoecomics.” They start out with the proposition that the intersection of genomics and behavioral economics suffers from 1) the study samples are way too small, 2) there’s a publication bias toward false results. It’s a […]
Heritable and heritable
A few days ago Kevin Drum put up a post with the title “Being Poor in America Really Sucks”. He linked to a Pew survey which reported that the United states seems to have a stronger correlation between parent-child socioeconomic outcomes than most other nations. The implication here is that social mobility in the United […]
Heritable and heritable: the gifted and the lucky
A few days ago Kevin Drum put up a post with the title “Being Poor in America Really Sucks”. He linked to a Pew survey which reported that the United states seems to have a stronger correlation between parent-child socioeconomic outcomes than most other nations. The implication here is that social mobility in the United […]
Sample size, schample size
Ed Yong has a post up on a behavior genetic publication where the sample size is 23. The researchers report a correlation between a SNP on the OXTR locus and “prosociality.” To make a long story short the sample size suggested to Dr. Daniel MacArthur and Dr. Jospeh Pickrell that this was a spurious correlation. […]
Personality and genes
There’s a variable in the GSS, GENEEXPS, which asks if genes play a role in personality. The options are: – It’s genes which play a major role – It’s experience which determines personality First, let’s admit that the premise is stupid. Personality is heritable, but environmental variation also seems to matter. In other words it […]
Beware of scientific revolutions!
Above is the Ngram result for paradigm shift, a ubiquitous descriptive concept which can be quite slippery when applied to contemporary science. For example, every few years there is always a new “revolution” which is going to overturn …
Slate, science, and Brian Palmer
I’m still scratching my head over the rather atrocious Brian Palmer piece in Slate, Double Inanity: Twin studies are pretty much useless. It’s of a quality which would make it appropriate for WorldNetDaily. Here are the responses of Jason C…
Twin studies are not useless
A few friends have pinged me on this piece in Slate, Double Inanity: Twin studies are pretty much useless. The headline is bold, but the piece is just a sloppy mishmash. It’s really something amenable for a major “fisking,” but I gene…
Looking for a few good 145+ I.Q. individuals
Above is the distribution of self-reported I.Q.s of the readers of this weblog according to the 2011 survey. I point this out because my friend Steve Hsu will be giving a talk at Google later today. Here are the details:
I’ll be giving a talk at…