addendum: checking google it looks like for the term "whip smart" lawyers are the outlier. look to be a factor of 3 or 4 between them and everyone else. 

and it is hard to find reliable cheap indicators saying when contrarians are more likely to be right 
 
Well, I've got one case. If there is a debate on differences in human behavior, and the academics are denying the impact of genes, and the contrarians are asserting it, bet on the contrarians.

You mean when I Googled "bigfoot is real" and got this website, that's not evidence?

This is an interesting hypothesis, and I think generally right, but I think most Generation Xers see themselves as more "children of the 80's" rather than a product of the early 90's recession or the Gulf War. As a proud Xer, I was shaped more by the Cold War, the dawn of the personal computer, and early 80's MTV than by the later events.

Here is evidence of religion as an adaptation. When people are shown pictures of attractive people of their own sex, they are more likely to rate themselves as religious. Apparently, seeing lots of rivals makes people want to enforce rules of monogamy. It has been shown that how people feel about premarital sex, abortion, and gay marriage are better predictors of church attendance than opinions about actual religious matters. Religion is, in part, a mating strategy.

Very few studies have been done of general athletic ability. I'd like to see more. General intelligence (g) has been studied a lot. We can give people a wide range of tests like remembering numbers, folding shapes in your head, vocabulary analogies, and it turns out they all correlate to g. Some correlate more strongly, some more weakly. 
 
The same thing could be done for athletic ability (I'll call it a). Give people tests like the bench press, 50 meter dash, 100 meter swim, and see how they correlate. We can then ask: 
 
To what extent is it heritable? (the usual twin/adoption studies could help) 
 
Which individual skills best correlate with a? 
 
Is there a "Flynn effect" for a? Is it going up or down? 
 
And, of course, the controversial question...does the average value of a differ by race?

Thanks Razib, a good study.

I suspect that the heritability of athletic ability is rather high. When that turns out to be true, it will be harder for people to deny that there are also heritable differences in both other abilities and personality. I think it will be easier for people to accept the fact that running ability is partially genetic than it will be to accept the fact that your likelihood to commit a violent crime is partially genetic. However, once the foot is in the door, it will be very tough to close it.

It seems that, for a long time, people living in cities were less able to survive and reproduce in a Darwinian sense than people who lived in rural areas. I wonder if this had a permanent impact on the gene pool. It might even be measurable someday, especially since not all parts of the world urbanized at the same time.

Good stuff. This is further evidence that the theory that we learned to walk because the forest changed to open savannah is not correct. I guess it's possible that we learned to walk in the savannah, and this is an offshoot that returned to the forest, but I think that's unlikely. 
 
So why did we start walking? Maybe it's still an advantage in a drier forest...or a wet forest with plenty of branches. I think the aquatic ape theory is an interesting one, but I'm skeptical of it.

of possible interest re: long term financial solvency: long distance runners vs. sprinters? 
 
My guess is that there wouldn't be much of a correlation. I think that the main difference between the two runners is body type. Sprinters tend to be muscular since it takes a lot of power to get limbs moving quickly, and long-distance runners tend to be thin, so they use less energy per stride and are less likely to overheat. Still, it's an interesting idea. I think it would be neat if there was a correlation.

I've heard the theory that the development of language lead to handedness, as the left and right parts of the brain handle very different functions in language processing. The tool making hypothesis sounds reasonable, too.

Thanks, Razib

Some people are definitely more monogamous than others. The question for the evolutionist is, "What strategy is more successful at producing offspring in the modern age with birth control?" In the past, I'd be willing to bet that there was a significant correlation between a person's number of sexual partners and the number of kids. Now with birth control, all bets are off. I tried a quick Google search for correlations between sexual partners and birthrates, but came up with nothing. 
 
Will our future be one of monogamous pairs, polygamous men with several wives, along with many men without, or a complete free-for-all of polyamorous men and women? Only time will tell.

I'm sure there's a technical word for what I'm talking about, but which I labelled subjective hedonism, so feel free to tell me in the comments. 
 
I've seen the term alief used to mean something that people intellectually know might not be true, but they can't help but feel the emotion. 
 
Can we train ourselves not to manifest these cognitive ticks? Consider an extremely tasty brownie shaped like feces vs. one that wasn't. 
 
There is a chain restaurant called Modern Toilet where the food is served in "toilets", and often does look like feces.

Now when my wife accuses me of forgetting something she said to me, I can tell her that it's only because she's hot! This is great!

"Third, sex differences in sociosexuality were generally large and demonstrated cross-cultural universality across the 48 nations of the ISDP, confirming several evolutionary theories of human mating." 
 
All sociology professors should have to read this study.

Speaking of evolution, has anyone else seen this? The appendix is useful after all! Just like tonsils, the foreskin, and everything else people thought was useless. Evolution rarely wastes effort. 
 
The only downside to this is that is takes away an easy argument against the IDers. When told about intelligent design, a good refrain was "An intelligent designer wouldn't have made the appendix." Now we'll have to make subtler arguments about the structure of the eye, ect.

The reason why so many people can't comprehend macroevolution (the formation of new species), is that for multicelled animals, it usually takes far longer than a human lifetime. But, there are some things that just take a very long time. I've never seen a mountain form, but I trust the geologists when they tell me about plate tectonics.

Anyway, at some point, the fat cats stopped being fat. If this social attitude stays consistent over generations, then genetics will start playing a role as more slender people are recruited via marriage and affinity to the upper classes and more chubby people are expelled or kept away. 
 
This is certainly possible, although it could be moot if someone invents the anti-fat pill, which I think is a real possibility. Even if someone does, general attractiveness could start to bubble up into the upper classes. I've seen studies showing that more attractive people tend to make a bit more money. Right now, I think this is primarily an environmental effect, but at some point it could become genetic.