December 3, 2008
Etruscan genetics, a few nails in the coffin.... permlink
Category: Genetics
The Etruscan timeline: a recent Anatolian connection:
The origin of the Etruscans (the present day Tuscany, Italy), one of the most enigmatic non-Indo-European civilizations, is under intense controversy. We found novel genetic evidences on the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) establishing a genetic link between Anatolia and the ancient Etruria. By way of complete mtDNA genome sequencing of a novel autochthonous Tuscan branch of haplogroup U7 (namely U7a2a), we have estimated an historical time frame for the arrival of Anatolian lineages to Tuscany ranging from 1.1 +/- 0.1 to 2.3 +/- 0.1 0.4 kya B.P.
Related: Posts on Etruscans & genetics.
Posted by Razib at 11:47 AM•1 Comments
Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend permlink
Category: Genetics
Though Barbara Oakley's Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend is ostensibly about Machiavellian behavior, it is also a testament to her intellectual ambition. The subheading is a clear pointer to this. Oakley attempts to synthesize a wide range of fields, behavior genetics, cognitive neuroscience, clinical psychology, diplomatic history, evolutionary psychology, economic history, along with heavy dollops of political and personal biography, to produce a portrait of how Machiavellian intelligence emerges from its biological substrate, develops, and impacts us on a personal and social level. With any such project there is bound to be some disappointment due to the limitations of what one can communicate and construct in about 400 pages of narrative. But the attempt still produces something of definite worth and intellectual value.
Read on »
Posted by Razib at 11:24 AM•5 Comments
Asian dudes permlink
Category: Blog
Via kaleidoscopik
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Posted by Razib at 8:21 AM•0 Comments
Romania going Creationist? permlink
Category: Evolution
Romania removes theory of evolution from school curriculum:
Romania's withdrawal of the theory of evolution from the school curriculum could be evidence of a growing conservative tendency in teaching. Evolution has been removed from the school curriculum in a move which, pressure groups argue, distorts children's understanding of how the world came into being.
Meanwhile, religious studies classes continue to tell Romanian children that God made the world in seven days.
The theory of the Origin of Species and the evolution of humans is no longer present in the compulsory curriculum, through a nationwide decision made under the previous Government in 2006. Before the change, Darwin's theory was taught to pupils aged 18 or 19 years old. This was also in the curriculum during the Communist period of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
I'm not sure about the veracity of this story, it seems polemical. But with the outbreak of Creationism in Turkey and Serbia, my priors for southeast Europe and its environs have shifted. Romania is evidence that even decades of state supported atheism are irrelevant if basic investment in education and human capital are not made, I suspect that the human mind is wired for Creationism.
Posted by Razib at 12:32 AM•5 Comments
November 30, 2008
The neuroscience prosopagnosia permlink
Category: Genetics
A few years ago I blogged about prosopagnosia, "face blindness." Nature Neuroscience now has a new paper finding some correlates with brain architecture, Reduced structural connectivity in ventral visual cortex in congenital prosopagnosia:
Using diffusion tensor imaging and tractography, we found that a disruption in structural connectivity in ventral occipito-temporal cortex may be the neurobiological basis for the lifelong impairment in face recognition that is experienced by individuals who suffer from congenital prosopagnosia. Our findings suggest that white-matter fibers in ventral occipito-temporal cortex support the integrated function of a distributed cortical network that subserves normal face processing.
Read on »
Posted by Razib at 10:23 PM•0 Comments
Racial hygiene 2008? permlink
Category: Science
FuturePundit points me to a research paper, Impact of a new national screening policy for Down's syndrome in Denmark: population based cohort study:
Results The number of infants born with Down's syndrome decreased from 55-65 per year during 2000-4 to 31 in 2005 and 32 in 2006. The total number of chorionic villus samplings and amniocenteses carried out decreased from 7524 in 2000 to 3510 in 2006. The detection rate in the screened population in 2005 was 86% (95% confidence interval 79% to 92%) and in 2006 was 93% (87% to 97%). The corresponding false positive rates were 3.9% (3.7% to 4.1%) and 3.3% (3.1% to 3.4%).
Conclusion The introduction of a combined risk assessment during the first trimester at a national level in Denmark halved the number of infants born with Down's syndrome. The strategy also resulted in a sharp decline in the number of chorionic villus samplings and amniocenteses carried out, even before full implementation of the policy.
Read on »
Posted by Razib at 7:11 PM•8 Comments
ACTN3 sports gene test is a con! permlink
Category: Genetics
I was waiting for Dan MacArthur to comment on the "ACTN3 sports gene" story because I knew he had done research on this very locus. As usual, he's rather diplomatic, with a post titled The ACTN3 sports gene test: what can it really tell you?. He says:
Kevin Fischer has already noted that from a pure cost-benefit point of view the ATLAS test doesn't compete with the offerings of personal genomics companies. ATLAS will charge you $150 for testing ACTN3; for just $250 more, you get genetic information pertaining to more than 90 different conditions and traits from 23andMe. Neither test is likely to change your life (the predictive power of most current genetic tests using common markers is extremely low), but if you're interested enough in recreational genetics to fork out for an ACTN3 test you might as well spend a little extra to get information on a bunch of other traits at the same time.
Remember those astrology infomercials on TV? "For entertainment purposes only!" Over the next few years many firms will piggy-back on the cultural prestige of science to make a quick buck. It seems the banal CW that new technology is oversold in the short term but underappreciated over the long term applies here. The new applied genetics (i.e., "personal genomics) will be seamlessly integrated into our lives in 10-20 years, but right now there's not much value-add for purchasing kits which tell people that they are European or have blue eyes.
Posted by Razib at 1:03 PM•1 Comments
November 25, 2008
What's new in life science research? permlink
Category: Science
If the title piques your interest, check out a new ScienceBlog of that name. The contributors are familiar faces....
Posted by Razib at 9:09 PM•2 Comments
The Secular Right & prayers for H. L. Mencken. permlink
Category: Culture
Since the Right is roiling with faction, I thought I'd point you to a new weblog, Secular Right. No need to explain what it's about, the title says it all. John Derbyshire recounts an interesting experience at the H. L. Mencken Club:
Well, so there I was sitting down to dinner on the first evening of this Menckenfest. Seeing a plate of salad in front of me, I applied some condiments and started eating. In between the second and third mouthfuls I heard an amplified voice coming from the speakers' tables: "All right, everybody, we shall now say Grace. Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts ..." I felt as if I'd been caught picking my nose on live TV.
Somewhat later I got into conversation with the lady who had given out the Grace. She was very charming and friendly, and had been instrumental in getting the conference organized, so is obviously very capable. It emerged, however, in the course of our conversation, that she is a Young Earth Creationist!
In case you don't know, H. L. Mencken was the basis for the skeptical reporter in Inherit the Wind. Aside from being an infamous atheist, Mencken was also a lion of the Old Right, explaining the fondness many conservatives have for him today.
Posted by Razib at 10:29 AM•5 Comments
November 24, 2008
Woolly Mammoth best left dead? permlink
Category: Evolution
An editorial in The New York Times, Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth?:
No one is quite sure why the woolly mammoths died out toward the end of the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago. Theories include warmer temperatures that gradually displaced the plants on which they fed, overhunting by primitive man, an accumulation of harmful genetic mutations, widespread disease, or an asteroid or comet colliding with Earth and disrupting the climate.
If scientists do bring back a few mammoths, we suspect our warming world won't look any more hospitable than the one that did them in.
A meta-point here is that it's great that the chattering classes devote time to scientific issues; we're on the cusp of the age of applied biology. But a question I have is the presupposition that a warmer world would be inimical to the existence of the mammoth. After all, there is tundra, and there is glacier. It seems that some tundra would remain as the glacier retreated, following its march..
But I also decided to figure out when Woolly Mammoths speciated. From what I can tell it seems that they diverged from the Steppe Mammoth about 150,000 years ago. Fossil people can clarify or correct. I was curious about this fact because of this chart:
Read on »
Posted by Razib at 12:24 AM•17 Comments
November 23, 2008
Andrew Gelman on Bloggingheads.tv permlink
Category: Culture
Andrew Gelman has commented on his interview performance....
