genetics
razib | November 10, 2009In the comments below I referred to the "Price Equation." Here is what William D. Hamilton had to say about George Price's formalism in Narrow Roads of Gene Land:
A manuscript did eventually come from him but what I found set out was not any sort of new derivation or correction of my 'kin selection' but rather a strange new formalism that was applicable to every kind of natural selection. Central to Price's approach was a covariance formula the like of which I had never seen...Price had not like the rest of us looked up the work of the pioneers when he first became interested in selection;…
I'm not vulnerable, just especially plastic. Risk genes, environment, and evolution, in the Atlantic
ddobbs | November 10, 2009
The video interview above, with NIH primatologist Stephen Suomi, is embedded within a feature of mine that that appeared today at The Atlantic website -- and is in the December 2009 issue now shipping -- about a new hypothesis in behavioral genetics.
This emerging hypothesis, which draws on substantial data, much of which has gone simply unnoticed or unremarked, I call the "orchid-gene hypothesis," for lack of a better name. Some of the researchers have other offerings. It's been around for several years but is now blooming as evidence accumulates. When I came across it at a conference this…
razib | November 8, 2009In reviewing a paper which sketches out the boundary conditions under which group-level natural selection would result in the emergence of altruism as a genetically encoded trait, I stated:
... I would look to cultural group selection, because there are many cases of women being assimilated into a dominant culture, and their offspring speaking the language, and expressing the values, in totality of their fathers. One inherits 50% of one's genes from one's mother and one's father, but inheritance of cultural traits which are distinctive between parents may show very strong biases. Partitioning…
razib | November 7, 2009I recently finished reading The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, a new book by Nicholas Wade, a science writer for The New York Times. Before giving it the "full treatment" I thought it behooved me to revisit some of the scientific literature which Wade relies upon to give form to his argument. One of the pillars of The Faith Instinct is group selection, and one of the scholars who Wade specifically cites is the economist Samuel Bowles. Bowles was an author on a paper I reviewed earlier this week, on the empirical assessment of the extent of heritability of wealth…
clock | November 4, 2009Dog Genome: Teaching Scientists New Tricks
November 17th; 6:30-8:30 pm with discussion beginning at 7:00 followed by Q&A
The Irregardless Café, 901 W. Morgan Street, Raleigh 919.833.8898
This year, roughly 66,000 people will be diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, while another 22,000 will be diagnosed with cancers of the brain. In parallel, our pet dogs also suffer from a range of similar spontaneous cancers. For thousands of years, humans and dogs have shared a unique bond--breathing the same air, drinking the same water, and living in the same environment. During the 21st century…
pharyngula | November 4, 2009Last week, I described the lectures I attended at the Chicago 2009 Darwin meetings (Science Life also blogged the event). Two of the talks that were highlights of the meeting for me were the discussions of stickleback evolution by David Kingsley and oldfield mouse evolution by Hopi Hoekstra — seriously, if I were half my age right now, I'd be knocking on their doors, asking if they had room for a grad student or post-doc or bottle-washer. They are using modern techniques in genetics and molecular biology to look at variation in natural populations in the wild, and working out the precise…
pharyngula | October 30, 2009Lander began by saying he wasn't an evolutionist — an interestingly narrow definition of the term. He's a fan of the research, but considers himself a biomedical geneticist, as if that was something different.
Having entire genomes of many species available for quantitative analysis is going to lead to a qualitative change in the science we can do.
He gave a pocket summary of the human genome project. Mouse genome followed, then rat and dog, and now have sequence (to varying degrees of completeness) of 44 species, out of 4600 mammals. Within Homo, there's the hapmap project and the 1000…
razib | October 30, 2009I've discussed menopause as an adaptation and the grandmother effect before. I was also pleased to see the responses of Larry Moran's readers when he presented his standard anti-adaptationist line of argument. I don't want to retread familiar ground here, I'm not sure if menopause is an adaptation, but let's assume so for the purposes of reviewing a new paper which has come out and offers a slight but fascinating twist on the grandmother hypothesis. Grandma plays favourites: X-chromosome relatedness and sex-specific childhood mortality:
Biologists use genetic relatedness between family…
razib | October 29, 2009The Spittoon points to a new paper, Drawing the history of the Hutterite population on a genetic landscape: inference from Y-chromosome and mtDNA genotypes, which I've been meaning to look at more closely. Unlike some attempts to use genetics to illuminate questions about the human past here the historical record is rather complete. The 16th century was the high tide and maximal efflorescence of German Protestantism. Not only were vast swaths of what we think of as redoubts of German Catholicism in the Austrian lands brought into the Protestant fold, but the diversity was also at a peak, as…
razib | October 26, 2009Neanderthals 'had sex' with modern man:
Professor Svante Paabo, director of genetics at the renowned Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, will shortly publish his analysis of the entire Neanderthal genome, using DNA retrieved from fossils. He aims to compare it with the genomes of modern humans and chimpanzees to work out the ancestry of all three species.
