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In the Solomon Islands, about 10 percent of the dark-skinned indigenous people have strikingly blond hair. Some islanders theorize that the coloring could be a result of excess sun exposure, or a diet rich in fish. Another explanation is that the blondness was inherited from distant ancestors — European traders and explorers who came to the islands. But that’s not the case, researchers now report. The gene variant responsible for blond hair in the islanders is distinctly different from the gene that causes blond hair in Europeans. “For me it breaks down any kind of simple notions you might have...

Ever heard about the 'Khazar' myth pushed by the Neo-Nazis/KKK? In fact, Jews are both a nation and a religion. the percentage of those with any roots in khazaria is so minimal, that there was only one non-historian "writer" that came up with the idea to say that the percentage is higher. As a penpal who is of Jewish background told me once: 'Before the WW2 Were were told to go BACK to Palestine where we came from... now the same haters don't even grant us that...' Hitler VS Khazar mythOddly enough, Hitler's "aryanism" and anti-Jewish sick obession was AGAINST...

A person's intelligence is mostly inherited, it's in their genes, but whether a person can expect to be a clever grandma or grandpa relies on both genes and environment. "Until now, we have not had an estimate of how much genetic differences affect how people's intelligence changes across the lifetime," study researcher Ian Deary, of the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, said in an email to LiveScience. "These new results mean that researchers can seek both environmental and genetic contributionsto successful cognitive aging." Previous studies of the genetics of intelligence have been performed on sets of twins or...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new study has identified a gene mutation that researchers estimate dates back to 11,600 B.C., making it the second oldest human disease mutation yet discovered. Researchers with the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute led the study and estimate that the mutation arose in the Middle East some 13,600 years ago. Only a mutation seen in cystic fibrosis that arose between 11,000 and 52,000 years ago is believed to be older. The investigators described the mutation in people of Arabic, Turkish and Jewish ancestry....

Here is your opportunity to ask the candidates your specific questions about income inequality. Let us know and we may include your question in the debate. Click to read Yahoo/ABC loaded question article

Researchers at KTH say they have found further proof that the wolf ancestors of today’s domesticated dogs can be traced to southern East Asia — findings that run counter to theories placing the cradle of the canine line in the Middle East.Dr Peter Savolainen, KTH researcher in evolutionary genetics, says a new study released Nov. 23 confirms that an Asian region south of the Yangtze River was the principal and probably sole region where wolves were domesticated by humans. Data on genetics, morphology and behaviour show clearly that dogs are descended from wolves, but there’s never been scientific consensus on...

When the DNA sequences of Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes were sequenced, the difference between the sequences of coding genes was smaller than expected based on the phenotypic differences between both species. If not the coding genes, then what is responsible for these dissimilarities? In the words of the authors of a new study that took a look at this question: Although humans and chimpanzees have accumulated significant differences in a number of phenotypic traits since diverging from a common ancestor about six to eight million years ago, their genomes are more than 98.5% identical at protein-coding loci. Since this...

Two of the holy grails of medicine - stem cell technology and precision gene therapy - have been united for the first time in humans, say scientists.It means patients with a genetic disease could, one day, be treated with their own cells. A study in Nature corrected a mutation in stem cells made from a patient with a liver disease. Researchers said this was a "critical step" towards devising treatments, but safety tests were still needed. At the moment, stem cells created from a patient with a genetic illness cannot be used to cure the disease as those cells would...

For the last decade cancer research has been guided by a common vision of how a single cell, outcompeting its neighbors, evolves into a malignant tumor. Through a series of random mutations, genes that encourage cellular division are pushed into overdrive, while genes that normally send growth-restraining signals are taken offline. With the accelerator floored and the brake lines cut, the cell and its progeny are free to rapidly multiply. More mutations accumulate, allowing the cancer cells to elude other safeguards and to invade neighboring tissue and metastasize. These basic principles — laid out 11 years ago in a landmark...

Type 2 diabetes is an extremely common chronic condition characterized by high levels of sugar in the blood as a result of either insufficient production of the hormone insulin or an inability of cells to respond to insulin. A combination of genetic and environmental factors causes an individual to develop type 2 diabetes. Among the most reproducible genetic variations associated with type 2 diabetes in different ethnic populations are those in the CDKAL1 gene. However, the mechanisms underlying these associations have not yet been determined. But now, a team of researchers, led by Kazuhito Tomizawa, at Kumamoto University, Japan, has...

