Round-up: Belief in evolution and prejudice

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week

Within-family heritability estimates for behavioural and disease phenotypes from 500,000 sibling pairs of diverse ancestries. Loic Yengo and colleagues estimate heritability for a number of traits using a large sample of sibling pairs drawn from 23andMe. Exploiting purely within-family variation (and thereby controlling for factors shared by siblings), they obtain an estimate of .70 for height and .49 for BMI. The authors were unable to analyse cognitive ability due to ethics restrictions.

Does Wealth Inhibit Criminal Behavior? Evidence From Swedish Lottery Winners and Their Children. David Cesarini and colleagues examine whether having more money stops people from committing crime in Sweden. By comparing lottery winners to those who played the lottery but didn’t win, they find that windfalls have no effect on the risk of being convicted for a crime or the risk of one’s children being convicted of a crime.