Genetics

A classic in devolution, actually. In Mozambique, it is estimated that 90% of the elephants have been slaughtered for ivory to finance a civil war that ended in 1992. But tuskless elephants seem more likely to survive: Hunting gave elephants that didn’t grow tusks a biological advantage in Gorongosa. Recent figures suggest that about a third of younger females—the generation born after the war ended in 1992—never developed tusks. Normally, tusklessness would occur only in about 2 to 4 percent of female African elephants. Decades ago, some 4,000 elephants lived in Gorongosa, says Joyce Poole—an elephant behavior expert and National Geographic Explorer who studies the park’s pachyderms. But those numbers dwindled to triple digits following the civil war. New, as Read More ›

Recently, we noted that John Sanford was speaking at NIH on human health and mutations. Philip Cunningham writes to mention a 2017 paper by Sanford and S. T. Cordova, Nylonase Genes and Proteins – Distribution, Conservation, and Possible Origins on whether the ba cteria that digest nylon evolved new genes: We began this work hoping to better understanding the various claims regarding the de novo origin of certain nylonase genes. The idea that nylonases would have arisen very recently, de novo, was based upon the widely-held assumption that nylonases would have been essentially non-existent prior to the artificial manufacture of nylon. This basic assumption would not be justified if there were any nylonlike polymers in nature, or if nylonase activity Read More ›

Geneticist John Sanford is also the author of Genetic Entropy: and one of the editors of Biological Information: New Perspectives: Proceedings of a Symposium Held May 31 Through June 3, 2011 at Cornell University Note: In a distinctly unsavoury move, devout Darwinians managed to get Biological Information dropped by Springer. It is all the more valuable to read for that reason. Nick Matzke famously got the publishing company Springer to suppress the publication of the papers of a conference held at Cornell. See here. He did this without having seen, much less read, any of the papers. Obviously, his motivation could not have been the content of the papers. He was motivated by the mere fact that several of the Read More ›

It’s now suggested that people likely to live long tend to find each other (assortative mating). How else to explain this?Researchers found that siblings’ and first cousins’ lifespans were well correlated but also: But spouses’ lifespans were correlated, too. That could be easily explained by spouses sharing the same household and lifestyle: eating the same healthy diet or puffing on cigarettes together. But the researchers noticed something odd: the lifespans of other relatives related only by marriage also correlated. That can’t be explained by genes, and it can’t be explained by shared environment. So Ruby and his colleagues started investigating the lifespans of in-laws. They looked at siblings-in-law, and first-cousins-in-law, and then further afield, at relationships like “the sibling of Read More ›

David Berlinski and Michael Denton  feature in a podcast: For Berlinski, a mathematician and author of The Deniable Darwin, the problem is quantitative and methodological. For Denton, a geneticist and author of the new Discovery Institute Press book Children of Light: The Astonishing Properties of Light that Make Us Possible, the problem is empirical. Don’t miss this engaging discussion. “Denton, Berlinski: Primary Objections to Neo-Darwinism” at Evolution News and Science Today Here’s the podcast: On this episode of ID The Future from the vault, Discovery Institute senior fellows David Berlinski and Michael Denton, both long-time critics of neo-Darwinism, discuss their primary objections to neo-Darwinian theory. For Berlinski, a mathematician and author of The Deniable Darwin, the problem is quantitative and methodological. For Denton, a geneticist and Read More ›

… not only is the mind real but it is so real that nature doesn’t even matter. Barry Arrington wrote here recently, Elizabeth Warren says that a DNA report that shows she is between 1/1024th and 1/64th Colombian, Mexican or Peruvian absolutely scientifically proves her claim that she was a Cherokee Indian, so President Trump must pay up on his $1 million bet. But Elizabeth Warren is also a strong supporter of the trans-gender movement. So she also believes that a DNA report that shows a person has an XY chromosome is scientifically meaningless with respect to whether the person is a male and a DNA report that shows a person has an XX chromosome is scientifically meaningless with respect Read More ›

Here’s a reasonable take on Warren’s DNA results: Using this data, the original analysis, which was prepared by a respected geneticist, determined that five segments of Sen. Warren’s DNA — totaling about 12.3 million bases (“letters”) — are of Native American ancestry. That might sound like a lot, but the human genome contains more than 3.2 billion bases, which means that only about 0.4% of Sen. Warren’s DNA sequence can be attributed to Native American ancestry. Thus, the vast, vast majority of her DNA is of European descent. Though her pedigree probably contains a Native American ancestor, he or she existed six to ten generations ago. If a generation is roughly 25 years, that means that Sen. Warren’s (possibly one Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Genetics isn’t as important as once thought for the evolution of altruistic social behavior in some organisms, a new insight into a decade-long debate. This is the first empirical evidence that suggests social behavior in eusocial species — organisms that are highly organized, with divisions of infertile workers — is only mildly attributed to how related these organisms are to each other. In evolutionary biology, fitness refers to an organism’s reproductive success and propagation of its genes. When researchers at Hokkaido University studied the foraging and nesting behaviors of the eusocial species Lasioglossum baleicum, commonly known as the sweat bee, they found that the fitness was more a result of the bees’ cooperative behaviour than it was a Read More ›

