I'm always perplexed by stuff in the evolutionary field that is supposed to be insightful and\or debateable. Of course, culture is driving evolution and -- at least one would suspect -- speeding it up. How can it not be? Darwin's insight about natural selection seems ... insightful. But once you say, "hey organisms are adapt to their environment through selection" ... then logically you're off and running. *Everything* in the environment would affect selection. Once people learn to throw spears then obviously spear throwing and spear making ability would affect selection. Once folks consciously migrate through known seasonal "good feeding" grounds, then memory and spatial orientation are selected for. Once we learn to beat up the other guys with clubs ... club weilding skill. Once folks share information by talking ... then talking is in the mix. Once you have written language, then skill with that is in the mix. And numbers. And navigating village, town, city "human relations". And salesmanship. And skill at climbing the corporate greasy pole. Whatever the environment is ... it's plausibly affecting selection. That's simply "by definition". Now that we have welfare -- societal support for women to pop out kids sans husband ... taypaying middle class saps like me are selected against, "fitness" is ... Octomom!

My 2nd lame commentthought: 
 
I'm skeptical of the claim here that "the pattern is that more g-loaded tests tend to show stronger evidence of lasting shared environmental impact." 
 
I look at those WAIS MZAMZT results -- they're exactly what i'd expect. The Performance end -- which i'd assert is closer to the metal -- shows more heredity, less nuture. The WAIS verbal has some highly g-loaded stuff -- like verbal analogies, but also stuff like vocab and information that will highly track SES. (I'd like to see the actually subtest. Show me say analogies with higher shared environment and then we're talking about family environment affecting g.) 
 
~~ 
 
Further thought along these lines with regard to Raven's correlating at .58 for MZA. 
 
I think folks' "model" about this stuff is too simple. Ravens, or test like it are as i understand it almost entirely where the Flynn effect shows up.  
 
I don't think this is surprising. I think some of Flynn -- and it will vary country to country, place to place -- is nutrition, bringing up the bottom in schooling, but i think a bunch of it is what i'd call "a more complex cultural and especially visual environment". TV erasing what might have been labelled "rural stupidity" ... but extending that to more people than just rural folk. And while "math class" used to be -- 70 years ago -- just doing math, now there's a lot more about sequences, patterns, sets, etc. etc. The Internet dovetails these two. Much more information available, and lots more symbolic processing -- especially in the form of electronics games. People -- especially kids now -- are just a lot more "plugged in" to the sort of thinking that's captured by Ravens.  
 
But my thought here is that the simple binary naturenuture model doesn't capture this very well. What heredity gives you is a capability. But then that capability has to be realized -- sort of nuture. But it's not classically "nuture". I don't think nuture gives you the capability to do well on Ravens. It's just that you have to have some familiarity with "way of thinking" to do well. (Or at least it really helps.) 
 
My analogy would be to the SAT Math. In our naturenuture debates, i'd say IQ test; my brother would say it's a high school math test. Well now that my daughter's taken it ... it's darn sure a lot more a high school math test than i remember. BUT, it's still not a high school math test. What it is is an IQ test, that assumes knowledge of high school math. If you don't know high school math -- algebra, very basic geometry -- you're screwed. BUT, knowing those things rock solid, doesn't get you anywhere near 800, because you have to be "clever" to apply those tools to "see" the trick to solve the problems. It really is an aptitude test ... but one that requires a big knowledge base to be useful. 
 
More....

I guess i don't see the idea that there's a restriction of range (adopting families) problem in the adoption studies.  
 
My thought was that the whole point is to look at the role heridity and family environment here precisely *by* looking at upper middle class families more or less "doing all the right stuff" and seeing how biological and non-biological children compare. Ergo you are really asking a heridity question. Which makes sense because a lot of the politicalsocial argument is "imagine." (Imagine we made everything equal. Imagine everyone had infinite resources. Etc.) 
 
I don't even know how you'd design an experiment to get a decent range of suitably terrible, mediocre, average, good and terrific adoptive homes. Even how you'd measure them. Outside of the moral problem of slapping kids in terrible adoptive homes. 
 
If you want a study of adoption to get directly at this issue, then it would seem to be the one in toto's comment -- comparisons versus adoptee's natural parent's IQ. And you'd need a massive study because children's "herditarian IQ" is not just an average of parental IQ but a random spread and not even around the average but something associated with the average confounded by regression to the mean. (I don't know we even have a decent model because there's so many genes involved and we don't know what they are and how much is interation effects etc.) 
 
Also this brings up my "raised by wolves" issue. I don't know anyone who doesn't think nuture is critically important ... when the range gets extreme. If you are raised by wolves ... you will *not* have a high verbal IQ. (You will likely be dead and have a zero IQ.)  
 
Rather all the issues -- why this gets any attention -- are about what's causing the differences we see in the range of societal environments that exist.  
 