Posted by Razib at 4:26 AM•0 Comments
November 22, 2008
Similarities & differences: American Indians & Real Indians permlink
Category: History
After reading American Colonies: The Settling of North America, I was struck by the incredible similarities in British modus operandi in North America and India the 17th and 18th centuries. These two imperial domains seem very different, but recall that Lord Cornwallis plays a prominent role in both Colonial and Indian history. This was a world-wide empire, the French and Indian War in North America was just a piece of the broader Seven Years' War, which also played out in India.
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Posted by Razib at 1:46 PM•17 Comments
Myers-Briggs & this blog permlink
Category: Blog
The Elf pointed me to Typealyzer where it supposedly analyzes the personality of the weblog. Well, this blog is....
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Posted by Razib at 12:04 AM•8 Comments
November 21, 2008
Opinions on evolution, intelligence & religion permlink
Category: Culture
In my post yesterday where I compared Catholics & Protestants in New England with Southerners in the McCain Belt, I was struck on the evolution question that in New England Protestants exhibited much more variance than Catholics. More Protestants rejected evolution or definitely believed it was true than Roman Catholics, who tended to agree that it was probably true. To me, this indicates the fissiparous tendencies of Protestantism, whereby new sects emerge from schisms within denominations, in contrast to the "broad church" philosophy of Roman Catholicism as well as the due deference to clerical elites. Though acceptance of some sort of evolutionary theory is not demanded by the Roman Catholic church, there is a general acceptance among the clerical caste as to the validity of general evolutionary processes. In contrast, liberal Protestants have arguably taken much more enthusiastically to evolutionary theory (e.g., Barack Obama, a member of the United Church of Christ, admits to believing in evolution with more certitude than angels), while conservative Protestants make its rejection a touchstone of their distinctiveness.
So I decided to go into the GSS, and see how the SCITEST4 variable relates to WORDSUM.
Read on »
Posted by Razib at 9:24 PM•5 Comments
More genetic maps of Europe permlink
Category: Genetics
Another paper on European phyogeography, Investigation of the fine structure of European populations with applications to disease association studies:
An investigation into fine-scale European population structure was carried out using high-density genetic variation on nearly 6000 individuals originating from across Europe. The individuals were collected as control samples and were genotyped with more than 300 000 SNPs in genome-wide association studies using the Illumina Infinium platform. A major East-West gradient from Russian (Moscow) samples to Spanish samples was identified as the first principal component (PC) of the genetic diversity. The second PC identified a North-South gradient from Norway and Sweden to Romania and Spain...The next 18 PCs also accounted for a significant proportion of genetic diversity observed in the sample. We present a method to predict the ethnic origin of samples by comparing the sample genotypes with those from a reference set of samples of known origin. These predictions can be performed using just summary information on the known samples, and individual genotype data are not required. We discuss issues raised by these data and analyses for association studies including the matching of case-only cohorts to appropriate pre-collected control samples for genome-wide association studies.
Below the fold is a PC map where I've added clarifying labels.
Read on »
Posted by Razib at 2:45 PM•12 Comments
Evolution of Primate Regulation permlink
Category: Evolution
Gene Regulation in Primates Evolves under Tissue-Specific Selection Pressures:
Regulatory changes have long been hypothesized to play an important role in primate evolution. To identify adaptive regulatory changes in humans, we performed a genome-wide survey for genes in which regulation has likely evolved under natural selection. To do so, we used a multi-species microarray to measure gene expression levels in livers, kidneys, and hearts from six humans, chimpanzees, and rhesus macaques. This comparative gene expression data allowed us to identify a large number of genes, as well as specific pathways, whose inter-species expression profiles are consistent with the action of stabilizing or directional selection on gene regulation. Among the latter set, we found an enrichment of genes involved in metabolic pathways, consistent with the hypothesis that shifts in diet underlie many regulatory adaptations in humans. In addition, we found evidence for tissue-specific selection pressures, as well as lower rates of protein evolution for genes in which regulation evolves under natural selection. These observations are consistent with the notion that adaptive circumscribed changes in gene regulation have fewer deleterious pleiotropic effects compared with changes at the protein sequence level.
Read on »
Posted by Razib at 12:30 PM•0 Comments