That guy at Nature who rides “Genetic determinism rides again” was right. Now, from ScienceDaily: For the first time, locations on the human genome have been identified that can explain differences in meaning in life between individuals. This is the result of research conducted in over 220,000 individuals by Professor Meike Bartels and PhD student Bart Baselmans from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The researchers identified two genetic variants for meaning in life and six genetic variants for happiness. The results were published this week in the scientific journal Scientific Reports. The fact that genetic variants for a meaning in life have been found indicates that everyone is different and that differences between people in complex processes such as a meaning Read More ›

Reviewing behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin’s Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, a history of medicine prof writes, Crude hereditarianism often re-emerges after major advances in biological knowledge: Darwinism begat eugenics; Mendelism begat worse eugenics. The flowering of medical genetics in the 1950s led to the notorious, now-debunked idea that men with an extra Y chromosome (XYY genotype) were prone to violence. Hereditarian books such as Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve (1994) and Nicholas Wade’s 2014 A Troublesome Inheritance (see N. Comfort Nature 513, 306–307; 2014) exploited their respective scientific and cultural moments, leveraging the cultural authority of science to advance a discredited, undemocratic agenda. Although Blueprint is cut from different ideological cloth, the consequences could Read More ›

But don’t tell Mother Jones’s readers: The Census of Marine Life closing ceremony was meant to celebrate the fact that humans had, for the first time, estimated how many species there were in the sea. The Sloan Foundation, which partially funded the $650 million, 10-year project, organized the event. Scientists had been trying to uncover this magic number for at least 250 years. Previous estimates had put the number somewhere between three million and 100 million species on Earth—a nice way of saying they had no idea. But on this day, Mora and his team were supposed to unveil a much more specific conclusion. Reporters swarmed the museum, hoping to get the scoop on the scientists’ discovery. The spokespersons for Read More ›

Humans apparently have a broken version of CMP-Neu5Ac Hydroxylase (CMAH), which helps build a sugar molecule that impacts running: Despite our couch potato lifestyles, long-distance running is in our genes. A new study in mice pinpoints how a stretch of DNA likely turned our ancestors into marathoners, giving us the endurance to conquer territory, evade predators, and eventually dominate the planet. “This is very convincing evidence,” says Daniel Lieberman, a human evolutionary biologist at Harvard University who was not involved with the work. “It’s a nice piece of the puzzle about how humans came to be so successful.”Elizabeth Pennisi, “This broken gene may have turned our ancestors into marathoners—and helped humans conquer the world” at Science The changes are estimated Read More ›

Which make the effects of mutations harder to predict than hoped. Of course, it’s also a blow for genetic determinism. From ScienceDaily: Ever since the decoding of the human genome in 2003, genetic research has been focused heavily on understanding genes so that they could be read like tea leaves to predict an individual’s future and, perhaps, help them stave off disease. A new USC Dornsife study suggests a reason why that prediction has been so challenging, even for the most-studied diseases and disorders: The relationship between an individual’s genes, environment, and traits can significantly change when a single, new mutation is introduced. “Individuals have genetic and environmental differences that cause these mutations to show different effects, and those make Read More ›

Remember old-fashioned, unalterable DNA? It was interesting stuff. So now this: “A study of chemical tags on histone proteins hints at how the same genome can yield very different animals:” The bee genome has a superpower. Not only can the exact same DNA sequence yield three types of insect—worker, drone, and queen—that look and behave very differently, but, in the case of workers, it dictates different sets of behaviors. A key to the genome’s versatility seems to be epigenetic changes—chemical tags that, when added or removed from DNA, change the activity of a gene. Previous studies had shown distinct patterns of tags known as methyl groups on the genomes of bees performing different roles within their hives.Shawna Williams, “As Bees Specialize, Read More ›

Seen from below: Professor Hugenholtz said the scientific community generally agrees that evolutionary relationships are the most natural way to classify organisms, but bacterial taxonomy is riddled with errors, due to historical difficulties. “This is mainly because microbial species have very few distinctive physical features, meaning that there are thousands of historically misclassified species,” he said. “It’s also compounded by the fact that we can’t yet grow the great majority of microorganisms in the laboratory, so have been unaware of them until quite recently.” Dr. Donovan Parks, the lead software developer on the project, is excited about the recent advancement of genome sequencing technology, and how it’s helping reconstruct the bacterial tree of life. … The research team then used Read More ›