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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...

Biologists have constructed a genetic map of Europe showing the degree of relatedness between its various populations. All the populations are quite similar, but the differences are sufficient that it should be possible to devise a forensic test to tell which country in Europe an individual probably comes from, said Manfred Kayser, a geneticist at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands. The map shows, at right, the location in Europe where each of the sampled populations live and, at left, the genetic relationship between these 23 populations. The map was constructed by Dr. Kayser, Dr. Oscar Lao and...

When it comes to memory it is clear that men and women are simply not on the same wavelength. While men may fail to match a woman's ability to remember the date of an anniversary, they are better at storing a seemingly endless cache of facts and figures. Scientists believe they have now uncovered the reason for this difference between the sexes – they make the memories in different ways.

RESEARCHERS believe they have discovered two genes which allow people to hold their drink. Carriers of one or both genes can process alcohol through the body quickly. One effect is that it halves the chance of developing mouth, throat and oesophageal cancer.

We all know the story of Dr. Frankenstein, the scientist so caught up in his own research that he arrogantly tried to create new life and a new man. Today, if you look at people who study how genetics shape human behavior, you find a collection of anti-Frankensteins. As the research moves along, the scientists grow more modest about what we are close to knowing and achieving. It wasn’t long ago that headlines were blaring about the discovery of an aggression gene, a happiness gene or a depression gene. The implication was obvious: We’re beginning to understand the wellsprings of...

Three genes may play a strong role in determining why some young men raised in rough neighborhoods or deprived families become violent criminals, while others do not, U.S. researchers reported on Monday. One gene called MAOA that played an especially strong role has been shown in other studies to affect antisocial behavior -- and it was disturbingly common, the team at the University of North Carolina reported. People with a particular variation of the MAOA gene called 2R were very prone to criminal and delinquent behavior, said sociology professor Guang Guo, who led the study. "I don't want to say...

The Secret To Long Life May Not Be In The Genes ScienceDaily (May 6, 2008) — A research on the bone health of one of the oldest persons in the world, who recently died at the age of 114, reveals that there were no genetic modifications which could have contributed to this longevity. The research team, directed by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona professor Adolfo Díez Pérez, pointed out a healthy lifestyle, a Mediterranean diet, a temperate climate and regular physical activity as the reasons for his excellent health. The research team studied the bone mass and analysed the genetics of...

Technique Traces Origins Of Disease Genes In Mixed Human Populations ScienceDaily (Apr. 9, 2008) — A team of researchers from Washington University in St. Louis and the Israeli Institute of Technology (Technion) in Haifa has developed a technique to detect the ancestry of disease genes in hybrid, or mixed, human populations. The technique, called expected mutual information (EMI), determines how a set of DNA markers is likely to show the ancestral origin of locations on each chromosome. The team constructed an algorithm for the technique that selects panels of DNA markers that render the best picture of ancestral origin of...

If snakes strike terror in your toddler’s heart, he might still grow to be brave. A tendency toward fearfulness does have genetic underpinnings, but those shift several times as children become adults, a study has found. The worries of adolescents differ from those of young children — fear of the dark gives way to squeamishness about blood in a well-documented developmental progression. Now, psychiatrist Kenneth Kendler of the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond and his colleagues have found that the genetic factors that leave a person prone to fear also shift during development. To tease apart the effect of...

Genes trigger phobias in kids and teens 21:00 07 April 2008 NewScientist.com news service Jim Giles Our response to the things that scare us, from threatening men on dark streets to hairy spiders in the bath, is programmed to become active at different times in our lives, suggest two studies on the genetics of fear. Scientists already know that fears and phobias are shaped in part by genes. Identical twins, for example, are more likely to develop phobias for the same objects, such as snakes or rats, than non-identical twins. But less is known about when the genes involved act...

Could a gene be partly responsible for the behaviour of some of the worlds most infamous dictators? Selfish dictators may owe their behaviour partly to their genes, according to a study that claims to have found a genetic link to ruthlessness. The study might help to explain the money-grabbing tendencies of those with a Machiavellian streak — from national dictators down to 'little Hitlers' found in workplaces the world over. Researchers at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem found a link between a gene called AVPR1a and ruthless behaviour in an economic exercise called the 'Dictator Game'. The exercise allows players...

Natural Selection Protected Some East Asian Populations From Alcoholism, Study Suggests ScienceDaily (Apr. 3, 2008) — Some change in the environment in many East Asian communities during the past few thousand years may have protected residents from becoming alcoholics, a new genetic analysis conducted by Yale School of Medicine researchers suggests. Scientists have long known that many Asians carry variants of genes that help regulate alcohol metabolism. Some of those genetic variants can make people feel uncomfortable, sometimes even ill, when drinking small amounts of alcohol. As a result of the prevalence of this gene, many, but not all, communities...

You can't buy happiness but it looks like you can at least inherit it, British and Australian researchers said on Thursday. A study of nearly 1,000 pairs of identical and non-identical twins found genes control half the personality traits that make people happy while factors such as relationships, health and careers are responsible for the rest of our well-being. "We found that around half the differences in happiness were genetic," said Tim Bates, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh who led the study. "It is really quite surprising." The researchers asked the volunteers -- ranging in age from 25...

Study of long-lived Ashkenazi Jews may yield longevity genes galore A type of gene mutation long known to extend the lives of worms, flies and mice also turns up in long-lived humans. Researchers found that among Ashkenazi Jews, those who survived past age 95 were much more likely than their peers to possess one of two similar mutations in the gene for insulinlike growth factor 1 receptor (IGF1R). The mutations seem to make cells less responsive than normal to insulinlike growth factor 1 (IGF1), a key growth hormone secreted by the liver. In past studies, IGF1 disruption increased the life...

