Similarly, although sociologists have examined smoking trends at great length, very few efforts have been made to synthesize this work with findings from behavioral genetic research. For example, Pampel (2005) examines social trends in smoking for U.S. adults born between the turn of the century and the mid-1970s by comparing the correlation between years of education and smoking across birth cohorts. He shows a steady increase in the association between education and smoking for white men born between 1931 and 1944. This correlation drops for those born between 1945 and 1949 and returns to a high level for those born after 1950. The steady rise in the correlation between education and smoking corresponds with our findings regarding the steady decline in the genetic influences on smoking. Likewise, his finding that the educational correlation peaks for those born in the early 1940s corresponds with our finding that genetic factors bottom out at this time. In other words, what may at first appear to be a random change in the data due to unique sampling characteristics takes on a different meaning in
