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Mr T.'s avatar

"People care about relative as well as absolute outcomes."

I really want to see data on this, I'm skeptical.

To be clear, people surely talk a lot like they care, but talk is cheap. What are people's revealed preferences?

For one data point take migration. Migrants often trade-off increase in life quality against relative status. Most migrants move where their relative status decreases (poor countries to rich, country to big cities).

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Biopolitical's avatar

"religious belief is not entirely heritable; if it were, western societies would not have become less religious in recent decades." This is incorrect. Heritability is the proportion of phenotypic variance explained by genetic variance in a given population at a given time. Heritability is not about population means. Suppose the population mean environment changes at time t and this changes the population mean phenotype. This tells us nothing about heritability. Heritability could well be 1 (all phenotypic variance is explained by genetic variance) both before and after t. Under high heritability, those that are more religious than average after t are the descendants of those that were more religious than average before t. Heritability, and not the genetic and environmental effects on population means, is what matters for evolution.

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