...
Paabo recently told a conference at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory near New York that he was now sure the two species had had sex - but a question remained about how "productive" it had been.
"What I'm…
razib | October 25, 2009When Mendelism reemerged in the early 20th century to become what we term genetics no doubt the early practitioners of the nascent field would have been surprised to see where it went. The centrality of of DNA as the substrate which encodes genetic information in the 1950s opened up molecular biology and led to the biophysical strain which remains prominent in genetics. Later, in the 1970s Alan Wilson and Vincent Sarich used crude measures of genetic distance to resolve controversies in paleontology, specifically, the date of separation between the human and ape lineage. Genetics spans the…
razib | October 23, 2009If you haven't been following the goings-on via Twitter, Luke Jostins has been posting some tidbits on his blog, Genetic Inference. If you get interested in something, remember you can search abstracts.
razib | October 22, 2009If you have more than a marginal interest in evolutionary biology you will no doubt have stumbled upon the conundrum of sex & sexes. Matt Ridley's most prominent work, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, covered both the theoretical framework and applied implications of the subject. Ridley leaned heavily upon William D. Hamilton's scientific work, which extended upon Leigh Van Valen's concept of the book's titular Red Queen. The complex interplay between pathogens & multicelluar organisms across the eons is a topic of such breadth and depth that a substantial…
razib | October 21, 2009One of the banes of modern life is the stack of papers in one's "to-read" list. I guess that goes to show how cushy modern life is, as what sort of complaint is that? In any case, I began to consider this after reading Joe Thornton's magisterial response to Michael Behe's giddy excitement over his most recent paper, An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution. Thornton dispatches Behe's muddled misconceptions with economy and precision, but after reading the paper, as opposed to cogent summaries such as Carl Zimmer's in The New York Times I'm even more…
razib | October 20, 2009Evolutionary ideas have been around a long time, at least since the Greeks, and likely longer. I accept the arguments of researchers who suggest that humans are predisposed to Creationist thinking; after all, cross-cultural data shows the dominance of this model before the rise of modern evolutionary biology. But this does not mean that the possibility of evolution would be totally mystifying to the human race before Charles Darwin's time. After all, it may be that humans as a species have a predisposition toward theism as well, and yet all complex societies produce atheistic movements as…
edyong | October 20, 2009This is the story of a Turkish boy, who became the first person to have a genetic disorder diagnosed by thoroughly sequencing his genome. He is known only through his medical case notes as GIT 264-1 but for the purposes of this tale, I'm going to call Baby T.
At a mere five months of age, Baby T was brought to hospital dehydrated and in poor health. In some ways, this wasn't surprising. His parents were blood relatives and they had suffered through two miscarriages and the death of one premature baby. Baby T himself was born prematurely at 30 weeks.
Baby T's family history suggested that he…
razib | October 19, 2009If you're at ASHG, a session you might want to attend, Scale Effects and Recent Brain Evolution: Theory and Preliminary Evidence. Here's the abstract:
What forces have driven human evolution since the grand human diaspora? In this paper, I argue that the scale effects so central to endogenous growth theory in the field of economics (e.g., Kremer's widely-cited "Population Growth and Technological Change: 1,000,000 B.C. to 1990," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1993) have been important drivers of human brain development since the diaspora. Scale effects have made prominent appearances in…
razib | October 17, 2009From the comments:
Jizya is only a financial tribute / aid to the Muslim State which is in-charge of safeguarding the security of the state and non-muslim's lives and properties on their behalf.
Non-muslims pay Jizya BUT they are EXEMPTED from any other taxes which muslims pay in a Muslim State i.e. Zakat, Khums etc.
As compared to taxes which the Muslims are subjected in a Muslim state, the amount of Jizya is very low.
As such, Jizya should not be interpreted as "Additional Tax" imposed on non-muslims. It is rather a "lesser" obligation as compared to that of a Muslim.
I've heard this…
razib | October 17, 2009Another episode with me interviewing John Hawks on Bloggingheads.tv. Mostly we're talking about about Ardipithecus. The last 1/3 is about Indian genetics. We recorded on Thursday, but since then I've changed my mind on some issues and now disagree with some of what I said. I will likely post on my revisions soon, though have a rather low degree of certitude as to the accuracy of what I suspect, so I am poking through the literature to see if I can become more confident, or just falsify (if you missed my last discussion with John from two weeks ago, it's here).