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. On Twitter there was some concern about the focus on DRD4. The issue is a general one in much of behavioral genomics, and I'm not too interested in rehashing the point. But the broader question of heritability of behavior remains. It seems to me that we have some 'natural experiments' now. For the past 50 years there have been a series of cross-cultural adoptions from Asia to North America and Europe. If human behavior variation across and within populations is substantially heritable than this might be a good place to start. Rather than focusing on genes, we need to focus on heritability first.