There Is No Gene for Finishing College

By Paul Voosen. A couple of years ago, Daniel J. Benjamin, a behavioral economist and associate professor at Cornell University, noticed a disturbing trend in genoeconomics, the nascent discipline that seeks to tie human genetics to traits relevant to the social sciences, like risk aversion, happiness, or even self-employment. Most of the work was statistically weak, he found, conducted on small samples of a few hundred people. Benjamin calculated that scientists could legitimately conclude almost nothing from those studies. It was a black mark on a charged discipline, one that invariably brings up the hoary nature-nurture debate and past associations with eugenics. Read more...