California's success in using 'familial searching' spurs Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris to increase funding for the controversial genetic sleuthing technique in rape, murder and cold cases. A young man followed a woman into a coffee shop as she prepared to open for business at 6 a.m. He put a knife to her throat, sexually assaulted her, barricaded her in a walk-in refrigerator and grabbed cash from the register before vanishing. The March 2008 attack near the Santa Cruz Harbor in a low-crime neighborhood unnerved the community and spawned an intense police hunt. "It is the kind of attack that communities...

Australian ethicist working at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics claims that humanity has a “moral obligation” to use in vitro fertilization (IVF) to select the most intelligent embryos for the good of society, with the obvious implication that the less intelligent “surplus” embryos should simply be destroyed. Professor Julian Savulescu of Melbourne made the statement while commenting on an economic modeling research paper by Oxford University ethicists Andres Sandberg and Nick Bostrom, who claim that a rise in humanity’s IQ would result in a reduction in poverty, welfare dependency, crowding of jails, school dropout rates, out-of-wedlock births, and...

The first modern people evolved in southern Africa more than 60,000 years ago - and not in the east of the continent as most scientists believe, a study concludes. After analysing DNA samples from 27 populations in modern-day Africa, researchers say the most likely location for the 'cradle of humanity' is the Kalahari desert region of South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. The modern-day click-speaking bushman from the desert show the greatest genetic diversity of any Africans - suggesting that their home was the birthplace of the first true Homo sapiens. Originators: The home of the modern day click-speaking bushman in...

There are multiple links in my one post, so if you wish to go directly to them here they are: ----http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/9384/ ----http://www.scribd.com/doc/39228567/Determinism-and-Morals ----http://www.philosophy.ucsb.edu/faculty/anderson/lewisanti.html ----http://www.scribd.com/doc/48738624/Reduction-ism ----http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6fdZqzD2Qk ----http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXaQsybMIQQ ----http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaqmGGOZbeY I piece together these recent and past videos and stories (one is an article from National Review from 2008 scanned in -- not in the links above) that deal with evolutionary psychology and genes being the source of (fallaciously of course) all human behavior. In other words, no choice of free will. I will add an excerpt below. Enjoy the massive amounts of info!!

President Barack Obama, addressing a tribal nations conference at the White House last week, announded that the U.S. government is now supporting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, which includes a sweeping declaration that "indigenous peoples" have a right to lands and resources they traditionally occupied or "otherwise used." "Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired," says the U.N. resolution. The Bush administration had declined to support the resolution. At the White House Tribal Nations Conference, Obama reminded the group that...

The Insanity VirusSchizophrenia has long been blamed on bad genes or even bad parents. Wrong, says a growing group of psychiatrists. The real culprit, they claim, is a virus that lives entwined in every person's DNA. by Douglas Fox Steven and David Elmore were born identical twins, but their first days in this world could not have been more different. David came home from the hospital after a week. Steven, born four minutes later, stayed behind in the ICU. For a month he hovered near death in an incubator, wracked with fever from what doctors called a dangerous viral infection....

A new UCLA study suggests that disparities in cardiovascular disease risk in the United States are due less to race or ethnicity than to socioeconomic status. In the study, published in the August issue of the journal Annals of Epidemiology, researchers from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and colleagues found that there are large differences in risk by socioeconomic status within racial and ethnic groups — with the poorest individuals having the highest risk — but that there are few differences in risk between racial and ethnic groups. "Most ethnic differences in cardiovascular risk are really due...

The Jewish people, according to archaeologists, originated in Babylon and Persia between the 4th and 6th centuries BC. The modern-day Jews most closely related to that original population are those in Iran, Iraq and Syria, whose closest non-Jewish relatives are the Druze, Bedouins and Palestinians, the study found. Sometime in that period, the Middle Eastern and European Jews diverged and the European branch began actively proselytizing for converts. At the height of the Roman Empire, about 10% of the empire's population was Jewish, although the bulk of them were converts. Some Khazars were also incorporated during this period. "That explains...

Autism Genome Project Phase 2 results published in Nature Mount Sinai researchers and the Autism Genome Project Consortium (AGP) announced today that they have identified new autism susceptibility genes that may lead to the development of new treatment approaches. These genes, which include SHANK2, SYNGAP1, DLGAP2 and the X-linked DDX53–PTCHD1 locus, primarily belong to synapse-related pathways, while others are involved in cellular proliferation, projection and motility, and intracellular signaling. The findings were published today in Nature by researchers at the Seaver Autism Center for Research and Treatment at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, together with an international consortium of researchers...

