Good post and good reply. The issue about bathroom scales is very relevant and applies also to all sorts of freely available information such as body fat calipers and the free blood pressure cuffs found in pharmacies. These aren't regulated because there isn't a potential windfall for medical practitioners. It looks like this issue must still be in committee. Write your own senators and representatives, but write the committee members, too. Especially ones from the party you donate money to.

I don't think this level of analysis is very informative. It doesn't explain the range of sexual characteristics. The issue is not nearly so simple as attraction to males vs. attraction to females. There are many other issues sexual proclivity such as "top" vs. "bottom" that are not explained this simply. Why do some men become homosexual while others become transgendered?

I've nearly asked about non-genetic biological effects on traits several times here, but never did. I'm glad to see it addressed. It always struck me as a bit premature to attribute differences to environment when there are so many biological steps involved in the actual expression of a gene. Random small changes early on can have massive consequences for the entire system, especially in development. Genes are the blueprint for a pattern, that does not mean the pattern will always look like its blueprint.

Economists try to reduce things to an ideal state too often and then try to use it to explain the wider economy. A lot macro theory is based off of assumption that humans are rational agents and easily interchangeable (equivalent abilities). Apparently economists don't talk to humans very often.

About 10 years ago I had a wealthy friend who encountered a similar problem trying to get a cell phone. For whatever reason, back in 1998 cell phone providers ran a credit check on their customers. They refused to take him as a customer because he had no credit score.

My brother was diagnosed with ADD and a psychologist who gave him a battery of tests said he's one of the most intelligent people she's tested. However, he can't stand reading. 
 
I think as a general rule, it may be true that intelligent people are likely to turn to books and learning in free time rather than suffer boredom, but other factors can override. 
 
Like Kosmo, my grades were all over the place, but I ended up in an intellectually non-stimulating workplace rather than as a PhD student. To get by, you adjust. It's difficult to come home and transition into material that is more interesting but has to be set aside quickly. When I was younger, it wasn't uncommon for me to stay up to all hours reading. But when you know you have to go to bed at a certain time in order to get enough sleep, it just seems depressing to get that little bit of light and have to shut if off again right away. 
 
Kosmo, you sound like classic attention deficit problems. You should get it checked out. It might make life easier if you found a way to deal.

Ha. Anyone seen the episode of Seinfeld where George is celibate and becomes a genius and whats-her-face is celibate and becomes a dunce? Now we just need some research showing that interacting with the opposite sex improves women's cognitive performance improves from interacting with men...

Yes, lower BMI should lead to changing ratios of hormones, such as estrogen:testosterone. Also, as Dex points out, better sleep should lead to hormal changes, such as more growth hormone and different levels of corticosteroids. 
 
As to the personality effect of these different hormonal changes, I don't know. I believe men might become mildly more aggressive/confident if they dropped a lot of body fat and added some muscle, but the age of the man would have a big impact on relative testosterone as well. 
 
As Gary Taubes points out, insulin used to be used as a psychiatric treatment, and when I went on the Atkins diet several years back, my mood did stabilize and improve. Of course metabolic hormones and nutritional content aren't BMI...

I think we cannot forget that papers like the NYT started out with subscription models that failed. I will click through to a NYT article if it is free and open, but I won't pay for one until I don't have to go through the sign-in process and can read the article for a couple cents or less. 
 
Under "Why Readers Will Pay For Online News," the most sensible quote is from Rob Grimshaw at FT.com, who recognizes that there are a lot of readers out there like myself. 
 
The thing that concerns me about the pay movement is that, as with music file sharing, the only way to make it work will be for media conglomerates to enlist government help in monitoring and punishing content pirates. I don't want that to happen. Bad enough to have NYT influencing people through their publications. 
 
Interested readers should check out the Clay Shirkey article on this topic at Edge.org along with its responses. Two alternative models for media are: 
(1) government subsidy 
(2) no profit philanthropy 
These are based on the notion that running a newspaper with professional reporters is relatively cheap in the Internet age. 
 
Vimeo recently started deleting its raw files rather than paying for storage. I think Facebook and YouTube are doomed, which is fine. I wouldn't mind paying YouTube as a producer rather than a viewer. I think that's the way it will be headed. 
 
As others have pointed out, the Internet could only kill advertising. Unless you have a captive audience like pre-tape TV, nobody will pay attention. I have never even once followed a web ad.

I think you're being a little too hard on the likes of facebook. Sites like that would have zero users if they had charged from the outset. The reason is simple: nobody knows they like facebook until they have a dozen or more friends. Nobody realizes it's useful based on its description. Usefulness sneaks up on them. 
 
