genetics
razib | August 31, 2006A reader pointed me to this fascinating, if tragic, article about the rise of rare recessive diseases among a schismatic Mormon sect which dominates Colorado City. This group has been in the news since the their "prophet" was just arrested. The article points out that because of the inbred nature of the community, and its small size, one particular rare disease, Fumerase Deficiency, has now become rather common. I have talked about inbreeding before. Most of us know the problems that crop up intuitively from experience, rare traits begin to spread in an inbred population. But, what needs…
razib | August 31, 2006Lubos Motl asked me to comment on this majestic post by a computational biologist at Stanford. This paragraph is worth quoting:
I will enumerate three main points, all of which represent both a challenge and an opportunity. The first will deal with a scientific challenge of a theoretical orientation, namely the lack of a theory for biology. The second with the sociological organization of biologists and biology departments at the leading research institutions. And the third will be part science, part sociology, having to do with the focus of current experimental methods and programs on…
razib | August 28, 2006Last week I pointed you to 10 questions for Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, and hinted that there is another 10 Qs for another student of R.A. Fisher. Well, that time has come, today David B. posted his 10 questions for A.W.F. Edwards. I want to follow up last week's theme in regards to population substructure, because A.W.F. Edwards has been the most prominent recent expositer of why phylogeny, clustering of populations, is still possible though we are a genetically young and homogenous species. We asked A.W.F. Edwards on his motivations for writing Lewontin's Fallacy, and I think you'll find…
evolgen | August 28, 2006
This is a reminder that I will be hosting the fifth edition of Mendel's Garden. Mendel's Garden is a blog carnival devoted to genetics. If you have written a genetics related entry on your blog and would like it to be included in the carnival, either email me (evolgen [at] yahoo [dot] com) or use the Blog Carnival submission page. You may submit entries relating to quantitative genetics, molecular genetics, evolutionary genetics, developmental genetics, or anything else genetical in nature. The deadline for submission is this Friday (September 1).
razib | August 27, 2006OK, so I finally read Coming to Life by Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard. Unfortunately, I am having a hard time finding something original to say. To recap, Janet, Shellee, Bora (hey, check out Bora's link, books_coming_to_life_by_christ.php!), RPM, The Poreless One and PZ hit this book hard. The reviews are damn thorough, and you have a wide disciplinary perspective, from neuroscience to developmental biology to evolutionary genetics to physiology to biochemistry, and over into philosophy. How's that for multidimensional?
So where does that leave me? Since I am so late already I figured I…
razib | August 26, 2006Like sex, altruism is a great mystery in the life sciences, especially in the case of humans (because of is generous expression). Neither kin selection nor reciprocal altruism seem able to explain the scale of human societies, their cooperativeness, their often unselfish nature. Several years back David Sloan Wilson and Elliott Sober wrote Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior to offer their own model, which works within a multi-level selection paradigm which suggests that cooperation and altruism are favored at the level of groups, above and apart from their…
razib | August 26, 2006Kathryn Jean Lopez is very skeptical of the new stem cell method. I think you might have to put a pitchfork in it then, it seems like she would be hyping it if she thought it could go anywhere....
razib | August 25, 2006RPM comments on some issues relating to human genetics. First, he points to the article about how conservatives are going to outbreed liberals, etc. etc. etc. The problem with this article is that the Left & the Right have been around since the late 18th century and history marches Leftward even though one assumes the Right has been breeding at a higher clip for the past 8+ generations. What gives?
First, there is a heritable component to political orientation. That is, a proportion (around 0.5) of the variation in of conservatism or liberalism within the population is attributable…
evolgen | August 24, 2006Jim Crow has published a perspective in Genetics on his favorite reviewers from 1952-1956 when he was associate editor of the journal. He prefaces it by writing:
As far as I can ascertain, the editorial correspondence from that period is lost, so I am writing this from memory. Naturally, my recollections of events half a century ago are fallible, but I think I remember the essence. The identity of reviewers was confidential, so some of what follows is a breach of that confidence. I do not know whether there is a statute of limitations, but it seems reasonable that after half a century some…
razib | August 23, 2006Stem cell breakthrough promises to overcome ethical objections. I don't know, this is going to be all over the news, well, it already is. I don't think Ramesh Ponnuru or Kathryn Lopez are going to shut up about it for a long time. I am cautiously optimistic, but unfortunately this will be immediately heralded and accepted because of the ethical issues that some have with embryonic stem cells, whether it turns out to be a dead end or not. I have no great insights on this, so go read the articles, or check out the other ScienceBlogs (I happened to check google news, so that's why I hit it…
clock | August 23, 2006Not really a review of Greg Bear's "Darwin's Radio" and "Darwin's Children" but musing (practically SF itself) on the topic of these books (from April 20, 2005):
Did A Virus Make You Smart?
