If you link to this weblog from your weblog, please update links: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/ If you have not updated your feeds, please do so now: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GeneExpressionBlog The old feed address will point for another week or so to the new feed, but eventually it will cease working.

Update your bookmarks: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp And RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GeneExpressionBlog If you have a weblog that links to ScienceBlogs GNXP, I would appreciate you update the link for the sake of PageRank. There isn't much to say about the move. There wasn't one big precipitating reason, a variety of reasons coalesced to make this the right thing to do for me. I would like to give a shout out to Erin Johnson, who from what I recall has been the longest serving ScienceBlogs community manager in the history of the website. One bittersweet aspect of leaving the…

That's all I have to say to Eric Michael Johnson's post, Ann Coulter, Hate Speech, and Free Societies. OK, seriously, from what I recall Eric is an American, though resident in the forgotten north. American absolutist stances on free speech are not shared by most Western societies, so demanding total free speech is quixotic and culturally tone deaf. Granted, Europe or Canada are not barbaric like China or Muslim societies when it comes to speech, so that communication about this issue is possible. But here are the exceptions to free speech enumerated in the European Convention on Human Rights…

The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia: With the exception of Neanderthals, from which DNA sequences of numerous individuals have now been determined...the number and genetic relationships of other hominin lineages are largely unknown. Here we report a complete mitochondrial (mt) DNA sequence retrieved from a bone excavated in 2008 in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia. It represents a hitherto unknown type of hominin mtDNA that shares a common ancestor with anatomically modern human and Neanderthal mtDNAs about 1.0 million…

In this diavlog with Glenn Loury the behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan recounts the results of an experiment. - If given the option of paying $100 for an item vs. $80 for an item, but in the second case having to go across town for the item, respondents choose $80 and going across town - If given the option of paying $1000 for an item vs. $980 for an item, but in the second case having to go across town for the item, respondents choose $1000 and not going across town This the result of a heuristic bias whereby we seem to perform comparisons as percentages, and not the absolute value…

You've probably heard about the research in the press, but please see Derek Lowe for perspective. The difference between high fructose corn syrup and sugar as an additive may, or may not, be problematic. But the uncertainty in this area is why I try and avoid excessively processed foods*, there's just so much we don't know. If you're poor and short on cash perhaps the high ratio of calories per cent of processed foods are simply necessary, but for people of even modest means I don't think it is that difficult to cut most consumables which come out of boxes from your diet. Again, I want to…

Not Exactly Rocket Science, authored by a certain Edmund Yong. Congratulations Mr. Yong, but I will admit being less than surprised. Update: And also, congratulations to all the other winners, several of whom are in my "regular reads."

I have a short piece up at Comment is Free at The Guardian, The origins of morality do not matter. Its flavor is a bit different from my typical blog posts because the format enforces more brevity, so I decided to try and leverage some analogies. I conclude: ... Our moral consensus is a river whose course shifts across the plain, constrained by the hills thrust upward by biology. Only history knows where the river will flow next, though evolution can hint at the range of possibilities. On a note related to this piece, I will be posting a review of The Price of Altruism: George Price and the…

The Andrew Pollack piece which I hinted at came out a few days ago: Consumers Slow to Embrace the Age of Genomics. For what it's worth, I think this chart from Dr. Daniel MacArthur is right on: This too will pass. I believe that like the internet the knowledge and analysis of our genetic information is going to be ubiquitous after a rough period when most of the dreams of grandeur from the first generation entrepreneurs fade.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is looking for his male Irish forebear using genetics: Well, it turns out that the men sharing that Ui Neill haplotype tended to have certain surnames. If we use those surnames, we narrow the number of possibilities in Allegany and Hampshire counties to 178 men born between 1800 and 1830 bearing 22 surnames. What's so exciting about this? Well, it turns out that the men in the Gates family line have a particular mutation, a slight variation, in our Ui Neill haplotype. And we inherited that slight mutation, a spelling variant in that DNA signature, through one of those…

The Evolution Of Symbolic Language by Terrence Deacon and Ursula Goodenough. Deacon's The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain is a book I liked a great deal, though in hindsight I don't think I had the background to appreciate it in any depth (nor do I now).

At least in this case, Troglomorphism, trichobothriotaxy and typhlochactid phylogeny (Scorpiones, Chactoidea): more evidence that troglobitism is not an evolutionary dead-end: The scorpion family Typhlochactidae Mitchell, 1971 is endemic to eastern Mexico and exclusively troglomorphic. Six of the nine species in the family are hypogean (troglobitic), morphologically specialized for life in the cave environment, whereas three are endogean (humicolous) and comparably less specialized. The family therefore provides a model for testing the hypotheses that ecological specialists (stenotopes)…

A few weeks ago I commented on the paper about the origin of the small dog phenotype in the Middle East. Now The New York Times has an article on a newer paper, New Finding Puts Origins Of Dogs in Middle East. Here's the conclusion: Dog domestication and human settlement occurred at the same time, some 15,000 years ago, raising the possibility that dogs may have had a complex impact on the structure of human society. Dogs could have been the sentries that let hunter gatherers settle without fear of surprise attack. They may also have been the first major item of inherited wealth, preceding…

A week ago I observed that commenting was being transformed with the spread of Disqus and Echo. The Big Money has now introduced Echo: The comments themselves are also more interactive. Any of your postings can be shared with your friends on Facebook, followers on Twitter, or any of your connections on the other supported services. You can also reply to fellow commenters, tell them you like their posts, or flag any inappropriate or spam messages that you see. All commenters have their own profiles, which you can find by clicking on their profile names and viewing their details. There you'll…

14th season begins tonight. The website. You can usually get the episode a bit earlier at Allabout-SP.net.

Dienekes has reposted some of the abstracts from the meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. This one caught my eye, Genetic analyses reveal a history of serial founder effects, admixture between long separated founding populations in Oceania, and interbreeding with archaic humans: Genetic anthropologists continue to debate whether human neutral genetic variation primarily reflects a continuum of demes connected by local gene flow or colonization and serial founder effects. A second unresolved issue concerns the genetic contribution of archaic species to the modern…

A few weeks ago I had dinner and drinks with an old friend who works for the firm which invented the x86 series of microprocessors. He's doing well financially right now, and was very bullish on his firm. More specifically it seems that they're on a hiring binge (he knows because he's been on hiring committees). So a while back he forwarded a resume of a graduate school acquaintance to human resources. His boss came up to him later and told him that there were remunerative benefits to forwarding resumes. If the individual gets hired: - There is a entry-level $2,000 bonus to the referrer - But…

How Privacy Vanishes Online. Pretty banal actually. Social networking has really changed things. As I've said before I'm fascinated by the large number of people who, even those who want to be anonymous, enter in their real email addresses when leaving a comment. There seems a default "trust unless you shouldn't trust" setting, so we naively input our information assuming it isn't being mined by someone. In any case, a bigger issue in the future I think will be stupid government officials who scan up documents which they shouldn't scan up. It's happened a few times so far, but I think it'll…

Over the past week I've been asked via email and on message boards about about David Shenk's new book, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong. Since I haven't read the book I can't really comment, but I did finally listen to Will Wilkinson's interview with Shenk on bloggingheads.tv. It seems to me that Will exhibited more clarity and precision in one sentence in relation to the term heritability than Shenk did in 10 minutes. It is true there are many people who don't understand that 80% heritable does not mean that a trait is "80%…