So, back in 2004, had facebook launched as a site where you pay a small fee to join, nobody would have joined and facebook would have died in obscurity. The only possible workable business model is to give it away for free and attract a crowd - the very model that you say is doomed to failure.

Here's an interesting explanation for the decrease in violent crime: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/magazine/21wwln-idealab-t.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1193069109-tIv/I01qmqYqqX/fw3A7Iw&oref=slogin&oref=slogin 
 
In summary, lead additives to gasoline led to violent tendencies in adolescents who were exposed to the lead as children. Rates of violent crime peaked about 20 years after lead additives were phased out (just long enough for the last group of poisoned children to become adults) and has been declining since. 
 
It's really a fascinating article.

One oft-cited evidence of general decline is the number of children in single-parent households. It does seem that our species evolved to prefer two parents (Dawkins says that love's purpose is to motive males to stick around for three years and participate in parenting). 
 
So this might something you could look at in a future post, unless it contradicts your hypothesis.

There's some evidence that religious people are actually happier than non-religious people, overall. I've heard researchers explain this as having something to do with having a meaning for your life, but I suspect it really just has to do with the fact that if you accept the dominant social and cultural narratives, you're just gonna be a happier person all else being equal.

If we went through a 30-year convulsion over "politically correct" speech -- which sought, basically to avoid hurting the increasing diversity of the intellectual and social agora -- it will be an even longer time before it is OK to discuss racial disparities in intelligence as 1. existing and 2. not impacting on the basic worth of a human being or group of humans.  
Students get grades; students are segregated into fast and slow lanes; we house the mentally retardied and treat the mentally ill, and the law and how enlightened people view those in the slower, more difficult lanes, looks at ALL as having the same dignity and the same right to a piece of happiness and joy, even the profoundly retarded, for example.  
The progress we see with parents cherishing their downs syndrome children is another sign that the equation of intelligence with goodness is fading away.  
These data mandate that we engage in a wider discussion of how we treat others, how we respect others of diverse capacities. 
Woefully, the media are as much slaves to the prejudices of the past as their readers. The issue is not intelligence but worthiness to have a shot at happiness and self-fullfilment.  
The world may be flat, and wealth generation may be a significant piece of future human history, but our values need to reflect the diversity that that flatness multiplies.

Rob, that would be the EP prediction, in fact.

Well, in this case, the mistaken self-reports were pre hoc, so to speak.

he describes the world that is in a 'malthusian trap,' which england first breaks out of. 
 
Okay, but does England break out before Germany/France/etc because of the "survival of the richest" paradigm that reigned for one particular 600-year period, or is it more or less accidental that England preceded Germany, but not accidental that England preceded, say, Ethiopia, because of selective pressures on Eurasian agricultural societies over the course of 10000 years? The latter seems more likely to be true (although surely not an original idea), but I fail to see how the English evidence provides much support for it. One would want to see evidence of time-preference selection over a long period across Eurasian cultures, and its absence in non-Eurasian regions.

I'm still trying to figure out what mystery he's trying to solve. If it's why the industrial revolution started in England rather than, say, Germany or France, although the latter two proved equally capable of mastering it, then why does putative selection for time preference explain that? And if the mystery is why much of Eurasia industrialized successfully while much of the rest of the world did not, how much of an answer can a 600-year slice of one apparently atypical island country's history provide?

Seriously, how does Pinker have time to answer all these idiotic questions? He must be way busier than I am, but I can't get through half of this. If somebody wants to strip out just Pinker's answers I'd read those though).

Steve Sailor wrote: 
"[Clark documents] a vaguely eugenic pattern of reproduction and survival in early modern England" 
 
For that to be true (and eugenic from the perspective of the industrial revolution), he'd have to show that the elites were more future-oriented than the peons, not just that they reproduced more. Is that in fact the case? 
 
"But I don't think he has proven that the same pattern didn't exist in France or Italy or lots of other places." 
 
In fact he seems to have demonstrated that precisely the opposite pattern existed in Japan, and yet they seem to have plenty of patience and foresight and industrialized very well. So now we have to believe either that in Japan it was the peons who were more future oriented than the elites or that very recent (within the last 800 years) evolution plays little to no role in the degree of future orientation a society has. 
 
And there's still the fundamental problem that future orientation may plausibly predict how well a society may adapt to industrialization, but it would seem to say little about whether a society will be the first to industrialize.