linkfest – 04/21/13

Inbred royals show traces of natural selection – “Study suggests the Spanish Habsburgs evolved to mute the effects of inbreeding, but other geneticists are unconvinced.”

Time to get tough on the physiological causes of crime – “[V]iolent criminals are biologically different from the rest of us.” – review of The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime.

Scientists find ethnicity linked to antibodies – “‘[I]t’s early days,’ emphasizes Watson, ‘but these findings could mean that past environmental exposures to certain pathogens caused DNA insertions or deletions in different ethnic groups, which could impact disease risk. Our results demonstrate that antibody studies need to take into account the ethnicity of DNA samples used.’”

Those resistant to ‘love hormone’ may also be easier to hypnotize – “Gene variants linked to social detachment may increase suggestibility.”

One Blessing Of Outbreeding – i didn’t write this, i swear! (you’ll never guess who did…)

The gay germ hypothesis – from peter frost. see also Not Final! from greg cochran.

Another reminder… – “[A] prod to certain of my smart liberal friends to start having children.” – from jayman. see also: The end of paternal investment or, more cads, fewer dads from mr. mangan.

The Strange Case of Dr. Robert Trivers – “[Trivers] has been driven off the campus of Rutgers University! He has been involved in a controversy lately over his accusation that one of his graduate students committed fraud in a scientific paper. Apparently he was banned from campus because a colleague who supports the alleged fraudster claimed Trivers had ‘frightened him in his office’.” – from helian unbound.

Women graduates of elite colleges 1/3rd more likely to be stay-at-home moms – from steve sailer.

Scent of a Man: Women Can Sniff Out a Hot Guy – “Women at their peak fertility prefer the smell of men oozing with testosterone, a new study finds.” – and speaking of testosterone: Testosterone pumps up threats for tough guys – “The higher a man’s testosterone level, the more macho he’s likely to act when his masculinity is threatened, a new study finds.”

The Real ‘Hobbit’ Had Larger Brain Than Thought

Egyptian mummies yield genetic secrets – “The ancient Egyptians could soon be getting their genomes sequenced as a matter of routine.”

Why Menopause?

Stonehenge occupied 5,000 years earlier than thought

The Pattern of Female Nuptiality in Oman – “[M]ore than half (52%) of the total marriages in Oman are consanguineous. First cousin unions are the most common type of consanguineous unions, constituting 39% of all marriages and 75% of all consanguineous marriages. About 11% of the marriages are polygynous…. [P]aternal first-cousin marriages constituted 27.7% of all marriages and 72% (565/786) of all first-cousin marriages, while maternal first-cousin marriages constituted 10.8% of all marriages and 28% (221/786) of all first-cousin marriages.”

The Ancient Greeks & Romans, Beauty and Human Biodiversity – @occam’s razor.

Could Life Be Older Than Earth Itself? – “[T]wo geneticists have applied Moore’s Law to the rate at which life on Earth grows in complexity — and the results suggest organic life first came into existence long before Earth itself.”

Chimps Communicate Like Passionate Italians – my favorite headline of the week. (^_^)

Live fast, die younger: Actors, singers and sportsman ‘die seven and a half years before other high achievers’

Historic human remains yield epigenetic tags – see also: Epigenetic Inheritance: Fact or Fiction?

Icelandic anti-incest app keeps residents from becoming kissin’ cousins – previously íslendingabók.

‘Real men wear kilts’: The anecdotal evidence that wearing a Scottish kilt has influence on reproductive potential: how much is true? – keep wearin’ yer kilt!

Did this magical little crystal help the Vikings rape and pillage across the world? – “Research suggests crystal salvaged from a shipwreck may be a sunstone”

bonus: What rights should Dzhokhar Tsarnaev get and why does it matter? – “The Obama DOJ says it intends to question the Boston bombing suspect ‘extensively’ without first Mirandizing him”

bonus bonus: Applicants wanted for a one-way ticket to Mars – let’s go! (^_^)

bonus bonus bonus: ‘Living fossil’ genome unlocked – “The genes of an ancient fish, the coelacanth, have much to reveal about our distant past.”

bonus bonus bonus bonus: Chlamydia Is Killing Koalas — Will Genetics Find a Cure?

