razib | September 20, 2007Apropos of my post yesterday urging lack of sentimentality regarding the extinction of languages check out this article about Flemish separatism in Belgium. The salient bits:
But Leterme proved anything but a unifying figure. He created a political uproar when he told the French newspaper Liberation that Belgium was "an accident of history." And he criticized the king for not speaking Dutch well enough.
...
The French-speakers of Wallonia, a name some translate as land of valleys, dominated both politics and the economy in Belgium for decades. The south's coal reserves and steel industries…
razib | September 20, 2007I've talked about MHC a fair amount, mostly because of its evolutionary significance, so if you are interested in the topic Mystery Rays for Outer Space is starting a series ion the topic. Check out the first post. Also, PLOS Genetics has a new paper on MHC.
razib | September 20, 2007Remember those funny little Flores Hobbits? Carl Zimmer has followed the story like a master tracker over the years. In any case, Wrist bones bolster hobbit status:
Painstaking study of Homo floresiensis wrist bones shows that their wrists were far more primitive than ours -- suggesting that they were evolutionarily distinct from modern humans. The hobbits' wrists are so primitive-looking, say the researchers, that tracing our shared heritage would involve going back millions of years, perhaps to very birth of the genus Homo in Africa.
I wonder if John Hawks might comment soon (I recall…
razib | September 19, 2007There is an article in The New York Times which focuses on the fact that many languages are going extinct as native speakers die. Here is the critical issue:
In a teleconference with reporters yesterday, K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore, said that more than half the languages had no written form and were "vulnerable to loss and being forgotten." Their loss leaves no dictionary, no text, no record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a vanished culture.
A language is a window into the mental ecology of ideas of a people. It is a connection to the…
razib | September 19, 2007Over the past few years we've all heard about "Red" and "Blue" America. Pundits like David Brooks have written about how the two Americas are drifting apart through residential segregation in the real world or reading their own ideological media in the cyberworld. But over the past six months I've been involved in some political volunteer work relating to a local issue and I've seen voter lists with party registration, and I was struck by the number of Democrats and Republicans who lived in the same household! Husbands and wives, parents and children, and so on. There has always been a…
razib | September 19, 2007From PLOS One, Gain-of-Function R225W Mutation in Human AMPKγ3 Causing Increased Glycogen and Decreased Triglyceride in Skeletal Muscle:
We have identified for the first time a mutation in the skeletal muscle-specific regulatory γ3 subunit of AMPK in humans. The γ3R225W mutation has significant functional effects as demonstrated by increases in basal and AMP-activated AMPK activities, increased muscle glycogen and decreased IMTG. Overall, these findings are consistent with an important regulatory role for AMPK γ3 in human muscle energy metabolism.
Costford SR, Kavaslar N, Ahituv N,…
razib | September 18, 2007Michael Lynch in Nature Reviews Genetics, The evolution of genetic networks by non-adaptive processes:
Although numerous investigators assume that the global features of genetic networks are moulded by natural selection, there has been no formal demonstration of the adaptive origin of any genetic network. This Analysis shows that many of the qualitative features of known transcriptional networks can arise readily through the non-adaptive processes of genetic drift, mutation and recombination, raising questions about whether natural selection is necessary or even sufficient for the origin of…
razib | September 17, 2007If you read my post about Neandertals and cold climate, you should go read John Hawks' opinion.
razib | September 17, 2007Check out The Impact of Science Blogging Survey. Below the fold is an explanation:
This survey attempts to access the opinions of bloggers, blog-readers, and non-blog folk in regards to the impact of blogs on the outside world. The authors of the survey are completing an academic manuscript on the impact of science blogging and this survey will provide invaluable data to answer the following questions:
Who reads or writes blogs?
What are the perceptions of blogging, and what are the views of those who read blogs?
How do academics and others perceive science blogging?
What, if any, influence…
razib | September 17, 2007A genome-wide association study of global gene expression:
We found that 15,084 transcripts (28%) representing 6,660 genes had narrow-sense heritabilities (H2) > 0.3. We executed genome-wide association scans for these traits and found peak lod scores between 3.68 and 59.1. The most highly heritable traits were markedly enriched in Gene Ontology descriptors for response to unfolded protein (chaperonins and heat shock proteins), regulation of progression through the cell cycle, RNA processing, DNA repair, immune responses and apoptosis. SNPs that regulate expression of these genes are…
razib | September 16, 2007Over at my other blog p-ter has a nice post with a few links to databases where you can do your own querying for SNPs & sniffing for selection.
razib | September 16, 2007Do you smell what I smell? Perhaps not, and it might not be due to a cold...Genetic variation in a human odorant receptor alters odour perception (Nature):
Human olfactory perception differs enormously between individuals, with large reported perceptual variations in the intensity and pleasantness of a given odour...A common variant of this receptor (OR7D4 WM) contains two non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), resulting in two amino acid substitutions (R88W, T133M; hence 'RT') that severely impair function in vitro. Human subjects with RT/WM or WM/WM genotypes as a group…
razib | September 15, 2007Olivia Judson's piece The Selfless Gene in The Atlantic is a pretty good survey of the various theories of the evolution of altruism. If you read Narrow Roads of Gene Land or Natural Selection and Social Theory, nothing new, but if you aren't familiar with the lay of the land it's worth checking out. But you can't find it free online, so you'll have to get a subscription to The Atlantic or run out to the book store and sneak a peak.
razib | September 14, 2007About a week ago I posted on a new paper about worldwide variation on a gene which results in differences in muscle fiber. The author left a comment, which I'll reproduce below:
We thought about selection for cold tolerance, but our latest data on global distribution of the null allele don't really fit with that. Most likely it's something to do with famine resistance, although we're not ruling out the idea that it's selection for some sort of muscle performance phenotype (it's surprising how many muscle genes are popping up in recent genome-wide scans for selection).
We haven't got genotype…
razib | September 14, 2007I've spoken about Vitamin D a fair amount on this blog before. Not only have I presented it as a major selective pressure for light skin in the northern latitudes after the switch to agricultural lifestyles (and the concomitant nutrient deprivations due to reliance on a predominantly starch diet), but I recently found that I myself suffered from a lack. Though I eat a salad most days, and try to eat meats and fish, the fact that I have dark skin and live at a relatively high latitude and in a region characterized by cloudy winters was a combination which naturally led to low levels of…
razib | September 13, 2007Four Stone Hearth, the anthropology blog carnival, is over at John Hawks' place.
razib | September 12, 2007Jake over at Pure Pedantry has a lost post titled Why Pairing Science and Atheism is High-Brow. It is a very nice little essay, and I enjoyed the historical perspective brought into the discussion by quotations from a John Dewey article from TNR of the 1920s. Anyway, there's nothing new, but the subtlety of exposition is worth a look.
razib | September 12, 2007Nature has a new paper, Placing late Neanderthals in a climatic context:
...This study shows that the three sets translate to different scenarios on the role of climate in Neanderthal extinction. The first two correspond to intervals of general climatic instability between stadials and interstadials that characterized most of the Middle Pleniglacial and are not coeval with Heinrich Events. In contrast, if accepted, the youngest date indicates that late Neanderthals may have persisted up to the onset of a major environmental shift, which included an expansion in global ice volume and an…