Round-up: Are women moving Left and men moving Right?

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week

Evolutionary psychiatry: foundations, progress and challenges. Randolph Nesse reviews the literature on the field of evolutionary psychiatry, which seeks to understand mental illness from an evolutionary viewpoint. The field’s key insight, he argues, is recognising that some conditions taken to reflect mental illness are adaptive or were adaptive in our ancestral environment — at least some of the time. For example, negative emotions such as fear and anxiety have adaptive functions.

Sex-specific associations between education-related genetic factors and fertility extend beyond educational attainment. Ivan Kuznetsov and colleagues examine whether the relationship between education polygenic scores and completed fertility varies by sex. Analysing data from the Estonian Biobank, they find that polygenic scores are negatively related to fertility among women but are unrelated or even positively related among men.