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?

_{(note: comments do not require an email. ugly fish!)}

linkfest – 02/25/13

Natural selection acts to maintain diversity between Out of Africa and sub-Saharan African populations in genes related to neurological processes and brain development – aapa abstract @race/history/evolution notes.

Hispanic Genomic Diversity, Part I: European, African, and Amerindian Admixtures and the Taíno ‘Extinction’ Controversy – “This post deals with the variance in European, African, and Amerindian/Taíno admixture in five of the twenty Hispanic subgroups….” – from nelson!

Misguided Nostalgia for Our Paleo Past – “Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending even suggest that human evolution as a whole has, on the contrary, accelerated over the last several thousand years, and they also believe that relatively isolated groups of people, such as Africans and North Americans, are subject to differing selection. That leads to the somewhat uncomfortable suggestion that such groups might be evolving in different directions—a controversial notion to say the least.” – i dunno why that suggestion should be uncomfortable, but i guess it is. -?- see also steve sailer.

Predictable evolution trumps randomness of mutations – “Separate bacteria populations may respond to environmental changes in identical ways.”

Mediterranean Diet Cuts Heart Disease Risk – IN MEDITERRANEAN PEOPLE! – “Heart disease experts said the study was a triumph because it showed that a diet was powerful in reducing heart disease risk, and it did so using the most rigorous methods. Scientists randomly assigned 7,447 people in Spain who were overweight, were smokers, or had diabetes or other risk factors for heart disease to follow the Mediterranean diet or a low-fat one.” – *facepalm*

Where Men See White, Women See Ecru – “Neuroscientists prove what we always suspected: the two sexes see the world differently” – i love ecru!

Why Women Talk More Than Men: Language Protein Uncovered – FOXP2 gene. and an objection: The “Language” Gene and Women’s Wagging Tongues.

Bone Marrow Transplants: When Race Is an Issue – via hbd biblography.

“Know Thyself” Is A Lot To Ask

Low mobility associated with inherited ability is no social tragedy – from gregory clark, via jayman.

The sociology of dysgenia – “Eugenics is a great idea, and perhaps it’s not as complex as I make it to be here. But the fact remains that for all we speculate, we know very, very little about it.” – from spandrell. via foseti.

Modern sub-fertility may be a pathologically slow life history, triggered by a supernormal stimulus of modernity – from bruce charlton. see also mangan and malcolm pollack.

The Riddle of the Human Species – multilevel selection argumentation from e.o. wilson. i like the opening paragraphs very much. (^_^)

Can India’s Democracy Defeat Corruption? – “Of course, big corruption scandals are commonplace in the developing world (and the developed world, for that matter). Yet the scale and relative peacefulness of the corruption debate in India may be unprecedented…. And although the Indian political system is imperfect in ways too numerous to list here, the central authorities most of the time do respect free speech and free press. Civil society works. Freedom of association works….”

Study finds maize in diets of people in coastal Peru dates to 5,000 years ago – “Up until now, the prevailing theory was that marine resources, not agriculture and corn, provided the economic engine behind the development of civilization in the Andean region of Peru.”

Fun With HBD: Racial Differences in Women’s Asses – (~_^)

How Christianity stopped Anglo-Saxon England eating horsemeat: Church officials claimed it was ‘pagan’ food

bonus: The Big Question – “Q: What day most changed the course of history?” – i like freeman dyson’s response. (^_^)

bonus bonus: Dolphins Call Each Other By Name – “Bottlenose dolphins call out the specific names of loved ones when they become separated, a study finds. Other than humans, the dolphins are the only animals known to do this….”

bonus bonus bonus: The Meanest Girls at the Watering Hole – behavioral evidence suggests that hierarchy is heriditary in elephants.

bonus bonus bonus bonus: Grey langurs spotted treating a wild dog to a grooming session in India

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: How male alligators have PERMANENTLY erect penises which they keep hidden inside their bodies

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Most zombie ant photographs are upside down

bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: The 15th-Century Equivalent of Your Cat Walking on Your Keyboard – meow!

_{(note: comments do not require an email. it’s a dog’s life.)}

tweaking just ONE gene…

…is all it takes to get some of the most recognizable of racial differences between human populations.

via steve sailer, from nicholas wade in the nyt:

East Asian Physical Traits Linked to 35,000-Year-Old Mutation

“Gaining a deep insight into human evolution, researchers have identified a mutation in a critical human gene as the source of several distinctive traits that make East Asians different from other races.

“The traits — thicker hair shafts, more sweat glands, characteristically identified teeth and smaller breasts — are the result of a gene mutation that occurred about 35,000 years ago, the researchers have concluded….

“The first of those sites to be studied contains the gene known as EDAR. Africans and Europeans carry the standard version of the gene, but in most East Asians, one of the DNA units has mutated.

“Seeking to understand if the gene was the cause of thicker hair in East Asians with the variant gene, a team of researchers led by Yana G. Kamberov and Pardis C. Sabeti at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., decided to test the gene in mice, where its effects could be more easily explored….

“The Broad team engineered a strain of mice whose EDAR gene had the same DNA change as the East Asian version of EDAR.

“When the mice grew up, the researchers found they did indeed have thicker hair shafts, confirming that the changed gene was the cause of East Asians’ thicker hair. But the gene had several other effects, they report in Thursday’s issue of the journal Cell.

“One was that the mice, to the researchers’ surprise, had extra sweat glands. A Chinese member of the team, Sijia Wang, then tested people in China and discovered that they, too, had more numerous sweat glands, evidently another effect of the gene.

