Aggregating transdisciplinary media for an increasingly interconnected world.
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Jonah Lehrer (Wired): "The Personality Paradox" →
From the article:
“There’s an interesting new paper in Biological Psychiatry on the genetic variations underlying human personality. The study relied on a standard inventory of temperaments – novelty-seeking, harm avoidance, reward dependence and persistence – as measured in 5,117 Australian adults. What did the scientists find? Mostly nothing. The vast genetic search came up empty:”
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Altruism - genetics or culture?
Adrian Bell is doing research on the cultural impacts (versus evolution) on altruistic behavior. From the article:
“The researchers used a mathematical equation, called the Price equation, that describes the conditions for altruism to evolve. This equation motivated the researchers to compare the genetic and the cultural differentiation between neighboring social groups. Using previously calculated estimates of genetic differences, they used the World Values Survey (whose questions are likely to be heavily influenced by culture in a large number of countries) as a source of data to compute the cultural differentiation between the same neighboring groups. When compared they found that the role of culture had a much greater scope for explaining our pro-social behavior than genetics.”
Check out the video interview here:
