Daniel MacArthur is a genomics researcher who writes about the fast-moving world of human genetics. Daniel takes a close look at a PNAS paper published this week in this Wired article.
Let me be clear from the outset: given the limitations of the datasets the authors had to work with (they relied on results from studies performed by other researchers, and there are few cohorts with both genetic and social network data), there are a lot of things this study has done well. .
Choices and behaviors influence long term happiness, despite individual genetic and personality traits, a study finds. Bruce Headey (Melbourne University), Ruud Muffels (Tilburg University) and Gert Wagner (DIW and Technical University Berlin) analyzed data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey, a series of yearly interviews of adult and youth household members from 1984-2008. [continue reading…]
Footage of this driver’s disastrous attempt to park a BMW at a Thornhill, Ont. fitness centre became a hit on YouTube and resulted in charges laid against a 62-year old. Well maybe she can draw some comfort from this new research, which suggests that bad drivers may in part have their genes to blame, suggests a new study by UC Irvine neuroscientists. People with a particular gene variant performed more than 20 percent worse on a driving test than people without it – and a follow-up test a few days later yielded similar results. About 30 percent of Americans have the variant.
“These people make more errors from the get-go, and they forget more of what they learned after time away,” said Dr. Steven Cramer, neurology associate professor and senior author of the study published recently in the journal Cerebral Cortex. [continue reading…]
It’s easy to explain why we act a certain way by saying “it’s in the genes,” but a group of University of Iowa scientists say the world has relied on that simple explanation far too long. In research to be published today in Child Development Perspectives, the UI team calls for tossing out the nature-nurture debate, which they say has prevailed for centuries in part out of convenience and intellectual laziness. [continue reading…]