“Another surprise was that the engineered mice had less breast tissue, meaning that EDAR could be the reason that East Asian women have generally smaller breasts.

“East Asians have distinctively shaped teeth for which their version of EDAR is probably responsible. But the mice were less helpful on this point; their teeth are so different from humans’ that the researchers could not see any specific change….

“A team led by Dr. Sabeti and Sharon R. Grossman of the Broad Institute has now refined the usual scanning methods and identified 412 sites on the genome that have been under selection. Each site is small enough that it contains at most a single gene.

“Each race has a different set of selected regions, reflecting the fact that the human population had dispersed from its African homeland and faced different challenges that led to genetic adaptation on each continent. About 140 of the sites affected by natural selection are in Europeans, 140 in East Asians and 132 in Africans, the authors report in another article published Thursday in Cell….“

so cool!

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linkfest – 11/20/11

Parasites drove human genetic variation – “Adapting to pathogens was more important than climate and diet in driving natural selection.”

Neanderthals ‘hit by globalisation’ – “Neanderthals may have vanished after being swallowed up by Stone Age ‘globalisation’, according to a new theory. Rather than being driven into extinction, they lost their identity after interbreeding with early modern humans and adopting their culture, it is claimed.”

Neanderthal Neuroscience – @the loom.

Oral contraceptive use is associated with prostate cancer: an ecological study – “A significant association between OCs and PCa has been shown. It is hypothesised that the OC effect may be mediated through environmental oestrogen levels; this novel concept is worth further investigation.” – oops.

Intelligence across childhood in relation to illegal drug use in adulthood: 1970 British Cohort Study – “High childhood IQ may increase the risk of illegal drug use in adolescence and adulthood.”

Frequent gamers have brain differences, study finds – “They couldn’t determine if the frequent gamers’ brains grew larger as a result of playing video games or if those kids were attracted to gaming because that part of their brain was enlarged in the first place….” – quite so.

Brain scans of happy people show they respond more positively to their environment

Study Finds Link Between Low IQ, Large Waistline – “More men with low intelligence scores at 18 had unhealthy belly size at 40″

Six Black Russians – heh. from greg cochran.

HBD, Left, and Right – @altright.

bonus: Antarctic mountain mystery solved

bonus bonus: Swedish scientists create light from almost nothing

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which altruism genes?

in biology, altruism is defined as more than just lending the neighbor a cup of sugar. being altruistic means reducing one’s own fitness somehow (although i guess that one cup of sugar might, in some instances, be critical to one’s survival!), maybe passing up on a chance to reproduce or even sacrificing one’s own life for another.

seems like every creature on the planet displays some sort of altruistic behavior. plants put down fewer roots (presumably lowering their fitness) in the presence of related plants; some of the amoebas that live together as slime molds sacrifice their lives for their fellow single-celled family members; and, of course, the classic example of the eusocial insects — ants, bees, etc. — who have whole castes that do not reproduce and simply work their little hearts out raising their sisters (to whom they are more genetically related than they would be to their offspring — it’s complicated — don’t ask! or you can read about it here.). if you’re interested, there’s lots more about altruistic behaviors in animals in wikipedia.

my point is: there must be a whole range of altruism genes out there since all sorts of different creatures display all sorts of different altruistic behaviors. one size does not fit all.

furthermore, i’d be willing to bet the bank (hey — it’s not my money!) that there are different altruism genes in different human populations. or, at least, different frequencies of different altruism genes/alleles in different populations.

i’m sure there’s prolly plenty of overlap ’cause we’re all humans, primates, mammals, vertebrates, tetrapods, laurasians, etc., etc. but the various human populations have had quite unique evolutionary histories, so it shouldn’t be surprising if varying frequencies of/different altruism genes/alleles have been selected for here and there.

think of the fact that different genes for light skin color were selected for in europeans versus east asians and you’ll get my drift.

also think about how different peoples seem to display (at least somewhat) different altruistic behaviors. consider suicide bombers who, perhaps comparable to honey bees or g. sulphureus soldier termites who sacrifice themselves to defend their colonies, seem to be more common in some populations (middle eastern, japanese) than others (although maybe these examples are just artifacts of desperate circumstances).

“genes for suicide missions” won’t just pop up out of the blue, or very easily either i imagine. full hymenopteran sisters share 3/4s of their genes with each other, so it’s not surprising that they’re willing to sacrifice everything for their siblings. but it’s hard to see how such “extreme altruism” genes could arise in humans.

however, it is conceivable that, for example, in arab societies — tribal societies based upon a certain mating pattern (fbd marriage) which creates “bands of brothers” — over one thousand years of tribal warfare might’ve selected for a greater willingness to partake in kamikaze behaviors. remember that inbreeding means the evolution of altruism is easier.

it’s just a thought.

in any case, when we’re talking about genes for altruism, i think we should ask ourselves: which altruism genes?

edit: hamilton got here first, of course (^_^) [pgs. 19-20] -

“I do believe in the existence of considerable genetical differences in altruism, in selfishness, and in many other social attributes in most social animals, and this includes in humans, but this belief is certainly not predicated directly from kin-selection theory. Rather, it is underpinned more by a belief in a complexity of life sufficient to generate genetical variability in a almost everything — the variability we actually see — and also, as will appear in Volume 2 of this compilation, by modern theoretical expectations connected with reciprocation and with disease selection. It certainly does not come from kin selection per se.”

previously: genes for altruism

_{(note: comments do not require an email. my favorite altruism cartoon. [the only altruism cartoon?])}