A gene silencing approach can save monkeys from high doses of the most lethal strain of Ebola virus in what researchers call the most viable route yet to treating the deadly and frightening infection. They used small interfering RNAs or siRNAs, a new technology being developed by a number of companies, to hold the virus at bay for a week until the immune system could take over. Tests in four rhesus monkeys showed that seven daily injections cured 100 per cent of them. U.S. government researchers and a small Canadian biotech company, Tekmira Pharmaceuticals, worked together to develop the new...

Most Tibetans are genetically adapted to life on the "roof of the world," according to a new study. The Tibetan Plateau (map) rises more than 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) above sea level. At such heights, most people are susceptible to hypoxia, in which too little oxygen reaches body tissues, potentially leading to fatal lung or brain inflammation. To survive the high life, many Tibetans carry unique versions of two genes associated with low blood hemoglobin levels, the researchers found. Since hemoglobin is the oxygen-carrying component of red blood cells, the find might seem "really counterintuitive," said study leader Tatum Simonson...

The next time you're tempted to call some oaf a Neanderthal, you might want to take a look in the mirror. According to a new DNA study, most humans have a little Neanderthal in them—at least 1 to 4 percent of a person's genetic makeup. The study uncovered the first solid genetic evidence that "modern" humans—or Homo sapiens—interbred with their Neanderthal neighbors, who mysteriously died out about 30,000 years ago. What's more, the Neanderthal-modern human mating apparently took place in the Middle East, shortly after modern humans had left Africa, not in Europe—as has long been suspected. "We can now...

AUSTIN, Texas—From deep within the genomes of organisms as diverse as plants, worms and yeast, scientists have uncovered new genes responsible for causing human diseases such as cancer and deafness. The University of Texas at Austin scientists exploited the fact that all life on Earth shares common ancestry, and therefore shares sets of genes. They found genes in yeast, for example, that humans use to make veins and arteries, even though yeasts have no blood vessels at all. Yeasts use those same genes to fix their cell walls in response to stress. "Basically, we figured out a way to discover...

Obesity is a disease of excess, but a new study suggests that a few obese patients are actually lacking something--a piece of one of their chromosomes. The loss might remove a gene that helps the body manage blood sugar and appetite. Obesity runs in families, and researchers have identified several genetic variants that seem to boost the odds of becoming obese. However, these variants only explain a minority of cases. In the last decade, researchers have discovered that genetic differences among people can stem from lost or duplicated sections of chromosomes, called copy number variants (CNVs). Because of CNVs, for...

IT really is a case of blonde ambition. Women with fair hair are more aggressive and determined to get their own way than brunettes or redheads, according to a study by the University of California. Researchers claim that blondes are more likely to display a “warlike” streak because they attract more attention than other women and are used to getting their own way — the so-called “princess effect”. Even those who dye their hair blonde quickly take on these attributes, experts found. The study could cast fresh light on the ability of Joanna Lumley, the actress and former model, to...

Need evidence for Darwinian evolution? Just make it up. That’s the lesson of Donald Prothero’s book, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Prothero is a professor of geology at Occidental College in Los Angeles. On November 30, he teamed up with atheist Michael Shermer (founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine) to debate Stephen Meyer and Richard Sternberg of the Discovery Institute. Shermer wrote the foreword to Prothero’s book, calling it “the best book ever written on the subject.” In fact, “Don’s visual presentation of the fossil and genetic evidence for evolution is...

A study in mice has hinted at the impact that early life trauma and stress can have on genes, and how they can result in behavioural problems. Scientists described the long-term effects of stress on baby mice in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Stressed mice produced hormones that "changed" their genes, affecting their behaviour throughout their lives. This work could provide clues to how stress and trauma in early life can lead to later problems...... The team found that mice that had been "abandoned" during their early lives were then less able to cope with stressful situations throughout their lives. The...

People with gene variant perform more than 20 percent worse on driving test Bad drivers may in part have their genes to blame, suggests a new study by UC Irvine neuroscientists. People with a particular gene variant performed more than 20 percent worse on a driving test than people without it - and a follow-up test a few days later yielded similar results. About 30 percent of Americans have the variant. "These people make more errors from the get-go, and they forget more of what they learned after time away," said Dr. Steven Cramer, neurology associate professor and senior author...