And at least when we're talking about the typical range of middle class environments it seems pretty clear that the answer is -- it's over whelmingly heredity. 
 
For people in third world, undernourished, highly deprived environments with illiterate parents, limited to no books, disease, etc. ... then it's much, much less clear.

Religious belief is very important, critically important, to many people. My father is an orthodox Catholic. He went to Catholic grade school, Jesuit high school, and a Jesuit college. He has a Ph.D. in chemistry and an M.S. in computer science. He has taken courses in molecular biology. He has the Behe book and I believe he puts creedence in it.

God or no God, Massachusetts is still Puritanical.

It seems like there isn't a lot of really clear information on even things like the numbers of people who are "evangelical" Christians, for example, and who believe such and such a thing. The media sometimes report on evangelicals or Catholics or Muslims and give the impression that they're homogeneous groups, but they're obviously not. The media never discuss any of that, and it seems like there aren't even researchers trying to find a lot of it out. I guess it can be personal and can be something people might not be able to express or describe by answering a researcher's survey, but it's interesting the way those different "sects" could coexist and not be well understood.

My mom recently told me about the advice a librarian, at a public library, had given her, about search engines to use for a given task, and the advice wasn't good. Google scholar is superior to a lot of search engines, in my opinion, but the issue is not even about individual search engines. I'm not sure what they mean by loud places. Do people congregate online and talk about searching for information? Even though the searching and accessing of articles, online, allows one to move rapidly through large numbers of articles, I've noticed that the main obstacle to obtaining information is still my own degree of closed-mindedness. When I haven't found things, it's usually been because my searches have been too restrictive or because I haven't thought to search for some slightly far-out thing. I tend to think that future librarians could teach kids in school to find information online by teaching them to scan large numbers of articles or website and then read, in more depth, ones that appear to offer the relevant info. Google scholar lets one do that a little, even by showing snippets of the full text. I don't know. For awhile I thought that librarians would have nothing else to offer people in the "internet age," but I think they could conceivably still have things to offer people.

That second chart is a little bitter for me. My dad was an Air Force scientist laid off in 1970. When I was a little kid I always thought I would be a scientitst like my dad, but the next few years of penury convinced me it was a sucker's game. We lived around families headed by high school graduates that had much more affluence and material possessions than us (and they hated NERDS!)  
 
The threat of nuclear annihilation aside, the Cold War was great- it kept a lot of people well employed and produced a lot of great technology.

Double Helix: 
 
I don't think there really is such a thing as "indians" from the genetic perspective. 
 
Ok, this is true of Europeans and more so Africans. But even Africans are mostly people from the Bantu expansion. 
 
"Indians" are a conglomeration of caste groups which have been practicing endogamy -- at various levels -- for a couple thousand years. With quite different levels and sources of "source" DNA. For some groups the selection pressures have been similar to Ashkenazi. Other groups have been completely illiterate the entire time. 
 
I'm thinking in terms of genetic complexity its the biggest mess on the planet. 
 
And, of course, as in the US these differences generate fractious politics around civil service and university reservations with ST, SC then OBC (Other Backward Castes) to spread the gravy and garner more votes.  
 
That's why i'm with Sailer. Even though i like India -- and love one Indian in particular -- and worked with a lot of smart Indians (at a large software company) don't bet on the joint, no matter how savy US Indians seem to be. 
 
jim

I agree with Jason. Maybe people miss taking a trip or having a fling, but this is a one-time moment of regret. People who look back and think, I should have excercised, stopped smoking, or worked harder, are living their regret every day of their life.

There's a whole economics school called the Austrian school that predicted the housing bubble before there even was a housing bubble. 
 
I recall reading one article, perhaps by an Austrian, that made the case that the reason the dollar held its value when it was only a piece of paper, was because the idea of a gold-backed dollar was passed along culturally.  
 
There's actually a lot of economics out there that is human centric and doesn't create faulty mathematical models. The problem is that government wants mathematical models that treat the citizens as clay, it doesn't want to be told that mostly everything it does will end in disaster and failure.

And what is practical experience and common sense? Whatever the herd is doing.

Looks like some devolution taking place at the end there...

Is anyone else having a problem with the text of this post flowing properly in their browser? 
 
The right pane is covering the text in all the posts in my browser currently. But in previous posts i can click on the post link and bring them up properly. No so this one. I think the graph dropped in keeps the text pushed right and underneath the right pane ... it's a pain. 
 
If someone has had this problem and dealth with it someone, please give me a holler.

Yes, i agree. Older people are -- obviously -- more set in their ways, but each generation of young people is more affected by events. Either reaction to the disfunctions of the 60s and 70s, or attraction to Reagan pulled the 80s from the more normal pattern. Now with Obama or disillusionment with Bush could be working the reverse. 
 
I just believe there's a general life pattern as people settle down in have kids. Also could be "being more set in ones ways" -- i.e. old brain. 
 
Anyway here's the cumulative GSS data. I conglomerated the cells -- probably possible to do it online, but i'm ignorant how, i did it in Excel -- to decade. Then i conglomerated the three libcon buckets again. 
 
The pattern looks like that rough a-bit-less-then-10-point shift: 
AGE OF RESPONDENT Teen 20s 30s 40s 50s 60s 70s 80+ 
THINK OF SELF AS LIBERAL OR CONSERVATIVE  
EXTREMELY LIBERAL 4.45 3.18 3 2.37 2.68 2.07 1.63 1.69 
LIBERAL 17 14.62 12.12 11.27 10.22 8.93 9.28 7.94 
SLIGHTLY LIBERAL 17.4 16.11 15.07 12.95 11.12 10.14 9.4 9.15 
MODERATE 38.65 38.54 37.1 37.54 38.48 41.26 41.33 42.45 
SLGHTLY CONSERVATIVE 11.3 14.88 17.25 17.86 16.88 16.54 15.06 12.83 
CONSERVATIVE 9.6 10.65 12.91 15.09 16.77 16.63 19.44 21.18 
EXTRMLY CONSERVATIVE 1.65 2 2.56 2.9 3.85 4.42 3.85 4.71 
 
Summed Liberal 38.85 33.91 30.19 26.59 24.02 21.14 20.31 18.78 
Moderate 38.65 38.54 37.1 37.54 38.48 41.26 41.33 42.45 
Summed Conservative 22.55 27.53 32.72 35.85 37.5 37.59 38.35 38.72

Razib, 
 
Ok, it was blah, blah, blah. 
 
I'll have to go learn to prowl around the GSS myself.  
 
But this general pattern younger more liberal, older more conservative was i thought generally well established. Taught in my pol-sci class back in the 70s ... not that that means anything. 
Obviously it's strength would go up and down with politicalsocial events.  
 
I'll go check.

Razib, 
 
I'm surprised you're struck by this "decline".  
 
I think all this data shows is that people get more conservative as they get older and have more experience with the world. 
 
It's a bigger (10 point) shift for those without religion, simply because they are the folks who wise up the most with experience. Those who are religious start skewed more conservative ... and so the shift is less (4 points). 
 
That squares with my experience. I'm in the "I think God exists ... but rationally ... what the hell do i know?" camp. I'm much more conservative than i was as a young punk. I'm a natural Hamiltonian -- science, progress, technology, commerence. But as i've aged and grasped human nature, one appreciates the Jeffersonian -- distrust of bigcentral government -- side of the debate more. It's the history of the 20th century. I appreciate our constitutional system, and am ticked at the judicial activists tearing it down. 
 
I'm am "open" enough to at least have a foreign wife (Indian), but as i've aged (and had kids) i appreciate that "culture matters". I'm pretty darn happy to be the inheritor of the Anglo-Protestant culture we have (even though i was raised Catholic). And i'm pretty ticked at the multi-culturalists, and the PC police trying to tear it down ... and most of all yelling "racist!" when they aren't preening about their moral superiority. 
 
In other words ... i account for the of those 35+ Conservative 32% that would not have been in the 23% at age 18. 
 
My point -- this is probably, MOSTLY, an evolution of individual humans as they age, not a change in the country in time. 
 
If you have data from a previous GSS say 1990, then you could show that it's shifted.  
 
But generally, aren't the young always young and foolish ... eternally?

Is there research on how effective having a defined outsider lower-class is in reducing other religious or ethnic tensions? 
 
For example, how important was it to white unification in America to have blacks be the designated bottom of the barrel? Did this help European immigrants get over their Old World ethnic and religious differences? 
 
And now that anti-black attitudes are no longer a unifying belief among whites, are the political culture wars the result of intra-white religious differences becoming more important and definitional? 
 
I get the impression that many white evangelicals feel that secular upper income whites look down on them as the dregs of society. Obviously nobody likes thinking of themselves as the bottom of the barrel and that spurs a backlash. 
 
Human nature being what it is, some sub-group will always be considered the dregs of society. But if that group is a large percentage of society that seems a recipe for instability. 
 
Is it perversely good for a society as a whole if there is some 5% minority group that everybody else hates? 
 
(To be clear, I think it'd be ideal if everybody got along with everybody. I just don't think that is how human nature works.)

Seems like most states in the Mid-west, South-west and the South have a blotch or two of green. Wonder if those are cities.

OK, seriously. 
 
If you are comparing group behavoural trends, then you look at how groups compare to each other statistically, not how individuals within those groups compare. I don't think Jake's approach goes very far towards understanding the differences between men and women in the disciplines they choose.

All I can say is, thank God I majored in English.