The genetics of blue eye color in humans is almost entirely controlled by a single SNP in a conserved non-coding region in an intron of HERC2, as was strikingly demonstrated in a recent study on using genetics to predict eye pigmentation. Humans are not the only primate to have blue eyes–one notable example is the […]

Genetic Gating of Human Fear Learning and Extinction: Possible Implications for Gene-Environment Interaction in Anxiety Disorder: Pavlovian fear conditioning is a widely used model of the acquisition and extinction of fear. Neural findings suggest that the amygdala is the core structure for fear acquisition, whereas prefrontal cortical areas are given pivotal roles in fear extinction. […]

Advanced Paternal Age Is Associated with Impaired Neurocognitive Outcomes during Infancy and Childhood. I blogged it at ScienceBlogs. Labels: Genetics

It’s out. Will be interesting to compare with Religious Landscape Survey. Here’s a headline from a summary: More Americans say they have no religion. H/T Secular Right.

For non-blogging reasons I have recently been exploring the web for online primary texts in the history of biology. Since I last did much searching of this kind, many new resources have become available, and existing ones have been improved. For the benefit of any interested readers, here are some recommendations: A good website on […]

It has been noticed in some diseases that common variants which lead to modest increases in risk are located in or near genes that also, when mutated, cause severe monogenic forms of a the same disease (eg. obesity). This naturally leads to the hypothesis that newly identified genes containing modest risk alleles will also contain […]

Via Dienekes, The Earliest Horse Harnessing and Milking: Horse domestication revolutionized transport, communications, and warfare in prehistory, yet the identification of early domestication processes has been problematic. Here, we present three independent lines of evidence demonstrating domestication in the Eneolithic Botai Culture of Kazakhstan, dating to about 3500 B.C.E. Metrical analysis of horse metacarpals shows […]

If you haven’t read any of Peter Turchin’s work, his presentation (video) at Beyond Belief is a reasonable precis.

P-values come from null hypothesis testing, where you test how likely your observed data (and more extreme data) are under the assumption that the null hypothesis is true. As such, they do not allow us to decide which of a variety of hypotheses or models is true. The probability they encode refers to the observed […]

For Free Throws, 50 Years of Practice Is No Help.

Mean # of children for each category:Left of Center to Far Left 0.52Right of Center 0.62Libertarian 0.85No Religion 0.56Religious 0.99Atheist, Agnostic & Skeptical – 0.58Theist to aspiring Theist – 1.05Some University Education or less – 0.67University Degree – 0.48Graduate Degree – 0.85 Raw data below the fold. # of Children Left of Center Right of […]

No surprise. But the data are rather stark. Excluding those who gave “No Answer” and “Lots” here are the mean number of children of readers by age group from the survey, with the mean number of children in the age groups from the GSS for whites in the parentheses: 18-25 = 0 (0.32)26-35 = 0.25 […]

About His Deposit…: Caroline Hall was supposed to sign the contract a month ago guaranteeing a kindergarten spot for her son at an Upper East Side private school. He had already spent two happy years attending its early-childhood program. But Ms. Hall, a corporate counsel, began ducking the school’s calls. Where was her deposit toward […]

John Hawks points to an article by James F. Crow, Mayr, mathematics and the study of evolution. As John stated this is Open Access assuming you take the time to register. Here is a taste: In 1959 Ernst Mayr…flung down the gauntlet…at the feet of the three great population geneticists RA Fisher, Sewall Wright and […]