…here. Like the study Razib linked to a couple days ago, this one looks for signatures of selection in a number of genes suspected to play a role in the generation of natural human skin color variation. And also like the previous study, they find that different genes are implicated in derived light skin color […]

….to ruin a perfectly good theory. So says Beth Visser and colleagues in the latest edition of Intelligence. She tested Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI), gasp!, empirically. What did she find? Our analyses of tests measuring the “intelligences” of Gardner’s MI theory revealed that many of those tests were substantially intercorrelated, despite representing different […]

I haven’t watched football in years. But I’m still a Steelers fan. When I see a Steelers game when I’m in the bar it recaptures a special something from my teenage years…that passionate, unthinking, unreflective, pure partisanship. But why? The team isn’t what it once was, I barely recognize most of the players. The style […]

Jonah Lehrer on the origins of magical thinking: What’s the moral? Magical thinking is built into our brain at a pretty basic level. Although these Harvard students don’t really believe in Voodoo, a few experimental tricks can seduce them into delusion. A similar psychology probably explains why the vast majority of Americans (between 70 and […]

If you’re a Romanian who wants to get into Canada, but you’re already on their watch lists because they’ve deported you before and intercepted you on your other attempts to enter the country illegally, what to do? Why that’s simple, flank the enemy and make your run for the weakest border front, so buy an […]

Declan Butler is urging everyone to get the word out about the Bulgarian and Palestinian medics falsely accused of infecting children with AIDS. I’ve known about this story for a while, and like a lot of tragedies it has bubbled in the background. The reality is that even doing good in a nation like Libya […]

Both Coffee Mug and I have made a big deal out of the fact that a large percentage of the genome in eukaryotes is transcribed into RNA. In the comments, however, gc has been skeptical of inferring much from this fact, noting that the transcription machinery of the cell is inherently “leaky”. A new paper […]

To follow up on a previous post on determining the fraction of the human genome under selection (as well as Coffee Mug’s post on non-coding RNAs), here’s a paper which claims that, in raw numbers, more non-coding DNA has been under selection in humans than coding DNA. But still, using their method, based on the […]

Identifying genes underlying skin pigmentation differences among human populations: …we measured allele frequency differentiation among Europeans, Chinese and Africans for 24 human pigmentation genes from 2 publicly available, large scale SNP data sets. Several skin pigmentation genes show unusually large allele frequency differences among these populations. To determine whether these allele frequency differences might be […]

Expose a person to sunlight, and odds are the UV rays will jump-start a pathway leading to an increase in skin pigmentation, i.e. tanning. However, some people simply don’t tan. These people often, one may have noticed, have red hair. It’s no coincidence– there’s a well-known association between fair skin, red hair, and a defective […]

If the 24-hour science news cycle hasn’t knocked it out of the banks yet, recall that there was some hub-bub about a non-coding RNA (ncRNA) being a candidate for the fastest-evolving human gene. There was some discussion about whether ncRNAs might be something to keep an eye on and why RNAs might be particularly good […]

Ruchira Paul points me to an interesting fact which I had always noticed, but never noted, and that is that many Japanese Buddhas have curly hair. Can anyone tell me why this is? I am struck by the fact that depictions of Buddha by Greco-Bacterians was often Apollonian in character, and I am to understand […]

Aziz & Randall on the the Pope affair. Though I’d say both of them would broadly fit into the center-Left or center-Right coalitions, I’d also say that both tend to read the facts first before drawing conclusions…. Update: Ed Brayton has more. As does our Catholic brother in Darwin.

Broad National Effort Urgently Needed To Maximize Potential of Women Scientists and Engineers in Academia Studies have not found any significant biological differences between men and women in performing science and mathematics that can account for the lower representation of women in academic faculty and leadership positions in S&T fields. Authors: 17 women (e.g. Elizabeth […]

Hit it up if you have access. For the less fortunate: Were you surprised at the reaction to the book? Yes. The human past is a touchy subject because many people use it – quite misguidedly in my view – to reason from what was to what ought to be. You mustn’t say people practised […]

Classic Shaq quotes in no particular order, except that the leadoff quote is HBD-related … just to make this a true GNXP post … Nobody wants to get dunked on by a white guy. Tell Yao Ming I said this: “Ching-chong-yah-wah … ah-soooo …”Yao Ming’s response:Chinese is a hard language. Some things you just can’t […]

Techniques like this on a larger-scale might help get a handle on nervous system evolution. They took several mouse lines expressing fluorescent proteins under the control of different promoters and isolated individual cells from brain regions like the cingulate cortex, somatosensory cortex, hippocampus, and amygdala. They then used a microarray to look at the level […]

The abstract for this article by Adam Eyre-Walker (whose work I’ve quibbled with before) caught my eye: The role of positive darwinian selection in evolution at the molecular level has been keenly debated for many years, with little resolution. However, a recent increase in DNA sequence data and the development of new methods of analysis […]

Mendel’s Garden #6, bitch.