razib | October 18, 2007Every now and then I take political quizzes to see where I am. Below the fold are my results for three surveys....
Political Survey:
The World's Smallest Political Quiz:
Political Compass:
Politopia:
Enhanced Political Quiz:
razib | October 18, 2007Alu Recombination-Mediated Structural Deletions in the Chimpanzee Genome:
Here, by scanning the chimpanzee genome for such deletions, we determined the role of the Alu recombination-mediated deletion process in creating structural differences between the chimpanzee and human genomes. Using a combination of computational and experimental techniques, we identified 663 deletions, involving the removal of â¼771 kb of genomic sequence. Interestingly, about half of these deletions were located within known or predicted genes, and in several cases, the deletions removed coding exons from chimpanzee…
razib | October 18, 2007The Derived FOXP2 Variant of Modern Humans Was Shared with Neandertals:
...Here, we find that our closest extinct relatives, the Neandertals, share with modern humans two evolutionary changes in FOXP2, a gene that has been implicated in the development of speech and language. We furthermore find that in Neandertals, these changes lie on the common modern human haplotype, which previously was shown to have been subject to a selective sweep. These results suggest that these genetic changes and the selective sweep predate the common ancestor (which existed about 300,000-400,000 years ago) of…
razib | October 17, 2007In case you didn't notice, the latest Nature is heavy on human evolutionary genetics. Go here and control-f "Human genetics: Genes tell our evolutionary tale."
razib | October 17, 2007Researchers find earliest evidence for modern human behavior in South Africa:
"Our findings show that at 164,000 years ago in coastal South Africa humans expanded their diet to include shellfish and other marine resources, perhaps as a response to harsh environmental conditions," notes Marean, a professor in ASU's School of Human Evolution and Social Change. "This is the earliest dated observation of this behavior."
Further, the researchers report that co-occurring with this diet expansion is a very early use of pigment, likely for symbolic behavior, as well as the use of bladelet stone tool…
razib | October 17, 2007The genetic map maker. Read the whole thing, but this is interesting:
How did you feel about being accused of racism?
Well, many mistakes are made and that was a very curious one. I'd argued for decades that the concept of 'race' defined by external characteristics -- such as skin colour, size variations or facial fat -- is nonsense. These visible characteristics evolved under natural selection, mostly to cope with local environments, and have no deeper base. [my emphasis -r]
Hm. That's interesting. In his magisterial The History and Geography of Human Genes Cavalli-Sforza sketched out the…
razib | October 17, 2007OK GNXP readers...Donors Choose update. Been quiet about this. First, the good news. ScienceBlogs has raised A LOT of money. And Seed is throwing in matching funds (and possible prizes). The "bad" news is that my challenge is really not going too well :-) Page down on the leader-board, will you? So I've added many new causes (some of them were fully funded already). Check 'em out. If you feel inclined on giving, give. I'm generally trying to focus on biology & math since I think those are pretty "value added" in terms of how far one's money will go.
razib | October 16, 2007Maternal Immune Activation Alters Fetal Brain Development through Interleukin-6:
Schizophrenia and autism are thought to result from the interaction between a susceptibility genotype and environmental risk factors. The offspring of women who experience infection while pregnant have an increased risk for these disorders. Maternal immune activation (MIA) in pregnant rodents produces offspring with abnormalities in behavior, histology, and gene expression that are reminiscent of schizophrenia and autism, making MIA a useful model of the disorders. However, the mechanism by which MIA causes long-…
razib | October 16, 2007Antagonistic pleiotropic effects reduce the potential adaptive value of the FRIGIDA locus:
....Here we investigate the importance of pleiotropy and epistasis in determining the adaptive value of a candidate gene using the gene FRI (FRIGIDA), which is thought to be the major gene controlling flowering time variation in Arabidopsis thaliana. The effect of FRI on flowering time was analyzed in an outbred population created by randomly mating 19 natural accessions of A. thaliana. This unique population allows the estimation of FRI effects independent of any linkage association with other loci due…
razib | October 16, 2007Sort of. I assume that part of this is delivery and the nature of a short interview format. But, I think it is important to highlight a point of mild disagreement between Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein in their Salon interview:
PINKER: Exactly. I would be opposed to a requirement on astrology and astronomy, or alchemy and chemistry. Not because I don't think people should know about astrology. Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can't understand many things unless you know something about astrology -- the plays of Shakespeare and so on. What I'm opposed to is…
razib | October 15, 2007At my other site I've put up 10 questions for Jon Entine. He has a new book out, Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People, which covers the fascinating area of Jewish genetics.
razib | October 14, 2007If you haven't seen it, this is a hilarious story: Vatican Official Insists He's Not Gay:
A Vatican official suspended after being caught on hidden camera making advances to a young man says he is not gay and was only pretending to be gay as part of his work.
In an interview published Sunday, Monsignor Tommaso Stenico told La Repubblica daily he frequented online gay chat rooms and met with gay men as part of his work as a psychoanalyst. He said that he pretended to be gay in order to gather information about "those who damage the image of the Church with homosexual activity."
razib | October 14, 2007Sheril tagged me with a meme of the form:
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
* You can leave them exactly as is.
* You can delete any one question.
* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in…
razib | October 12, 2007Everyone at ScienceBlogs is talking about Al Gore. Well, all I have to say is that boy have things changed. Just look what Gore was up to a few years ago....
razib | October 12, 2007Eight Americas: Investigating Mortality Disparities across Races, Counties, and Race-Counties in the United States (Open Access). Here's the most interesting finding for me:
The 12.8-y gap in life expectancy between females in Americas 1 and 7 is approximately the same as the gap between Japan, with the highest national life expectancy for females in 2001 (84.7 y), and Fiji, Nicaragua, and Lebanon...Asian females in the US have a life expectancy that is 3 y higher than that of females in Japan...For males, the 15.4-y gap in life expectancy between Asians (America 1) and high-risk urban…
razib | October 11, 2007The New York Times has an interesting article, Picky Eaters? They Get It From You, which I'm sure many parents can relate to. Here's the most critical part:
The study, led by Dr. Lucy Cooke of the department of epidemiology and public health at University College London, was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in August. Dr. Cooke and others in the field believe it is the first to use a standard scale to investigate the contribution of genetics and environment to childhood neophobia.
According to the report, 78 percent is genetic and the other 22 percent environmental.
"…
razib | October 10, 2007Sheril had a post where she included a link to New Kids up. That reminded me, in the boy band craze of circa 2000 I remember one group which seems to have not received the accolades which I felt were appropriate. Below the fold....
razib | October 10, 2007Nature has two papers on language which I'll pass along (I don't know enough about this area to say anything non-tardish) for those who have an interest in such things.
First, our old friend Martin Nowak is behind a group which published an article titled Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language:
...Here we describe the emergence of this linguistic rule amidst the evolutionary decay of its exceptions, known to us as irregular verbs. We have generated a data set of verbs whose conjugations have been evolving for more than a millennium, tracking inflectional changes to 177 Old-English…