Why are car seats a good form of contraception?

A list of the most interesting academic and popular articles that came to our attention this week...

Welcome to the first Aporia Research Roundup. Every Monday (at 7am New York, 12pm London), we compile the most interesting studies and articles being shared in our network. We also try to link to a classic, often underread, study each week. You might also find the occasional documentary, Twitter thread, or podcast.

The first three links are always free, but we put our favourites (including the less politically correct ones) behind a paywall, to encourage you to support our work.

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The inheritance of social status: England, 1600 to 2022. Gregory Clark presents a new dataset comprising >400,000 English people from 1600–2022, which has information on social status and family relationships up to the 4th cousin. He shows that a simple genetic model first outlined by R.A. Fisher fits the data remarkably well.

The relationship between shared genotype and house value across family relationships.

Everyday life as an intelligence test: Effects of intelligence and intelligence context. In a classic article from 1997, Robert Gordon argues that certain actions in everyday life are analogous to items on an IQ test. As evidence, he shows that group differences in the prevalence of such actions are commensurate with group differences in average IQ.

Is French police brutality a myth? Contrary to the claim that French policy brutality is what caused the recent riots, Noah shows that France has a lower rate of fatal police shootings than Canada, Australia and New Zealand – countries not known for their rioting.