Is there an entrepreneurship gene?

Professor Bryan Caplan says yes. 

Caplan has been dancing around the nature-nurture debate for many moons on his blog, but I get the feeling he is leaning to one side of the fence with this statement ... "The rest is noise; nurture once again fails to rear its hopeful head."

As a personal friend, Caplan should know that my family will not abide such sentiments. Seriously. We invest our time pretty intensively in our children, and we don't want to hear that all our time was wasted. It's too late for that. To be even more scientific about, twins run in our family. I'm pretty sure that proves something.

Comments

[q]

I find your last two sentences to be cryptic. What are you implying about families where twins are a relatively frequent occurrence? Merely that they themselves are a non-random sample? In what traits--besides fertility--do you conjecture that they differ?

Also cryptic: Caplan's beliefs on the extent of genetic reach. I read him pretty regularly. He seems almost Manichean on many issues. Is it plausible that genetics matter more than we thought and more than nature? Sure. Is it plausible that that's true by a wide margin? Sure. But Caplan seems to want to argue that there's little that we can do to predictably influence children in any given direction. That seems wrong, wrong, wrong. But no one--not even Caplan--actually raises their kids this way.

So what's he saying?