Category: Genetics
A pattern of laws of tooth development identified
| April 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Genetics, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: In a study published this week in Science Advances, an international team of researchers from Arizona State University’s Institute of Human Origins and School of Human Evolution and Social Change, New York University, University of Kent, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology found that a simple, straightforward developmental rule — the […]
Is “race” a dying concept?
| March 25, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Genetics |
From David Reich at New York Times: One hopes so. In 1942, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu published “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race,” an influential book that argued that race is a social concept with no genetic basis. A classic example often cited is the inconsistent definition of “black.” In the United States, […]
Comparing human and chimp DNA, using a software analogy
| March 23, 2018 | Posted by News under Animal minds, Genetics, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Mind |
From Walter Myers III at ENST: While much of the DNA code may be the same, the parts that are not the same have significant differences. The programs I described above, such as Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat, have different purposes, yet they all depend on the same OS that consists of tens of millions of […]
Neanderthal gene flow was mostly one way
| March 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Genetics, Human evolution, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: The team also compared these Neandertal genomes to the genomes of people living today, and showed that all of the late Neandertals were more similar to the Neandertals that contributed DNA to present-day people living outside Africa than an older Neandertal from Siberia. Intriguingly, even though four of the Neandertals lived at a […]
Researchers: Modern humans “interbred with” Denisovans twice
| March 21, 2018 | Posted by News under Genetics, Genomics, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, speciation |
From ScienceDaily: Modern humans co-existed and interbred not only with Neanderthals, but also with another species of archaic humans, the mysterious Denisovans. Research now describes how, while developing a new genome-analysis method for comparing whole genomes between modern human and Denisovan populations, researchers unexpectedly discovered two distinct episodes of Denisovan genetic intermixing, or admixing, between […]
Was the media coverage of identical twins’ DNA in space horrific?
| March 17, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
From John Timmer at Ars Technica: Why are people excited about Kelly’s DNA? The simple answer would seem to be that he has an identical twin, who must have identical DNA, and so we have a chance to see what space does to DNA. After all, space is a high-radiation environment, and we know that […]
Now that’s different: Identical twins, one in space, have different DNA?
| March 12, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Extraterrestrial life, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
From NASA: The Twin Study propelled NASA into the genomics era of space travel. It was a ground-breaking study comparing what happened to astronaut Scott Kelly, in space, to his identical twin brother, Mark, who remained on Earth. The perfect nature versus nurture study was born. The Twins Study brought ten research teams from around […]
Nick Matzke’s research critiqued in Journal of BioGeography
| February 19, 2018 | Posted by News under academic freedom, Darwinism, Evolution, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
Readers may remember Nick Matzke, especially for getting a publisher to abandon the Cornell University papers and for other contributions to Darwinism. A reader now writes to tell us that two Field Museum researchers have just published a critique of Nick Matzke’s (probable) most important contribution to research so far. “Conceptual and statistical problems with […]
At Chemistry world: Is Richard Dawkins’ selfish gene a dated idea?
| February 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
From Philip Ball at Chemistry World: Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book The selfish gene, which topped a poll last year for the most inspiring science books of all time, has set the agenda for how we think about genes and DNA. ‘We are,’ he famously said, ‘all survival machines for the same kind of replicator – […]
Adam and Eve: Some of those just-a-myth citations turned out to be fig leaves
| February 11, 2018 | Posted by News under Genetics, Genomics, Human evolution, Intelligent Design, Religion, theistic evolution |
They withered under study. There’s been a lively discussion between geneticists Dennis Venema and Richard Buggs and about whether the human race must have had more than one pair of ancestors (Venema yes, Buggs no). From Evolution News and Science Today: Earlier, we saw that evolutionary genomicist Richard Buggs has been engaged in a dialogue with […]
Genetic novelty conference: “Errors cannot explain genetic novelty and complexity.”
