Makes sense. Even though I cover my typing hand with my other hand, I always add a few more fake keypresses so that any camera can't make a rough guess, judging by the quadrant of the image showing slight movement, which key was actually pressed. So now I have to do this for infra red coverage also. Great.

There's nothing fundamentally different being mooted here.

We are talking about the very early stages of life when I imagine that the boundary between separate organisms itself was probably very poorly defined compared to today's life forms; so in that sort of environment, a different horizontal mechanism of gene propagation could well have been the primary one.

The mechanism may be somewhat different to most of what happens today, but the core concept of Dawkins' "selfish gene" is unchanged, where the propagation of the gene, not the type of organism, is selected for,

Since the budget on 9th December, we've had a carbon tax in Ireland, at €15 per tonne. See http://www.moneyguideireland.com/new-carbon-tax-in-budget-2010.html

This paper looks suspiciously like data-mining to find an hypothesis. It's based on a cohort study that was not specifically designed for finding a correlation of this type. For example, it did not find out what the family income was.

An alternative hypothesis might therefore be that the amount of sweets you eat at age 10 is a predictor of what socio-economic group you're in then.