It seems to me that libertarianism would work fine in a population of intelligent, courteous, independent and well-behaved people, but those kinds of people certainly constitute a small minority. Most people (liberal or conservative) live in fear and are more than willing to trade their freedom for security.

Jason Agreed. I was not referring to libertarianism when I mentioned people exchanging freedom for security. I was referring to the two-party (conservative/liberal) democrat/republican situation, where either party eventually chews away at freedom and civil liberties, because of course they must in order to maintain order. Ultimately, a society is only as good as its average citizen, and that, I think, is the basis of many of our problems. And regarding human nature, I am a conservative and generally choose the oppression of the right rather than the left since I believe that in the long run, the policies of the right improve the chances of my genes (along with my children's and grandchildren's genes) being passed on to many subsequent generations.

Thanks you so much for a fascinating article, which is well written and clear. Please keep us up to date on this interesting research.

The more we attempt to engineer environmental egalitarianism, the more we push up heritability. You cannot win. The facts are the facts, and I wish that politics could be put aside for the interest of science.

This is a very interesting post. I'm learning a lot. Thank you kjmtchl. Does anyone know the methodology used to name genes? Is it based on the chromosome number or some other factor? For example foxp2.

Kele, Thank you for this very interesting post. I look forward to others.

I wonder if there are degrees of psychopathy? It seems to me that there are a lot of people who display varying degrees of these kinds of behaviors (at least that is my experience from 30 years in law enforcement)and probably constitute significantly more than 1% of the population. This study confirms what I and many others in law enforcement had intuitively thought for many years, i.e, a genetic link to violent crime. As far as incarceration is concerned, I prefer to think that we are not simply locking up people who are victims of genetic determinism, but rather we are locking up their genes.

Chris said, "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." Thank you Chris! I believe that I've read somewhere that monozygotic twins have many genetic differences, e.g., SNPs and Copy Number Variations? If one were to make a chocolate cake and put all the ingredients into a bowl such as the flour, sugar, baking powder, cocoa powder, egg, etc., mix it together thoroughly and evenly pour the batter into two identical baking pans and bake them together in a single oven, one would not end up with two identical cakes.

I think that intelligent people who are bored often are simply suffering from depression, which comes about when you realize that the puzzle is missing pieces.