| February 7, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Genetics, Genomics, Intelligent Design, Media, Science |
From Guenther Witzany, Telos-Philosophische Praxis, Salzburg-Austria, Corrado Spadafora, CNR National Research Council of Italy, and Luis Villarreal, University of California here: Evolution – Genetic Novelty/Genomic Variations by RNA Networks and Viruses, 4 – 8 July 2018 Salzburg – Austria For more than half a century it has been accepted that new genetic information is mostly derived from […]
Researchers: A mutational timer is built into DNA chemistry
| February 5, 2018 | Posted by News under Design inference, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: Every time our cells divide, the DNA within them must replicate so that each new cell receives the same set of instructions. Molecular machines known as polymerases make these copies of DNA by recognizing the shape of the right base pair combinations — G with C and A with T — and adding […]
Researchers: Genes can be suppressed by sound stimulation
| February 5, 2018 | Posted by News under Epigenetics, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: In a new PLOS ONE study, scientists from Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Biostudies have shown that certain ‘mechanosensitive’ genes are suppressed when subjected to audible sound. Moreover, these effects vary depending on cell type, where some don’t show any sensitivity. … “One such gene we examined helps in bone formation, and is […]
Researchers: Mechanism may exist in all animals for filtering out mitochondrial DNA mutations
| January 23, 2018 | Posted by News under Darwinism, Evolution, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: The team studied the transparent roundworm (C. elegans), which shares about 60-80% of the same genes as humans, to shed light on the importance of mechanisms regulating the frequency of gene mutations in different cells and organs. “C. elegans and humans share very similar mitochondria, and it is a useful organism as we […]
Should NASA look for viruses in space?
| January 18, 2018 | Posted by News under Cell biology, Extraterrestrial life, Genetics, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life |
From Alex Barash at Slate: The not-quite life forms have a bad rap. But they’re a reliable sign of life, and it would be exciting to find them in space. For one thing, viruses are an excellent indicator for life itself: Wherever there’s life on Earth, there are viruses, too, and almost invariably in far […]
Researchers: Cross-species gene regulation observed for the first time
| January 16, 2018 | Posted by News under Genetics, Genomics, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From ScienceDaily: Dodder, a parasitic plant that causes major damage to crops in the US and worldwide every year, can silence the expression of genes in the host plants from which it obtains water and nutrients. This cross-species gene regulation, which includes genes that contribute to the host plant’s defense against parasites, has never before […]
New hypothesis as to why flowering plants predominate
| January 15, 2018 | Posted by News under 'Junk DNA', Evolution, Genetics, Intelligent Design, Plants |
From ScienceDaily: Scientists have found an explanation for how flowering plants became dominant so rapidly in ecosystems across the world — a problem that Charles Darwin called an ‘abominable mystery’. In a study publishing on January 11 in the open access journal PLOS Biology, Kevin Simonin and Adam Roddy, from San Francisco State University and […]
Identical twins show epigenetic similarity as well. Then what about the famous “twin studies”?
| January 10, 2018 | Posted by News under Epigenetics, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: An international group of researchers has discovered a new phenomenon that occurs in identical twins: independent of their identical genes, they share an additional level of molecular similarity that influences their biological characteristics. The researchers propose a mechanism to explain the extra level of similarity and show that it is associated with risk […]
Researchers: Why are DNA mutations biased toward ‘G-C’ content?
| January 4, 2018 | Posted by News under Evolution, Genetics, Genomics, Intelligent Design |
From ScienceDaily: To make the iconic, twisted double helix that accounts for the diversity of life, DNA rules specify that G always pairs with C, and A with T. But, when it’s all added up, the amount of G+C vs A+T content among species is not a simple fixed percentage or, standard one-to-one ratio. For […]
Down syndrome: It turns out there are human beings in there…
| December 25, 2017 | Posted by News under Culture, Ethics, Genetics, Intelligent Design |
From Coner Friedersdorf at the Atlantic: ‘I Am a Man With Down Syndrome and My Life Is Worth Living’ Last week, the actor, Special Olympian, and advocate Frank Stephens gave this testimony to Congress: “I am a man with Down syndrome and my life is worth living.” In fact, he went farther: “I have a […]
