The baby's sleeping right next to me right now, so I can't watch this, but I'm looking forward to it:
- Recreational genetics and self-identity (09:11)
- Do racial categories have a biological basis? (09:52)
- Will gene sequencing undermine racism? (05:37)
- Ways to make awesome babies (12:39)
- Are most of us crazy or are we both crazy and stupid? (10:34)
- Politicians, scientists, and other nutcases (09:23)
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Photo credit: Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY
It is the norm today to discuss race as a social construct. Less fashionable is it to explore race as a biological concept. When there's no up or downside and the discussion is abstract I think most people can get away with benign neglect in regards to…
Since I asked regular readers to fill out a survey, I've received over 300 responses. My own experience with these surveys is that about 50% of the total responses come within 24 hours. Next weekend I'll put up the .csv file with all the data, and present some of my analyses as well. But below…
Mothers day, and so like all good fathers I went off rowing, only in this case I went Off a little further than normal, since we were competing in the Hammersmith Head.
First, however, I did my fatherly duty by assisting Miranda (who woke up especially to remind me that it was mothers day and that…
There are some really weird comments about Albania below. Part of these confusions have to do with ambiguities as to the religious identity of Albania, traditionally majority Muslim, but after decades of Communism very secular. What exactly are the religious breakdowns? How religious are Albanians…
So, if you select genes to id race by presumed categories, then test to see if your presumed categories are identifiable using those genes, THEY ARE!!!!11!!
I thought Razib knew a lot more about genetics than he demonstrates here.
Down syndrome is not a mutation, dude, it's a chromosomal disjunction. Lucky for him his thesis on selection reducing DS through eugenics in France derailed before he choked on it.
So, if you select genes to id race by presumed categories, then test to see if your presumed categories are identifiable using those genes, THEY ARE!!!!11!!
Yes. But you don't need to select any genes. Pick genes at random - just pick many of them and the racial categories will be easily identifiable.
@Callie: Razib is a professional blogger. He does not need to know genetics at depth.
i meant mutation in a general broad sense. since i referred to it being a mess up of the smallest chromosome, i thought that was pretty obvious, but fine enough if you want to jump on me about that. i'd rather not get into moronic semantic arguments (e.g., "what is a gene"), but i did just double check and large scale chromosomal rearrangements are classified as types of mutations by some sources. the main issue is that since i was talking about SNPs the whole time i probably should have clarified. but 60 minutes isn't that much time....
dk is right. the main issue of course is that if you select ancestrally informative genes you don't need to type as many. but the structure/frappe plots which have tens of thousands of snps show the same geographic variation.
@Razib:
Although this may sound like splitting hairs, since in overwhelming majority of cases Down syndrome is a simple trisomy (not a "mess up of the smallest chromosome" or large scale chromosomal rearrangements), it is indeed incorrect to refer to it as mutation. Unless mutation is defined to include aneuploidy which I don't think it is in most people minds; or unless a reference is made specifically to a small minority of Down cases.
yeah. i regularly think of ploidy as a form of mutation. i.e., i refer to polyploid apples as "mutants." i do think in most peoples' minds though mutation doesn't refer to such massive genomic events, so i have to be careful in the future. but yes, for the record, i simply referred to trisomy 21 as a mutation. probably has to do with my orientation more toward evolutionary than molecular genetics; the structure of how changes occur are usually less salient to me than the change (also, one of my profs is a developmental geneticist who would talk about ploidy events as mutations).
oh, and i realized a good way to clarify my psychology. i was using "mutation" as if it was a term like "allele" or "locus," an evolutionary genetic abstraction. i wasn't using it like "SNP" or "gene," which are concrete entities (gene can also be abstract).
anyway, in the future i'm going to avoid using mutation broadly unless i make the abstract context explicit.