Comments on: The bell curve of personality?

By: Razib Khan

Razib Khan — Thu, 10 May 2012 23:45:25 +0000

#8, that’s a really bizarre comment. if you can’t tell us anything, then don’t tell at all.

By: Nihaya Khateb

Nihaya Khateb — Thu, 10 May 2012 20:50:29 +0000

I have a new-old model for evolutionary behavior. I am going to speak about it in Ottawa congress this summer. I could not tell my idea now, but I can tell you that science un general and behavior in particular, could not reach it’s reality without connecting to intouition and to the street’ real life.

By: Razib Khan

Razib Khan — Thu, 10 May 2012 17:04:44 +0000

It is unfortunate that you would blithely disregard so much science as bad science,

where the fuck did i say it was ‘bad science’? don’t put words into my mouth again. EVER. even if you have social retardation syndrome i assume you understand what i’m getting at.

By: nooffensebut

nooffensebut — Thu, 10 May 2012 16:57:21 +0000

“I stopped reading much in the area of personality and behavior genetics a few years back.” It is unfortunate that you would blithely disregard so much science as bad science, as the evidence—particularly for the warrior gene—keeps piling up. After hundreds of studies on the gene, its mRNA, its enzyme, its metabolites, its epigenetics, its epistasis and corroborating lines of evidence with different ages, different populations, promoter-effect animal models, knock-out-gene animal models, different-allele dose responses, brain imaging, and so forth, maybe the collective body of research has accumulated a sample size worthy of attention.

By: Razib Khan

Razib Khan — Thu, 10 May 2012 16:51:20 +0000

#4, depends on GWAS study. some traits aren’t much enviro (think medical). but you would need to control for background variables in something like a cognitive phenotype. make sure you get a homogeneous population. or you can do some statistical trickery to control for the effect of environment after the fact in some model.

By: chris w

chris w — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:28:00 +0000

How do they control for or estimate environmental differences in these GWAS studies?

By: Razib Khan

Razib Khan — Thu, 10 May 2012 14:07:23 +0000

#3, what should i use?

By: Neuroskeptic

Neuroskeptic — Thu, 10 May 2012 07:52:30 +0000

“But it also makes science communication very difficult, because when people hear about genetics, they want to know about the specific and concrete gene”

Exactly. I’m not sure anyone’s worked out a way of communicating “the gist of” highly multigenic variation yet. But nothing in science communication is impossible …

By: Emil

Emil — Thu, 10 May 2012 07:26:42 +0000

When i first read the title of this post, i was expecting u to talk about a single factor of personality. Some researchers think that the personality traits can be reduced to a single factor. Presumably becus the different traits correlate in some way. Example paper: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092656607000256

Btw Razib, is there any reason that u use “NetworkedBlogs”? It has the annoying feature of adding an overlay (or whatever to call it) when i click the links from Facebook. Any chance u can get rid of this?