A few weeks ago I posted on a paper, Genetic Discontinuity Between Local Hunter-Gatherers and Central Europe's First Farmers.Another one is out in the same vein, Ancient DNA Reveals Lack of Continuity between Neolithic Hunter-Gatherers and Contemporary Scandinavians: The driving force behind the transition from a foraging to a farming lifestyle in prehistoric Europe (Neolithization) has been debated for more than a century...Of particular interest is whether population replacement or cultural exchange was responsible...Scandinavia holds a unique place in this debate, for it maintained one of the last major hunter-gatherer complexes in Neolithic Europe, the Pitted Ware culture...Intriguingly, these late...

Study Shows Portuguese Water Dog Breed, Gift from Ted Kennedy, Has Mutant Genes - Based on new research from the National Institutes of Health, first dog Bo is once, twice, but not quite three times a mutant.Researchers from the NIH and several universities have shown that variation among the coats of different dog breeds can be traced back to three genes.

Julia Pastrana became famous as the "bearded lady" in the mid-1800s. Now, more than 150 years later, scientists have discovered the genetic mutations responsible for her rare condition. The disorder, known as congenital generalized hypertrichosis terminalis (CGHT) with gingival hypertrophy, is characterized by excessive growth of dark hairs all over the body, distorted facial features, and enlarged gums. In some cases, people can have CGHT with normal gums. All of these diseases fall into a group of conditions called congenital generalized hypertrichosis (CGH). The disease is difficult to study because it is so rare. After analyzing the genomes of members...

Middle-class children are more likely to be clever than those from poorer families because they have 'better genes', former Ofsted chief Chris Woodhead said yesterday. The comments caused an immediate storm, with critics calling them insulting and 'crazy'. However, Mr Woodhead won support in some quarters - including the backing of an evolutionary psychologist, who said research had shown there was a link between class and average IQ. Mr Woodhead called for a return to selection by ability at 11. He suggested that grammar school pupils were more likely to be middle-class because 'the genes are likely to be better...

"Junk DNA" are inactive parts of your genome, switched off long ago in evolutionary history. Now scientists say there's a junk gene that fights HIV. And they've discovered how to turn it back on. What these scientists have done could give us the first foolproof HIV vaccine. They have re-awakened the human genome's latent potential to make us all into HIV-resistant creatures. This evening in PLoS Biology, they've published their ground-breaking research. A group of scientists led by Nitya Venkataraman and Alexander Colewhether wanted to try a new approach to fighting HIV - one that worked with the body's own...

An analysis of the the phylogenic tree (the component strains) present in the current swine flu cases in Texas and California show no identifiable components of Mexican origin.The H1 protein (hemagglutinin) shows evidence from past cases from Korea, China and Turkey as well as Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio and Kansas. The N1 protein (neuraminidase) shows evidence of having come from China, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Hokkaido, Japan, Chonburi and Chachoengsao (Thailand) and Italy. Figure 1 shows the phylogenic tree of the H1 protein (hemagglutinin) of the U.S. strain of the current influenza virus. Figure 2 shows the phylogenic tree of the N1...

"Gregory Cochran has always been drawn to puzzles. This one had been gnawing at him for several years: Why are European Jews prone to so many deadly genetic diseases?"

The era of personal genomic medicine may have to wait. The genetic analysis of common disease is turning out to be a lot more complex than expected. Since the human genome was decoded in 2003, researchers have been developing a powerful method for comparing the genomes of patients and healthy people, with the hope of pinpointing the DNA changes responsible for common diseases. This method, called a genomewide association study, has proved technically successful despite many skeptics’ initial doubts. But it has been disappointing in that the kind of genetic variation it detects has turned out to explain surprisingly little...

snip It's even conceivable, he said, that our genes eventually will change enough to create an entirely new human species, one no longer able to breed with our own species, Homo sapiens. "Someday in the far distant future, enough genetic changes might have occurred so that future populations could not interbreed with the current one,'' Sussman said in an e-mail message. snip It's also the topic of a new book, "The 10,000 Year Explosion,'' by anthropologists Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. "For most of the last century, the received wisdom in the...

UCLA researchers find that genes determine brain's processing speed They say a picture tells a thousand stories, but can it also tell how smart you are? Actually, say UCLA researchers, it can. In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience Feb. 18, UCLA neurology professor Paul Thompson and colleagues used a new type of brain-imaging scanner to show that intelligence is strongly influenced by the quality of the brain's axons, or wiring that sends signals throughout the brain. The faster the signaling, the faster the brain processes information. And since the integrity of the brain's wiring is influenced by...