I've been reading science-fiction pretty much all my life. I usually go through "phases" when I hit on a particular author and read several books by the same person. Last year I was in my Greg Bear phase and I have read eight of his books. He is one of those writers who gets better with age: more recent his book, more I liked it.
His is also some of the hardest of hard sci-fi around. He must be a…
razib | August 23, 2006Update: Over at Genetics and Health:
Last month, 12-year-old Bobby Stephens, Jr. died after football practice in Florida. This week, his family learned that he carried genes for both Hemoglobin S and Hemoglobin E. There have only been 27 documented cases world-wide of people who've died as a result of the combination of both of these two genetic mutations.
...
Hemoglobin S. This the predominant hemoglobin in people with sickle cell disease.
...
Hemoglobin E trait is benign. Hemoglobin E is extremely common in S.E. Asia and in some areas equals hemoglobin A in frequency.
...
Bobby had a…
clock | August 21, 2006Several ScienceBloggers are reviewing Coming To Life today (see reviews by Janet, Shelley, RPM, Nick and PZ Edit: Razib has also posted his take), each one of us from a different perspective and looking from a different angle, so go read them to get the full scoop.
PZ Myers reviewed the book a few weeks ago. Someting that struck me was that PZ said that the book :
"....assumes nothing more than that the reader is intelligent and curious. Seriously, you don't need a biology degree to read it!"
...while a reviewer, Edward F. Strasser (a math PhD whose hobby is reviewing books from this angle…
evolgen | August 21, 2006During the early part of the twentieth century, biological research was somewhat disjointed. Naturalists studied organisms and populations in the wild; geneticists were working out the mechanisms of heredity; and other researchers were figuring out how animals develop from a fertilized egg to an adult. One important union occurred when the naturalists and geneticists came together to study the genetics of natural populations. This led to the field of population genetics, which is still providing us with insights into the mechanisms of evolution today. Another major advance occurred when…
pharyngula | August 20, 2006The Inoculated Mind twists a Calvin and Hobbes comic to make a point about debates with creationists…I don't know if I should endorse that kind of tinkering with Holy Writ.
Oh, and while you're over there, Karl is also hosting Mendel's Garden #4.
pharyngula | August 18, 2006Well, there I am again, mentioned in an article in Nature (Nature Reviews Genetics, actually), but I have to agree with RPM: it's an awfully thin article that draws unwarranted and hasty conclusions from a tiny sample. It would have been better to actually talk to some of the people blogging about genes and genetics—we tend to be a voluble bunch, I think, and would have given her plenty of material to work with—rather than glancing at a few sites and trying to draw grand generalizations from them.
Skipper M (2006) Would Mendel have been a blogger? Nature Reviews Genetics 7:664.
razib | August 18, 2006Over at my other weblog there is a post titled Reconstructing human origins in the genomic era, a commentary on a review paper in Nature. Here are the two bullet points I want to highlight:
These genome-scale patterns could be best accounted for by models that involve low levels of gene flow among archaic populations before the emergence of anatomically modern humans - that is, they imply the existence of ancestral population structure.
There is also growing evidence that some highly divergent genetic lineages might have entered our genome through hybridization between an expanding…
evolgen | August 18, 2006Nature Reviews Genetics has published a terrible review of genetics blogging. And it's not just because they don't link to yours truly. The author links to Alex and Paul Zed, which means she knows about the ScienceBlogs empire network. I guess she didn't poke around long enough to find evolgen or Gene Expression. Maybe she saw them and wasn't sure if they were genetics blogs; it's not like the names give them away.
The article sucks for the most part because it's an exercise in shoddy research. The author attributes Mendel's Garden to Hsien-Hsien Lei. Hsien hosted the second edition, but the…