Evolution

Here: Allen Orr, my first Ph.D. student, has developed a thriving career as a popular book reviewer, and in this week’s New York Review of Books, he critique’s Nicholas Wade’s new book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. I made a few comments on this book a few days ago, saying that it was in the main pretty bad, though one part, the presentation of the case for genetic differentiation of human populations, was not too bad. But Wade’s main thesis was that differences between human societies, as well as rapid changes within human societies, was due to evolutionary change mediated by natural selection. That latter contention, I claimed, had no evidence behind it, though Wade argued otherwise. Read More ›

There are many “Neutral Theorists” who maintain that there is a lot of “junk-DNA,” among which long, non-coding DNA=lncDNA is some of the “junkiest.” But now consider this from Wikipedia: Nevertheless, despite low conservation of long ncRNAs in general, it should be noted that many long ncRNAs still contain strongly conserved elements. For example, 19% of highly conserved phastCons elements occur in known introns, and another 32% in unannotated regions (Siepel 2005). Furthermore, a representative set of human long ncRNAs exhibit small, yet significant, reductions in substitution and insertion/deletion rates indicative of purifying selection that conserve the integrity of the transcript at the levels of sequence, promoter and splicing (Ponjavic 2007). If lncDNA is ‘junk’, then according to ‘neutral theory’ Read More ›