Of course, it was put there by a Canadian poet. Recently we learned that “An original piece of “living poetry” has been created in a lab in Canada.” Christian Bok encoded some of his verse into a DNA strip and got it inserted into an E.coli bacterium: Dr Bok used cryptography to embed his poem […]
Genetics
Genetic studies: Twins chose a spouse like themselves, not like opposite sex parent
From “What Can Twins Tell Us About Mate Choice?” (ScienceDaily, Apr. 26, 2011), we learn: What factors influence our choice of a mate? Is it our genes? Does a man look for someone like his mother and a woman someone her father? None of the above, according to a study of Australian twins. Body size, personality, […]
Coffee!! You cannot be naturally selected to win big if you are well-armed against tropical diseases at Earmuff Central
A friend put me onto this human genetic research program (no, no, it all sounds reasonable, keep your shirt on; no one is looking for the missing link andyou are him and the genetic police are waiting outside … wake UP, will you?): Ethnically diverse people are donating DNA to science, and the wealth of genomic […]
Epigenetics as forerunner of design?
We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in our understanding of how evolution can act…on evolution, yielding mechanisms that allow both adaptation and heritability within the course of a lifetime. And such paradigm shifts almost always have societal consequences. Manel Esteller shows that epigenetics also impacts the “dark genome” in a way that […]
Thrifty gene is bankrupt science? Or, why you should always be suspicious when you hear …
As Globe & Mail medical reporter Carolyn Abraham tells it (February 25, 2011): Since James Van Gundia Neel proposed it almost 50 years ago, the thrifty-gene hypothesis has reigned as the dominant explanation for soaring rates of obesity and diabetes among many aboriginal groups. Native communities where diabetes didn’t exist in the first half of […]
Knockout gene study in mice prompts speculations on human behaviour #3348
Lab mice by Aaron Logan, Lightsource In “Ma’s gene does different things to pa’s copy” Jessica Hamzelou (26 January 2011) reports for New Scientist on a knockout study of mice where researchers knocked out a gene called Grb10 in females and mated them with normal males. (From the report: “Most of our genes are expressed in […]