I’ve been reading Sperm Biology: An Evolutionary Perspective; an engaging comparative look at, well, sperm biology. One fairly remarkable thing to me is that, while sperm evolve incredibly rapidly in morphology (at one point in the book, the claim is made that just about any animal can be distinguished visually by sperm cells alone[1]), the precise genetic changes involved in this variation are entirely unknown.

Given that the human and chimp Y chromosomes have diverged massively, the rapid evolution of sperm, and the fact that many genes on the Y are involved in spermatogenesis, it stands to reason that there is a large amount of variation within current human populations (there is very little work on this, so direct evidence of this is hard to come by), and that some of the relevant genetic loci lie on the Y chromosome.

So how variable is the Y chromosome within humans? It appears this is largely unknown as well (outside of the markers used for ancestry testing and the like), largely due to the fact that its repetitiveness makes it difficult to genotype or sequence. Here’s the thought: Pacific Biosciences now claims to be able to generate quality sequencing reads of up to a few kilobases; this alone might be enough to overcome the repetitiveness of the Y. Is it time for a “HapMap” of the Y chromosome, and incorporation of this chromosome into association studies for relevant traits?

[1] random aside: many nemotodes, including C. elegans, have ameoba-like sperm, rather than flaggela. How many C. elegans genetics talks have I listened to without knowing this? Many.

Denmark Introduces Harrowing New Tourism Ads Directed By Lars Von Trier
I think “Karen the single mom” ad does a better job of selling Denmark:

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A few months ago I read Empires of the Silk Road, where the author makes the argument that contrary to the common perception of Inner Asians as uncouth barbarians who were inimical to civilization as we understand it, in fact these populations were critical to the emergence of particular civilized values, as well as their role as facilitators of the spread of particular ideas and technologies. The latter is addressed in a somewhat overly enthusiastic fashion in Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, but the point seems to be robust. The transmission of chariots and horse culture to China and the civilizations of the ancient Near East seems to have been a function of mobile populations expanding out of the western margins of the Inner Asian plain. Religions such as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam were spread by the cultural networks of Inner Asians. This explains how a substantial number of Mongol tribesmen in Genghis Khan’s armies were Nestorian Christians, while Buddhism’s arrival in China nearly 2,000 years ago almost certainly was facilitated by Inner Asian traders and warriors.
But in the historical era there is a peculiar bias in our perceptions. The Huns, and later the Avars, Magyars and Bulgars are all instances of populations which emigrated from the zone between the lower Volga and Mongola into the heart of Europe. The Turks made an impact on a huge swath of the Ecumene, from India through the world of Islam, to southeastern Europe, and all the way into the heart of what is now European Russia! The Mongols exploded out from their heartlands and came near to conquering all of Eurasia, while only the farthest reaches of western Europe and southern India escaping their threats.
Notice a pattern? These are east-to-west movements. Until the expansion of the Russians into Siberia there was no historical record of an intrusion of west Eurasian populations analogous to what occurred in Hungary, Bulgaria or Anatolia. The Arabs and the Persians never made it beyond Transoxiana. In contrast there were multiple leap-frogs from east to west. One explanation is that over the past 2,000 years China has been a robust political entity. The rise of barbarian confederacies led by populations with roots in eastern Inner Asia, the Huns and Avars, in central Europe, date to the period of the decline of Roman hegemony.
But this is not the only story. There is the other half of the swing of the historical pendulum, when western barbarians pushed to the east. That movement is obscured because it occurred on the margins of, and prior to, history. In The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World much of the argument rests on archaeology, in contrast to Empires of the Silk Road, which utilizes philology and conventional historical records. The former book focuses on the west-to-east swing, which the author asserts is correlated with the expansion of Indo-European speaking populations.
That there needs something to be explained is evident when one glances at a map of the distribution of Indo-European langauges. We don’t have a historical record of what was going on here; unlike in the case of the spread of Turkic or Arabic. But that’s unfortunate because the expansion had a bigger linguistic impact. Something big happened, but we don’t really know much about it. And we don’t think about it. This is why the fact that the Tarim mummies seem to be of west Eurasian provenance is always of interest, it goes against our expectations. But those expectations sample only the historical record, one half of the swing of the pendulum.

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Papers Link Husband of Professor to ’93 Threat:

The husband of the neuroscientist accused of killing three colleagues at the University of Alabama in Huntsville told a witness he wanted to harm a Harvard professor who was later mailed a pipe bomb in 1993, according to newly released federal documents.
James Anderson Jr., the husband of Amy Bishop, wanted to “shoot,” “stab” or “strangle” the professor, Paul Rosenberg, according to documents released Tuesday by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Dr. Bishop had worked for Dr. Rosenberg in the neurobiology lab of Children’s Hospital in Boston, but resigned because Dr. Rosenberg felt that she “could not meet the standards required for the work,” according to the documents, first reported by The Boston Globe. Dr. Bishop was “reportedly upset” and “on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” according to the documents, which cited interviews with witnesses.

Misunderstanding Darwin: Natural selection’s secular critics get it wrong:

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini take the role of philosophy to consist in part in minding other people’s business. We agree with the spirit behind this self-conception. Philosophy can sometimes help other areas of inquiry. Yet those who wish to help their neighbors are well advised to spend a little time discovering just what it is that those neighbors do, and those who wish to illuminate should be sensitive to charges that they are kicking up dust and spreading confusion.What Darwin Got Wrong shows no detailed engagement with the practice of evolutionary biology, nor does it respond to the many criticisms that have been leveled against earlier versions of its central ideas. In this latter respect, the authors resemble the creationist debaters who assert that evolution is incompatible with the second law of thermodynamics, hear detailed refutations of their charge, and repeat their patter in the next forum.

The essay is enjoyable, but as I was reading it I did start to think that one of the resemblances between What Darwin Got Wrong and standard Intelligent Design works is that they serve to tie up scholars in refuting their arguments.

In 1997, Sports Illustrated asked “What Ever Happened To The White Athlete?”

Unsure of his place in a sports world dominated by blacks who are hungrier, harder-working and perhaps physiologically superior, the young white male is dropping out of the athletic mainstream to pursue success elsewhere

Read the whole thing. Some excerpts and comments below.
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For various reasons it was no longer feasible to run this website on Blogger. So I’ve switched over to WP. So please update your RSS feeds:

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Update: If you’re subscribed via the Feedburner feed, http://feeds.feedburner.com/GeneExpression, you don’t need to change anything. Just changed its feed address

Two posts for your consideration.
On the Less Wrong weblog, Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych. I am not one to make blanket dismissals of “evolutionary psychology.” But, there are structural problems with the strong incentives toward generating hypotheses at the equipoise of novelty and intuitive plausibility. In other words, much of the evo-psych which penetrates the broader public mindspace is driven by demand-side forces.
Over at EconLog Bryan Caplan has a post, Born Gay, where the newly famous Ryan Sorba is shown to be pretty close to a total behavior genetics denialist. Until they find the “gay gene” Sorba & company will reject the behavior genetics findings. Unfortunately, if the “gay gene” hasn’t been found yet, we might have to a wait a while (i.e., probably not a common variant of large effect). It would be nice to do a survey of the rejection of specific behavior genetic results as a function of ideological differences. The is-ought problem doesn’t seem to be a problem for most people; it seems a background assumption, so that what is is actually back-derived from what ought to be.

For various reasons it was no longer feasible to run the Gene Expression Classic website on Blogger. So I’ve switched over to WP. Please update your RSS feeds if you are subscribed to that blog:
http://www.gnxp.com/wp/feed

Sweden Beats Finland in Rematch of ’06 Hockey Final.