Since I pointed to a blog geared toward reviewing technologies which serve to benefit the perpetuation of the white European hegemony yesterday, I thought I should make it known that you should check out Not Exactly Rocket Science. Dawg has been bringing his game.

The post below on AVPR1A and fidelity alluded to the fact that this locus has been implicated in many other behavioral traits. I spent some of today digging through the literature. So check it....

AVPR1a and SLC6A4 Gene Polymorphisms Are Associated with Creative Dance Performance

AVPR1A and OXTR polymorphisms are associated with sexual and reproductive behavioral phenotypes in humans

Link Between Vasopressin Receptor AVPR1A Promoter Region Microsatellites and Measures of Social Behavior in Humans

Association between a vasopressin receptor AVPR1A promoter region microsatellite and eating behavior measured by a self-report questionnaire (Eating Attitudes Test) in a family-based study of a nonclinical population

Provisional evidence that the arginine vasopressin 1a receptor gene is associated with musical memory

Heritability of cooperative behavior in the trust game

Individual Differences in Allocation of Funds in the Dictator Game Associated with Length of the Arginine Vasopressin 1a Receptor (AVPR1a) RS3 Promoter-region and Correlation between RS3 Length and Hippocampal mRNA

Let me quote from the last study:

Commentary has a long piece, Jews and Their DNA, which covers the recent findings coming out of genetics in regards to the "Who is a Jew" question. It's a fair summary of the field, though I would note that the author relied heavily on uniparental lineages passed purely through males and females, and that autosomal studies which look at total genome content are now coming to the fore and fleshing out the picture. I suspect that the main result that will come out of these findings is that many, many, groups are going to be unhappy. Some will find that Jewish ancestry is admixed and that they are not a pure people apart. Others will be rather annoyed that to some extent Jewishness does map onto particular patterns of genetic variation which make Jews distinct from local non-Jewish populations. In other words, Judaism is not purely a cultural construct. Extremely religious Jews who are wedded to the matrilineal formula for Jewish identity will likely dismiss the convincing data for exogenous introgression over the generations through female mediated admixture. As I have noted before, even a 1% exogamy rate over 2,000 years builds up.

Over the years I've blogged a fair amount on the AVPR1A gene. Variation on this locus has been associated with differences altruism in humans and mating preferences in voles. Now a new paper is out in PNAS, at some point in the near future (not online, but will be here), which shows differences in martial behavior based on AVPR1A. From Study Links Gene Variant in Men to Marital Discord:

Notes on Sewall Wright: the Adaptive Landscape:

My series of posts on the work of Sewall Wright is now approaching its (anti?)climax. The next post, on the shifting balance theory, should be the last. The present note deals with a closely related subject. Wright introduced the concept of the 'adaptive landscape' largely in order to illustrate the shifting balance theory. It does however have great interest in its own right, and there is a substantial literature on the concept of adaptive landscapes. [Note 1]

Wright's own treatment of the subject has attracted some controversy following the biography of Wright by William B. Provine. Provine pointed out that Wright used two different interpretations of the 'landscape', which in Provine's view were inconsistent with each other: 'One of Wright's two versions of the fitness surface is unintelligible, and even if one were to escape this problem and put the gene combinations on continuous axes, the two versions would be mathematically wholly incompatible and incommensurable, and there would be no way to transform one into the other' (Provine, p.313). I believe that Provine's criticisms are overstated, but he was right to point out that Wright's concept of the landscape is problematic. This note examines the issues. It is long.

Related: Notes on Sewall Wright: Migration, Notes on Sewall Wright: Population Size, Notes on Sewall Wright: the Measurement of Kinship, Notes on Sewall Wright: Path Analysis and On Reading Wright.