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linkfest – 01/14/13

late linkfest again! sorry. (*^_^*)

Group Selection (and homosexuality) and Homosexuality, epigenetics, and zebras – from greg cochran. also, from jayman -
A Gay Germ? Is Homophobia a Clue?

The Trouble with Epigenetics (Part 1) – “[E]ven though epigenetic mechanisms may be involved in maintaining some stable traits over the lifetime of the animal, they are just that: mechanisms. Not causes. Epigenetics is not a source of variance, it is part of the mechanism whereby certain environmental factors or experiences have their effects.” (in other words, epigenetics is not magic.)

DNA ‘identichip’ gives a detailed picture of a suspect – “The VisiGen team tested the chip on more than 3000 DNA samples collected around the world, and found that it was 99 per cent accurate at predicting gender. The chip also predicted European or East Asian ancestry with an accuracy of 97 per cent, and African ancestry in 88 per cent of cases. However, it was only 63 per cent accurate at predicting blond hair….”

What did our ancestors look like? – “A new method of establishing hair and eye colour from modern forensic samples can also be used to identify details from ancient human remains….”

Black homicide rates by state – from the awesome epigone. compare to his White homicide rates by state. also, from hail: White Murder Rates by U.S. State, 1960 (vs. 2010).

People With Brown Eyes Appear More Trustworthy, But That’s Not The Whole Story – “‘Brown-eyed individuals tend to be perceived as more trustworthy than blue-eyed ones,’ explain the authors. ‘But it is not brown eyes that cause this perception. It is the facial morphology linked to brown eyes.’” – see also dienekes.

Networking Ability a Family Trait in Monkeys – “Social behaviors have been acted on by natural selection”

Cheating — and getting away with it – “Scientists have found a gene that allows amoebae to pass on more than their fair share of their genes but doesn’t make them less fit in other ways”

Banded mongooses structure monosyllabic sounds in a similar way to humans

America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead – “New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic.” – maybe.

Darwin Was Wrong About Dating – maybe.

How Did Humans Figure Out That Sex Makes Babies?

bonus: #overlyhonestmethods is the PostSecret of the science world, and it is amazing – heh. (^_^)

bonus bonus: Why I Am Not an Atheist – from kanazawa.

bonus bonus bonus: Immigrant mothers in Britain could be aborting unwanted girls, ministers admit after study of birth rates

bonus bonus bonus bonus: Why is gingerism so common in Britain? – from ed west.

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: China’s one-child law: Less competitive adults?

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linkfest – 03/18/12

Investing Practices Significantly Heritable – from dennis mangan.

Fifty-seven Years of Darkness – @the loom.

Recent generations focus more on fame, money than giving back – “Young adults less interested in community issues, politics and environment, finds new research”

Why do wealthy white conservative women have more children? – “Because they are more religious and less educated than liberal women.” – from the inductivist.

Why are redheads less common than blondes? – from peter frost.

Epigenetics and epidemiology — hip, hype and science – “Given the huge range of epigenetic variation and the relatively small effect size of environmental influences on the epigenome, investigation at the level of the individual may produce little but random noise. However … studied at the population level, epigenetics has much to offer to the understanding of disease aetiology and epidemiology has much to offer the field of epigenetics.”

Evan Charney’s Critique of Genopolitics and the Genetic Paradigm – “Human genetics constrains but does not determine human cultures and human judgments.” – from larry arnhart.

bonus: Write Your Own Academic Sentence – e.g.: The construction of history as such functions as the conceptual frame for the culture of power/knowledge. – heh. (^_^)

bonus bonus: Women and Children First – wow. how can you have NO memory of childhood?

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curioser and curioser

just when you think you’ve got inbreeding and genetics sorted out in your head (almost — well, no, not really), they throw something new at ya.

here’s an article that linton @nobabies.net pointed out to me (thanks, linton!):

“Epigenetics Linked to Inbreeding Depression”
16 September 2011

“Inbreeding depression is the bane of conservation biology. When closely related individuals mate, which can happen when there aren’t too many members of a species left, their offspring are often less fit and less fertile, making the species all the more vulnerable. Both plants and animals can suffer from inbreeding depression, and textbooks typically attribute this phenonmenon to genetics: Recessive genes with harmful effects, whose negative influences are normally masked by a dominant copy of a gene, are more likely to pair up in offspring of more genetically similar parents.

