My compliments to the writer of this piece, you have done a fine job of explaining genome diversity and I now understand it in a new light. Excellent science writing and I encourage you to expand this brief piece as more becomes known.

Jimi Hendrix was a synaesthete, he associated colors with musical notes, it helped to make him a musical genius. A great many of his songs reference to colors, even as a child he was entranced with a relationship between colors, music, and emotions that the rest of don't perceive.

Greg Bruce Lahn went looking for genes that 1)exress themselves in fetal and infant brain development and 2) have spread very quickly throughout the human population. This seems to me to be a fascinating scientific angle to pursue. Unfotunately in science it would seem the meek have inherited the earth.I would love to hear your opinions on this matter.

This is the only science that could support it's own gossip columnist. Hominid Hints from Heloise.

Something else never passed the smell test for me which supports admixture. I've heard talk over the years that the great leap forword was caused my one momentuous mutation. That kind of insults the complexity of the human brain and the as yet uncounted number genes that influence it. It always made a lot more sense to me at least that it was more likely caused by an influx of new genes from a hybridization event. The results of new inventive behavior would not be immediate, because the optimum combinations may take tens of thousands of years to sort out.

How can Svante Paabo and associates announce in February of 2009 that they had mapped 60% of the Neanderthal genome and found no trace of interbreeding with moderns and now they have found 1 to 4%? It wasn't all coincidentally hidden in the remaining 40%, I don't get it. Can someone with expertise explain this to me.

What! We don't need philosophers added to the mix of ideal futurists. That is the first blogging heads science Saturday I had to cut short. Good God they can be tiresome. "You're a dirty dualist." "Fuck you you're a vitalist." Now wasn't that more entertaining.

This is touching on what I believe to be the single most valuable lesson I've learned from being a fly on the wall here at GNXP for a few years. It's an atitude, a thinking mans approach to the world in general of quickly seperating pointless bar room philosophy from the scientific art of asking testable questions. Very intellegent people are highly succeptable to delusional thinking that they have found the truth when the humble scientific approach always holds firm that the truth is but a contradiction in terms.