Are symmetrical faces more attractive?

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week

Why is Intelligence not Making You Happier? Bianjing Ma and Lei Chen examine the association between cognitive ability and happiness in China. They find that it is small and non-significant. Nor is cognitive ability associated with expectations of worldly success. This could be because individuals with higher cognitive ability tend to underestimate their own socio-economic position and tend to be less confident about the future.

Genome-wide association meta-analysis of age at onset of walking. Anna Gui and colleagues conduct a genome-wide association study of age at onset of walking. They estimate SNP-based heritability at 24% and find that variants are concentrated in genes expressed in the brain. They also find that age at onset of walking was genetically correlated with intelligence and educational attainment, suggesting that more intelligent children start walking later.

The Confederate Diaspora. Samuel Bazzi and colleagues examine the long-run impact of the Confederate diaspora in the United States. Analysing historical data, they find that non-Southern counties that had larger populations of Southern whites in 1900 were more likely to have Confederate memorials, chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, and lynchings of black people.

Map showing the county-level population share of Southern whites living outside the South, based on the 1900 census.