John Hawkes has a longish article up on If you are going to "debunk" race with gene testing, please stop where he says among other things:


Humans do not have discrete races. Racial groups in humans do not have reproductive boundaries. Genetic variation in humans is clinal. Allele frequencies of most human genes do not vary by much between populations.


Hmmm, I guess I knew the bit about no reproductive boundaries at a personal level, both by inspection and by practice ...

However, it seems to me that denying the existance of "loose" racial groupings removes an important diagnostic tool in some cases, and doesn't buy us much in return.

Of course, I agree with his conclusion.

Hmmm, Dienekes has an update on Debunking the concept of 'race' ... not which is what lead John Hawks to write his post, it seems to me.

Dienekes concludes with this:


So, the concept of 'race' has not been debunked by modern genetics. Rather, it has been victoriously confirmed.


and includes this update:


John Hawks has much to say about this "debunking" of race, also addressing some problems of the DNA Print test.


However, I think that John Hawks is not addressing what Dienekes claims. If anything, the message I get from Hawks' posting is that any presumption of the existence of pure races is just so much bunkum.

My take is that at best we can talk about "loose" racial groupings, but they can be very useful in some circumstances ...

"the message I get from Hawks' posting is that any presumption of the existence of pure races is just so much bunkum."

If "pure" is defined as having a genetic make up that would have existed had there not been any interbreeding between different races after the current racial groupings formed, it may be a logical possibility that some people are "pure" in their racial ancestry because the genetic material from other races has been diluted over time. But presumably, this would correspond to purity of ancestry because of the gene flow between different races.

I meant to say.....some people are "pure" in their genetic make-up with respect to racial identity because the genetic material from other races has been diluted over time. But presumably, this would not correspond to purity of ancestry because of the gene flow between different races.

Scientists crack 40-year-old DNA puzzle and point to ‘hot soup’ at the origin of life
http://www.bath.ac.uk/news/ artic...code020805.html

“The new theory builds on an original idea suggested by Francis Crick - one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA - that the three-letter code evolved from a simpler two-letter code, although Crick thought the difference in number was simply an accident “frozen in time”.

The University of Bath researchers suggest that the primordial ‘doublet’ code was read in threes - but with only either the first two ‘prefix’ or last two ‘suffix’ pairs of bases being actively read.

By combining arrangements of these doublet codes together, the scientists can replicate the table of amino acids - explaining why some amino acids can be translated from groups of 2, 4 or 6 codons. They can also show how the groups of water loving (hydrophilic) and water-hating (hydrophobic) amino acids emerge naturally in the table, evolving from overlapping ‘prefix’ and ‘suffix’ codons.

“When you evolve our theory for a doublet system into a triplet system, you get an exact match up with the number and range of amino acids we see today,” said Dr van den Elsen, who has worked with Dr Stefan Babgy and Huan-Lin Wu on the theory.”

In UT Southwestern researchers find differences in a predictor of heart disease among sexes, races researchers find interesting differences between the levels of CRP in males and females, blacks and whites ...

Interesting post over at John Hawkes on the controversy surrounding the proposed Neandertal diet, was it Mammoth or Fish, due to levels of Nitrogen-15 found in the remains. What we certainly know is that Upper Paleolithic Europeans had higher Nitrogen-15 than Neandertals, and had mammoth bones associated with their living quarters - by which I presume he means the
Gravettian culture.

Well I'll add my own 2 cents, and guess that it was fish they were eating rather than mammoth.

cont'd...

Here's why, some Neandertal specimens have been found to have a (Control-F) bony growth in the ear, and this is also found in surfers and cold water divers, so much that it is called (Control-F) Surfer's Ear!

Also, modern humans with the powerfull physiques, not unlike Neandertals, are found among the seafaring Polynesians, but also the Tehuelche Indians of Patagonia, who lived by diving for fish.

Indeed, or mammoth in fish sauce?

LOL, indeed!

But it does make a difference, in that if they ate mostly fish - as I believe - then we should be searching coastal and riverine areas for their remanins. Most likely their coastal middens are submerged by now.

Man Clones Dog, blames chopsticks.

In the new study, a team led by Woo Suk Hwang of Seoul National University fused individual cells from an adult hound's ear to eggs painstakingly obtained from fertile female dogs.

This required a staggering amount of work because, in contrast to women, dogs cannot be prompted to produce ripe eggs with hormone injections. Instead, the researchers had to monitor the dogs daily for signs of natural egg ripening -- estrus, or "heat," which occurs about twice a year. Then they measured the dogs' blood hormone levels daily.

Within hours after a blood test confirmed that a batch of ripe eggs had been released from a dog's ovaries, Korean veterinarians anesthetized the dog, surgically exposed her reproductive tract and flushed the barely visible eggs into laboratory dishes.

Then began the exquisitely delicate task of extracting the DNA from those eggs. Many eggs are inadvertently destroyed in this process, but Hwang's team is world-renowned for its manual dexterity under the microscope -- a skill Hwang has credited to the Korean tradition of eating food with difficult-to-master steel chopsticks.

MBL researchers probe how an ancient microbe thrives and evolves without sex :-)


In a paper published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), MBL scientists Irina R. Arkhipova and Matthew Meselson provide evidence that suggests bdelloid rotifers--which probably gave up sex at least 50 million years ago but have still evolved into 370 species--handle DNA transposons more efficiently than other asexual species.

Einstein's Brain is now available online (the documentary, that is).

FYI

"I looking for Einstein's bu-RAIN-zu."

Here is the abstract of the first paper on Einstien's brain

Neuron:glial ratios were determined in specific regions of Albert Einstein's cerebral cortex to compare with samples from 11 human male cortices. Cell counts were made on either 6- or 20-micron sections from areas 9 and 39 from each hemisphere. All sections were stained with the Kluver-Barrera stain to differentiate neurons from glia, both astrocytes and oligodendrocytes. Cell counts were made under oil immersion from the crown of the gyrus to the white matter by following a red line drawn on the coverslip. The average number of neurons and glial cells was determined per microscopic field. The results of the analysis suggest that in left area 39, the neuronal: glial ratio for the Einstein brain is significantly smaller than the mean for the control population (t = 2.62, df 9, p less than 0.05, two-tailed). Einstein's brain did not differ significantly in the neuronal:glial ratio from the controls in any of the other three areas studied.

Diamond, M.C., Scheibel, A.B., Murphy, G.M., Jr. and Harvey, T., On the brain of a scientist: Albert Einstein, Experimental Neurology, 88: 198-204, 1985.

Here is the abstract on the second paper on Einstein's brain.

Neuronal density, neuron size, and the number of neurons under 1 mm2 of cerebral cortical surface area were measured in the right pre-frontal cortex of Albert Einstein and five elderly control subjects. Measurement of neuronal density used the optical dissector technique on celloidin-embedded cresyl violet-stained sections. The neurons counted provided a systematic random sample for the measurement of cell body cross-sectional area. Einstein's cortex did not differ from the control subjects in the number of neurons under 1 mm2 of cerebral cortex or in mean neuronal size. Because Einstein's cortex was thinner than the controls he had a greater neuronal density.

Anderson, B. and Harvey T., Alterations in cortical thickness and neuronal density in the frontal cortex of Albert Einstein, Neurosci Lett., 210:161-164, 1996.

Here is the HTML version of the third paper on Einstein's brain.

Witelson, S.F., Kigar, D.L. and Harvey, T., The Exceptional Brain of Albert Einstein, The Lancet, 353:2149-2153, 1999.

Also available in PDF fromat.

The short answers are:

1. Greater glial to neuron ratio in the parietal lobe.

2. Greater neuron density in the cerebral cortex.

3. Shorter lateral sulcus that was partially missing.

4. 15% wider, and thus rounder, than the controls.

Some claim that women have a higher neuronal density as an explanation for why make and female average IQs are similar. They are clearly not aware of the juggling done in most extant IQ tests that is designed to achieve that effect.

However, a more interesting questions is: Are there any real reasons to believe that there could be a sex-specific density difference, given that in males testosterone is produced from a very early age (and is converted to estradiol in the brain) while females do not produce much estrogen until much later and it is actively removed from circulation until just before puberty.

So, to find for greater female neuronal density, one would have to posit that in males the default density is reduced by the effect of circulating hormones (or something else).

More overclocking:

Some studies have suggested that the strength of people's memories is at least partly the result of genetic variation. But no one knew which genes were involved. So the psychiatrists took a look at the prion protein gene (PRNP), which causes mad-cow disease when it misfolds. (No one is sure what it does for us in its normal shape.) People have different versions of PRNP, some of which are more prone to misfolding than others. The scientists genotyped 354 subjects to see which version they carried and then gave them a memory test.

In a paper in press at Human Molecular Genetics, they report that people with one or two copies of the misfolding version recalled 17% more information than those without a copy.

In DDT-resistant insects given genetic boost that helps resistance spread it seems that DDT resistance confers additional benefits ...

Godzilla Pimp says:


From a genetic viewpoint, children are not born innocent but are really the genetic representatives of their parents ...


Get a grip man. From a genetic point of view innocence is irrelevant.

He means probably Blank-Slate innocence type.

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