“Or so the theory goes.

“But Philippine Vergeer, an evolutionary ecologist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, suspects that epigenetics — chemical modifications to the DNA that alter gene activity — may also be to blame, at least in plants….

“Vergeer and her Radboud colleagues Niels Wagemaker and Joop Ouborg compared DNA methylation between outbred and inbred S. columbaria — also known as small scabious — derived from the same mother plant. Methylation was 10% higher in inbred plants…. Also, inbred and outbred plants have different parts of their genomes methylated.

“The scientists then decided to look at what happened to plant offspring if they reconfigured the flora’s methylation. Every day for a week, they exposed germinating seeds of inbred and outbred plants to a demethylating agent. The result: ‘Phenotypic differences between outbred and inbred plants are nullified,’ Vergeer reported….”

so, at least in the case of these little plants, inbreeding depression seems to be connected to epigenetics and not genetics. when they reversed the epigenetics in these plants, the inbred plants photosynthesized (which is what the researchers were measuring) just as well as the outbred plants.

neato!

there has been some research done showing that epigenetic states are probably regulated (if that’s the right way to put it) by the underlying genetics, so perhaps the inbreeding depression in these plants was still a result of too many “bad genes.” but it’s cool that they could reverse the inbreeding depression by getting rid of the methylation!

there have also been studies, of course, showing that some epigentic states can be inherited across a few or several generations.

see also: Inbreeding and epigenetics: beneficial as well as deleterious effects

previously: the genetics of epigenetics

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the genetics of epigenetics

tschafer said: “I can see that ‘epigenetics’ is going to be this century’s excuse for socialism, just as ‘environmental determinism’ was last century’s excuse…. If enviornment predominates, well, we need to manipulate the environment to breed the New Socialist Man. If epigenitics is a factor, we must manipulate the environment in order to influence mutable genes.”

sho’nuff, the lefties seem to be lovin’ epigenetics: Why Your DNA Isn’t Your Destiny.

*facepalm*

epigenetics is cool, no doubt. along with other things, some epigenetic thingies [<< technical term] seem to be relatively short-term hacks of the genome in order to enable organisms to more quickly "adapt" to the environment. if there's a shortage of food, it might be useful that the next generation or two can metabolize food differently and, perhaps, extract more calories/nutrition than otherwise. (of course, if the environment doesn't remain so detrimental, the next generation or two might wind up obese and/or with high rates of diabetes.) this is a great adaptation to have — it means your lineage won't necessarily disappear immediately if the environment goes somewhat sour on you. gives the lineage a little time to adapt properly before being selected right out of the gene pool.

and that's the part that the happy leftists are missing from their thinking [sic] about epigenetics. epigenetics is obviously some sort of adaptation … so it must be coded for in our genes somewhere. that methylation happens to alter the expression of genes isn’t some miracle, however amazing it may be. it’s coded for:

“An N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea screen for genes involved in variegation in the mouse” [opens pdf]

“Despite the fact that the epigenetic state of the eukaryotic genome has profound effects on ultimate phenotype, little is known about the mechanisms by which these states are established. In mammals, genomewide epigenetic reprogramming occurs during both gametogenesis and early embryonic development (1). For technical reasons, mainly related to the challenges of manipulating such small starting material, it has been difficult to study these events. We have designed a screen to detect genes involved in establishing and maintaining the epigenetic state of the genome in the mouse by screening for mutations that affect variegated gene expression in the adult….

“Using a sensitized screen for modifiers of transgene variegation in the mouse, we have identified a number of mutations that affect epigenetic reprogramming during gametogenesis and early development….

“These mutant lines should provide a valuable resource for those working in the field of epigenetics. The study demonstrates the power of sensitized screens not only for the discovery of novel genes involved in a particular process but also for the elucidation of the biology of that process.”

in other words, there are genes behind epigenetics, and since all individuals are different, there are variations in these genes behind epigenetics. in fact, i’ll bet anyone $1.00 — no, $1.50! — that different frequencies of these genes will be found in different populations.

it might be epigenetics we’re talking about here, but it’s still biology.

see also: The case for transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans [pdf] and Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance: More questions than answers

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