In a recent post I noted that genetic tests to predict adult height are still a long way off being accurate; currently, known genetic variants can predict just over 5% of the variance in height, as opposed to 40% predicted using a simple algorithm based on the heights of both parents. The genetic complexity of height means that trying to screen embryos for this trait using pre-implantation genetic diagnosis is likely to be little more than an exercise in frustration. However, that's not true for all traits. In several recent posts I've mentioned eye colour as one relatively genetically simple...

Australians have been refused insurance protection because of their genetic make-up, researchers have shown in the first study in the world to provide proof of genetic discrimination

WASHINGTON – Ever wonder why sharks get several rows of teeth and people only get one? Some geneticists did, and their discovery could spur work to help adults one day grow new teeth when their own wear out. A single gene appears to be in charge, preventing additional tooth formation in species destined for a limited set. When the scientists bred mice...

Children differ, as any parent of two or more knows. Some babies sleep through the night, others are always awake; some are calm, others are fussy; some walk at an early age, others after a long wait. Scientists have proved that genes are responsible for these early differences. But people assume that as children get older and spend more time under their parents’ influence, the effect of genes declines. They are wrong. For a century or more, we have understood that intelligence is largely inherited, though even today some mistakenly rail against the idea and say that nurture, not nature,...

"Bad boys" have a bad boy gene. What's more, that same gene makes them more popular than the proverbial Mr. Nice Guy. Hello James Dean, so long Alan Alda

EAST LANSING, Mich. — A groundbreaking study of popularity by a Michigan State University scientist has found that genes elicit not only specific behaviors but also the social consequences of those behaviors.

It's not often that cultural and religious persecution makes countries more diverse, but the Spanish Inquisition might have done just that. One in five Spaniards and Portuguese has a Jewish ancestor, while a tenth of Iberians boast North African ancestors, finds new research. This melting pot probably occurred after centuries of coexistence and tolerance among Muslims, Jews and Christians ended in 1492, when Catholic monarchs converted or expelled the Islamic population, called Moriscos. Sephardic Jews, whose Iberian roots extend to the first century AD, received much the same treatment. "They were given a choice: convert, go, or die," says Mark...

MADRID (Reuters) – From the 15th century on, Spain's Jews were mostly expelled or forced to convert, but today some 20 percent of Spanish genes can be traced to Sephardic Jews, a study has found. A report in the American Journal of Human Genetics says almost a fifth of Spaniards' genes are of Sephardic Jewish origin and another 11 percent can be traced to North Africa. "The genetic composition of the current population is the legacy of our diverse cultural and religious past," one of the report's authors, Francesc Calafell, from the evolutionary biology faculty at Pompeu Fabra University in...

Berlin doctor has reportedly cured a leukemia patient of the deadly AIDS virus, German daily Die Welt reported on Wednesday. For two years now, Dr. Gero Hütter has found no trace of the virus in the 42-year-old American living Berlin, whom he has treated for leukemia at the city’s Charité hospital. The man is AIDS-free despite the fact that he stopped taking his medication for AIDS after the treatment, the paper reported, calling the development a “sensation.”

Genetics, DNA - strong Proof of (almost all) Jews' roots to the land of Israel, not so for Arabs /"palestinians" [The "palestinian" Arabs as "cousins" MYTH]Jews and their neighbors: The Middle East With Jews looking increasingly like a relatively cohesive population largely of Middle Eastern origin, the logical next question is how close a genetic relationship exists with other Middle Eastern groups. A study of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs published in 2000 by Israeli researchers revealed what the authors described as "a relatively recent common ancestry." It was greeted with euphoric proclamations that Palestinians and Jews are "brothers." A...

Eight years ago, I published an article in these pages called "Wandering Jews—and Their Genes" (September 2000). At the time I was working on a book about a Tibeto-Burmese ethnic group in the northeast Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur, many of whose members believe that they descend from the biblical tribe of Manasseh, and about a group of Judaizers among them known as the B'nei Menashe, over a thousand of whom live today in Israel as converts to Judaism. This led me to an interest in Jewish historical genetics, then a new discipline. Historical genetics itself was still a...

The same gene that affects a rodent's ability to mate for life may affect human marriages, Swedish and U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday. Men carrying a common variation of gene involved in brain signaling were more likely to be in unhappy marriages than men with the other version, the team at the Karolinska Institute found. Although they are not sure what the genetic changes do to a man's behavior, some other research suggests it has to do with the ability to communicate and empathize, the team reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We never looked at...