Dave and Jonah have both commented on this piece in The New York Times which is something of a mismash of recent studies coming out of the field of behavior genetics. The best thing about the piece, from my selfish angle, is that it references Contingency Table, now absorbed into my other weblog, who was riffing off one of my older posts here at Science Blogs. The biggest problem with pieces like this isn't the genetics or psychology,
it is the utter lack of focus on the importantce of probability distributions and the concept of expectation
. There are several types of genetic traits. Some of them are the simple Mendelian ones we are all familiar with, many autosomal recessive diseases are controlled by this dynamic, you have a loss of function on one locus, and boom! it all breaks down. This one-gene-one-trait model is not generally what we are ...
