John Kay writes: A narrow focus is characteristic of scientific method but gets in the way of understanding social phenomena. ... The economists who argue that the rationale of the family is found in cost savings have a point. Two together can live more cheaply than two separately, if not as cheaply as one. But anyone who thinks the quest for scale economies is the primary explanation of the human desire for family life is strangely deficient in observational capacity, as well as common sense.

David Dobbs has written a great National Geographic piece on the human compulsion to explore. At the centre of the article is the question of genetic influence. First, on whether migration has a genetic basis: [T]here is a mutation that pops up frequently in such discussions: a variant of a gene called _DRD4,_ which helps control dopamine, a chemical brain messenger important in learning and reward. Researchers have repeatedly tied the variant, known as _DRD4-7R_ and carried by roughly 20 percent of all humans, to curiosity and restlessness.

The Smithsonian magazine has an interview with James Flynn about his book Are We Getting Smarter? (HT: Annie Murphy Paul) First, Flynn on the “bright tax: The wisdom always was that the brighter you were, the less your mental abilities declined in old age. I found that was an oversimplification. It is true of verbal intelligence. The brighter you are, the more you get a bonus for verbal skills. I call that a “bright bonus.

I’ve posted before about Paul Krugman’s dislike of the work of Stephen Jay Gould, but I have come across another old essay in which Krugman weighs in on the question of Gould’s role in communicating evolutionary biology. Krugman argues that Gould was attractive to readers because he made no attempt to explain the mathematical logic of evolutionary theory. Krugman writes: Ask a working biologist who is the greatest living evolutionary thinker, and he or she will probably answer John Maynard Smith (with nods to George Williams and William Hamilton).

A few weeks ago, Bryan Caplan pointed out this great working paper by David Hedengren and Thomas Stratmann: **The Dog that Didn't Bark: What Item Non-Response Shows about Cognitive and ****Non-Cognitive Ability ** What survey respondents choose not to answer (item non-response) provides a useful task based measure of cognitive ability (e.g., IQ) and non-cognitive ability (e.g., Conscientiousness). Using the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), we find consistent correlation between item non-response and traditional measures of IQ and Conscientiousness.

Tomas Reespoints to an interesting paper by Marcus Jokela, who examined how the fertility rates of Americans born between 1920 and 1960 were affected by their personality. Using the big five personality traits - openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism - Jokela found that higher levels of conscientiousness in women and higher levels of openness in both sexes became more strongly related to low fertility as time went on. Effectively, cultural conservatives are now more likely to have higher fertility.

A new Nature paper by Fu and colleagues has been the subject of a few good write-ups. First, from Brandon Keim at Wired: In the most massive study of genetic variation yet, researchers estimated the age of more than one million variants, or changes to our DNA code, found across human populations. The vast majority proved to be quite young. The chronologies tell a story of evolutionary dynamics in recent human history, a period characterized by both narrow reproductive bottlenecks and sudden, enormous population growth.

In Forbes, Jon Entine discusses the rise of “positive eugenics”: Scientists offered what they considered to be a progressive solution: “positive eugenics,” which would encourage society’s healthiest citizens to have more children—the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was an eager proponent of eugenics—and more tentatively, “negative eugenics.”The “negative” wing of eugenics prevailed, however, which for the most part meant restricting the mentally ill, poor, immigrants and non-whites from propagating. It served as an inspiration and justification for Nazism and the “Final Solution,” which led to the discrediting of the entire movement.

In my review of Boyd and Richerson’s The Origin and Evolution of Cultures, I noted that I was not completely happy with their treatment of group selection. This post catalogues some of my thoughts. Boyd and Richerson open their group selection discussion by noting that selection can be broken down into between-group and within-group selection (as per the Price equation - and given this equation can be developed for multiple levels, we refer to “multi-level selection”).

The preliminary program for January’s American Economic Association annual meeting is available, with a session dedicated to genoeconomics. I’ve posted on the first of the papers before. Jan 06, 2013 8:00 am, Manchester Grand Hyatt, Elizabeth Ballroom C American Economic Association Genes and Economic Behavior (D8) Presiding: DAVID LAIBSON (Harvard University) The Genetic Architecture of Economic and Political Preferences DAVID CESARINI (New York University) CHRIS DAWES (New York University) CHRISTOPHER F.