The pith: there are differences between populations on genes which result in "novelty seeking." These differences can be traced to migration out of Africa, and can't be explained as an artifact of random genetic drift.
I'm not going to lie, when I first saw the headline "Out of Africa migration selected novelty-seeking genes", I was a little worried. My immediate assumption was that a new paper on correlations between dopamine receptor genes, behavior genetics, and geographical variation had some out. I was right! But my worry was motivated by the fact that this would just be another in a long line of research which pushed the same result without adding anything new to the body of evidence. Let me be clear: there are decades of very robust evidence that much of the variation in human behavior we see around us is heritable. That the variation in our psychological dispositions, from intelligence to schizophrenia, is substantially explained by who our biological parents are. This is clear when you look at adoption studies which show a strong concordance between biological parents and biological children on many metrics as adults, as opposed to the parents who raised the children. This doesn't mean that environment doesn't matter, but I believe we tend to underweight genetics in individual outcomes in our contemporary Zeitgeist, just as we may have overweighted it in the past. At this point some of you may be wondering, "what, I hear about genes for [fill in the blank] constantly!" So why am I saying we underweight genetics? I think there's a disjunction between the fixation that the public (and therefore the popular press) has on a specific biophysical candidate gene which is given almost magical powers of causal necessity and the more abstract and diffuse statistical genetic reality of correlations between parents and offspring whose effects seem to be distributed diffusely across the genome. The latter is a robust and ubiquitous phenomenon, but because it is not possible to frame the narrative as a "gene for X" it lacks power. In contrast, when you have a powerful gene of large effect whose variation in state has a concrete and comprehensible outcome the narrative is clear, precise, and distinct. There's an unfortunate problem with this though:
