Wouldn't health be a very likely place to look for highly heritable income-affecting things? Chronic physical or mental health problems can have a huge impact on how much money you make. I wonder how big an impact that might have.

Is there evidence about whether the problem with science education is mainly about educational priorities, or mainly about intelligence or specialization? That is, would (say) requiring a couple more science classes in high school make the citizens and politicians (who care mainly about what the voters and journalists think) less gullible about science? Or would it just move the complexity of the bullshit up slightly?

One thing I keep wondering about is how big a fitness effect homosexuality has in most environments in which our ancestors evolved. In the case of lesbians, a woman who "does her duty" with her husband enough to fill the pipeline of children she can bear and nurse and care for, but whose romantic/sexual preference is other women, isn't obviously less fit than a woman who does the same thing reproductively, but prefers romantic/sexual connections with men. (This works the same way as for a woman with relatively less sexual interest generally.) The issue here is simply that how often a woman has sex isn't the constraining factor on her fertility, it's how many kids she can bear and nurse and care for. In the case of men, it seems more likely that the difference could have fitness effects, because if you have lots of partners, more sex correlates with more offspring. I'm not sure how bisexuality affects this. Romantic attachments to men seem like they'd have more impact on fitness than sexual attraction, at least if you're in an environment where you're not able to get sex with lots of different women. I gather plenty of conquerors who left a fair-sized genetic mark in the world were perfectly happy to have sex with both the boys and the girls in their conquered territory. (And the livestock probably didn't escape unscathed either.) For men, sex is (in evolutionary terms) incredibly cheap, as long as it doesn't come with commitments to care for the offspring.

J Goard: I think of this in terms of computer networks. With complex language, there are more ways for you to get information, coordinate plans with other people, convince people to do what you say. But that's also a channel for attacks--you can leak information you don't want leaked, be manipulated or confused by someone else's use of language, etc.

Languages evolve faster than brains, and yet populations that have been separated for 50,000 years can still learn each others' languages, right? That suggests that language is being selected partly for universality--it won't use constructions that most humans' brains can't adapt to, even if there's a local human brain feature that would improve its efficiency in some task. I haven't studied this, so maybe I'm spouting obvious nonsense or something, but it seems like language has a kind of high-stakes aspect to its evolution. If it stays isolated in a small population, it's likely to die out when that population dies out, or is assimilated into a larger population with a different language. If it spreads throughout a population, it has a chance at becoming enormously successful. Maybe that is the driver for languages continuing to rely only on brain functions that all humans have? Isolation is death, universality is a chance at huge success. Along with that, language evolves by changes in the way people speak it. If there's some feature that can't be gotten by a lot of people learning it, maybe they just alter the language to avoid that part?

Do the amazon natives have a hard time learning about counting when exposed to the idea? Or learning the number words when they pick up a different language? There are three different things subject to evolution here--the natives' brains, their language, and their culture. Any combination of them might be responsible for lacking the ability to count. I suspect drHoward is right that someone who couldn't handle the level of mental abstraction necessary to count past five would find it impossible to survive as a human in a difficult environment. My unschooled impression is that hunter-gatherers in remote places usually use quite a bit of passed-on-to-kids knowledge about hunting, making tools, food/poison/medicine plants, dangerous animals, etc., and that they typically need to be able to remember and describe past events and plan out future ones. It seems a lot more plausible to me that you'd lose the specific language/culture pieces for counting through disuse and mutation/drift/whatever than that you'd lose the mental ability to count. (Though I'm assuming that counting makes use of a general-purpose set of mental tools, rather than some single module that might have been lost with little impact on other stuff.)

I once knew a *very* smart man[1] who was also a repeat serious criminal[2]. He ascribed his crimes to the addictive exciting life he had while committing them and on the run afterwards.  
 
[1] Obviously I didn't have an IQ score from him, but I've worked with some famously brilliant people, and my judgment is that he'd fit in that crowd just fine intellectually.  
 
[2] Bank robbery among other things.

I can't see how this plan can work. I think the main thing killing newspapers is loss of advertising revenue, which is driven by about four things: 
 
a. A lot of advertising (want-ads, frex) has permanently moved online.  
 
b. There are many alternative ways to reach customers, which seriously dilutes newspapers' ability to get ads. 
 
c. As people abandon newspapers for other news sources, the ads get even harder to sell. But reading news online is just *better* in most ways.  
 
d. There are a great many online news sources. If even a few (say, BBC or NPR) don't charge for access, then the newspapers who do charge for access will just lose the rest of their online readership.  
 
Just because the current model is unsustainable, doesn't mean the next model will be better.

How might we measure or estimate how much of the IQ:health correlation is based on better understanding of health issues, vs other stuff like IQ as a marker for mutational load or lousy developmental environment or what-have-you? It seems like one place to look is at people with more or less knowledge or training about medicine.  
 
For example, if we could somehow compare health outcomes for doctors (people who graduated from medical school) with those of some comparable professionals (similar IQ and economic/social status), that would give us some handle on this. If medical knowledge is an important advantage in health, then doctors ought to get a large benefit in life expectancy. Obviously, there are a lot of confounding variables here that would make this kind of comparison hard, though. (Among other things, depending on the kind of doctor you are, you're probably around sick people all the time, meaning you get exposed to more bad stuff. And I don't think there are many jobs with the stress level of, say, a surgical residency. And so on.)  
 
Maybe a better observational study would be between members of the same profession. The intuition is that when more useful information is available to you, higher IQ should be associated with better outcomes. So, what you'd expect is that the correlation between IQ and health outcomes should be biggest for doctors, somewhat smaller for nurses (who aren't exposed to as much detailed medical training as doctors, but who still get a lot), and still smaller for people entirely outside the medical field. (I suspect you have to control for medical specialty, though--the life of a emergency room doctor is probably different enough from the life of a dermatologist to need to be controlled for, and since different specialties pay very differently and are harder or easier to get into, they probably correlate with IQ.)

ziel: 
 
You've got to be kidding. Give your 1960 man an iPhone, and show him Google, Google Maps, Wikipedia, Babblefish and Youtube. Then use the GPS/navigation computer to guide you home. Then show him your music collection (you know, in the little silver thing that looks like a fat metalic book of matches with a tiny TV screen on it, and that contains a couple hundred hours of music and a dozen TV shows). Help him buy a book or two online and have it shipped overnight. Or get him a Kindle and let him buy books that just appear instantly. Have him book a flight and hotel online. Give him a laptop with Word and Excel and (if he's a techie) maybe Maple. Hell, give him a good calculator and inform him his sliderule is now a museum piece (along with his typewriter).  
 
Any one of those technologies will let him know, unambiguously, that he's living in Future Land without the flying cars. Our cars may look like smaller, longer-lived 1960s cars, our handguns may be little better than 1940s tech, and our houses may be flimsier (but less toxic) than in 1960, but our computers and consumer electronics rock.

I'm not sure how universal it is that sex leads to choice. But in the case where the female provides most of the resources and does the choosing, I think it's a mistake to assume that the only contribution of the male is his sperm. Instead, the male also spends a lot of resources getting chosen as a mate by the female. So the accounting is something like: 
 
a. The male spends most of the resources directed at maximizing the quality of the genes provided.  
 
b. The female spends most of the resources directed at mixing those genes with hers and producing viable offspring. 
 
ISTM that once we have females devoting more resources than males to offspring in a way that's physically determined (it's much harder to get extra resources from males for the offspring), and females able to somehow choose which males to mate with, this sort of pattern ought to be selected for--genes that lead to choosier females get selected, and genes that lead to males spending more resources being chosen also get selected.  
 
Comments? I'm far away from my field, so maybe this is either obvious or obviously wrong, but the logic looks right to me.

The innocuous questions do seem to give you a scale to compare with the more interesting ones (especially the last couple). Though I'd like to understand how that 0-100 rating relates to the actual binary decision to, say, slip your date some kind of drug to get her to sleep with you. (That would require premeditation, so I'm not sure how to interpret this result anyway.)

People differ in intelligence, and you need to recognize that fact to function in the world. But there's something unhealthy about obsessing over where you fall relative to everyone else in terms of intellectual potential. ISTM that it's easy to fall into a pattern where you're so focused on proving you're one of the intellectual elite that you value those proofs (test scores, credentials, admissions into top-tier schools) more than the application of your intelligence.

I wouldn't describe it as baby lust, but I knew I wanted kids even when I was a college kid. I'm straight, and the father of three now, so this all broadly worked out (other than the sleep deprivation from colic).  
 
The best first-person description of baby lust I've ever seen is from From The Archives, a now-closed blog whose archives (appropriately enough) are still up.  
 
This was amazing.

sg:  
 
Can you post a pointer to this data? It would be interesting to see if the fraction of kids from large families increases over time.  
 
In the last century (really about 50 years), we've had this enormous change--a woman's total fertility has become mostly a matter of direct choice, rather than mostly a matter of other stuff (marriage, economic status, etc) with an element of choice in there somewhere. If there were some gene which accounted for any noticeable fraction of this choice, it seems like it would be under strong selection right now.  
 
Does anyone know if there is data about fertility of mothers and children related to adoption studies? That would provide some very interesting data....

FWIW, I spent many years as a fairly doctrinaire libertarian, arguing those positions on the net for all to see. Over time, I've come to see all kinds of flaws in my old reasoning, even if I still have a tendency in the libertarian direction. I would like to think I also have a better understanding of my own biases in deciding what ideas/models of the world to accept, though it's inevitably kind-of hard to tell if you're doing that well or not

PubMed: 
 
I suspect one reason is that pretty much everything worth eating has its own defenses against parasites, and a great many of those defenses have evolved separately over time, with gazillions of nooks and crannies and special cases and such to deal with the constant pressure of parasites evolving to defeat them. Look at the known stuff that some bacterial infection has to get past to infect you: skin, low-pH sweat, defensins, the parts of the complement cascade that are triggered by sugars that often show up on bacterial cell walls, the macrophages and neutrophils and whatnot that also recognize a bunch of common stuff on the surface of bacteria, plus all the adaptive immune system stuff that's largely randomized and different for everyone, and that will take a few days to develop, but then give you lifelong immunity in many cases. Different animals have had time for the precise way each of those works to alter, so that evolving a defense to one of them--say, altering your cell wall so that the sugars on its surface aren't recognized by macrophages as foreign--is unlikely to transfer across all species, and may not even work against all animals in the same species. And then you get to go to the next layer of defense.  
 
Now, that doesn't mean it couldn't happen--pathogens jump across species from time to time, after all. But it implies that evolving to hop across species is likely to take time. If you are a pathogen that drives its host species into extinction, even over centuries, you probably won't have time to evolve the necessary tricks to infect the next species. If you did manage it, you'd probably run into geographic barriers.  
 
One example of something like this is the delivery by Europeans of the entire Eurasian epidemic disease package to the Americas in a century or so. I think the current belief is this wiped out 95% or so of the native population. But that still means 5% survived, and I guess they would have come back in a couple centuries, had Europeans civilization been wiped out by a big disaster of some kind.  
 
(Just my random thoughts--I'm a cryptographer, not a biologist, so my opinion is worth what you paid for it.)

Just as an aside, it seems like historically, people on low-carb diets or low-calorie diets or low-meat-high-carb diets were probably in very different situations, and those situations were consistent enough that the diets may trigger some kind of "mode switch."  
 
For example, high-carb diets with a lot of grains seem like they've been associated mostly with agricultural settlements. A sudden burst of sugar in a diet was probably mostly associated with summer/early fall, when lots of berries and fruit ripened. A low-carb diet seems like what you'd eat during winter if you were mostly dependent on hunting and fishing.  
 
I wonder if there are any reliable behavioral changes that come about from those different diets. Do years and years of reliance on one grain for most of your calories put you into docile peasant mode? Do years and years of low-carb diet put you into hungry hunter/gatherer mode? Etc.

Aren't there other mental performance-enhancing drugs around? It would be interesting to look at common failure modes for thinking under their influence, and then look for similar patterns in various academic fields.  
 
I'm a moderately productive researcher in cryptography, but my only performance-enhancing drug is caffeine. (OTOH, I have a tendency to get up to elephant-killing doses of caffeine if I don't watch myself--I'm sure those doses aren't good for me.)  
 
As an informal question, it's interesting to ask if you'd accept, say, a ten year cut in expected lifespan in order to move a sigma further to the right on the intelligence distribution. (I want to say no, but then, I'm probably accepting a cut of that size in my expected lifespan through my diet, and I'd sure as hell give up quarter pounders, or even meat, to move right that extra sigma!)

Yeah, I was wondering if this is "Asian" meaning ancestors mostly from Asia, or "Asian" meaning what used to be called "Oriental" and is now sometimes called "East Asian." My impression is that Indians and Chinese aren't especially close together genetically.