White Americans are both genetically weaker and less diverse than their black compatriots, a Cornell University-led study finds. Researchers analyzed the genetic makeup of 20 Americans of European ancestry and 15 African-Americans. The Europeans showed much less variation among 10,000 tested genes than did the Africans, which was expected, but also that Europeans had many more possibly harmful mutations than did African, which was not.

Genetic study ties Siberians to people in Americas By Will Dunham Thu Feb 21, 5:08 PM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - People indigenous to Siberia have strong genetic links to native peoples in the Americas, according to a study further supporting the theory that humans first entered the Americas over a land bridge across the Bering Strait. Scientists at Stanford University in California combed through the genes of 938 people from 51 places, looking at 650,000 DNA locations in each person. The study, in the journal Science on Thursday, revealed similarities and differences among various populations. "This is the highest resolution...

Unravelling the North West’s Viking past08 February 2008 The blood of the Vikings is still coursing through the veins of men living in the North West of England — according to a new study which has been just published. Focusing on the Wirral in Merseyside and West Lancashire the study of 100 men, whose surnames were in existence as far back as medieval times, has revealed that 50 per cent of their DNA is specifically linked to Scandinavian ancestry. The collaborative study, by The University of Nottingham, the University of Leicester and University College London, reveals that the population in...

Rat genes shed light on ancient human migrations 15:16 01 February 2008 NewScientist.com news service Emma Young One of humanity’s greatest scourges – the black rat – may help health experts track the spread of disease. New work probing Rattus rattus’s origins and historical movements should help health officials track its ongoing dispersal – and might also explain anomalies in its spread of diseases such as typhus and plague. Ken Aplin at CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems in Canberra, Australia, and colleagues have analysed the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of 170 black rats from 76 regions in 32 countries. They also surveyed other...

DR. FEERO is a family physician with a doctorate in human genetics from the University of Pittsburgh. He is a senior adviser for genomic medicine in the Office of the Director at the National Human Genome Research Institute. Our understanding of the genome is changing rapidly and drastically. For starters, the Human Genome Project has revealed that humans are, on a numerical basis, genetically less complex than a mustard plant (Arabidopsis). In fact, our genome contains between 20,000 and 25,000 sequences suggestive of “genes” encoding proteins, whereas Arabidopsis contains about 27,000. If that doesn't make much sense to you, don't...

The genetic information of organisms--as varied as goldfish and geraniums--is widely available to the global public. So are the biologic codes for many viruses, such as variola (which causes smallpox) and poliovirus. The advance of biological technologies that allow for the construction of specific genetic sequences raises the harrowing possibility that someone, somewhere would use available genetic information to unleash a biological attack. The quandary facing scientists in the life sciences is similar to the issues that confronted scientists at the dawn of the nuclear age: Can potentially dangerous knowledge be made secret? Or should it be kept widely available?...

In this undated photo released by Tokyo University's Department of Biophysics and Biochemistry Graduate School of Science, a genetically modified mouse approaches a cat in Tokyo. Using genetic engineering, scientists at Tokyo University say they have successfully switched off the rodents' instinct to cower at the smell or presence of cats, showing that fear is genetically hardwired and not leaned through experience, as commonly believed. (AP Photo/Ko and Reiko Kobayakawa, Tokyo University Department of Biophysics and Biochemistry Graduate School of Science, HO) Cat and mouse may never be the same. Japanese scientists say they've used genetic engineering to create...

When She's Turned On, Some Of Her Genes Turn Off, Fish Study Shows ScienceDaily (Dec. 12, 2007) — When a female is attracted to a male, entire suites of genes in her brain turn on and off, show biologists from The University of Texas at Austin studying swordtail fish. Molly Cummings and Hans Hofmann found that some genes were turned on when females found a male attractive, but a larger number of genes were turned off. "When females were most excited--when attractive males were around--we observed the greatest down regulation [turning off] of genes," said Cummings, assistant professor of integrative...

above-average intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews — those of northern European heritage — resulted from natural selection in medieval Europe, where they were pressured into jobs as financiers, traders, managers and tax collectors. Those who were smarter succeeded, grew wealthy and had bigger families to pass on their genes, they suggested. That evolution also is linked to genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs and Gaucher in Jews. The new study was funded by the Department of Energy, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Aging, the Unz Foundation, the University of Utah and the University of Wisconsin.

Generosity 'may be in the genes' People had to decide whether to keep money, or give it away Some people may be genetically destined to have a generous personality, Israeli research has suggested. A total of 203 people took part in an online task in which they could either keep or give away money. Gene tests revealed those who had certain variants of a gene called AVPR1a were on average nearly 50% more likely to give money away. The study, by The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, appears online in the journal Genes, Brain and Behavior. Lead researcher Dr Ariel Knafo...

Human Genome Has Four Times More Imprinted Genes Than Previously IdentifiedIn classic genetics, children inherit two copies of a gene, one from each parent, and both actively shape how the child develops. But in imprinting, one of those copies is turned off by molecular instructions coming from either the mother or the father. (Credit: Jane Ades, NHGRI) ScienceDaily (Nov. 30, 2007) — Scientists at Duke University have created the first map of imprinted genes throughout the human genome, and they say a modern-day Rosetta stone -- a form of artificial intelligence called machine learning -- was the key to their...

MRIs link pedophilia to problems in brain development For Immediate Release – November 28, 2007 (TORONTO) – Pedophilia might be the result of faulty connections in the brain, according to new research released by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). The study used MRIs and a sophisticated computer analysis technique to compare a group of pedophiles with a group of non-sexual criminals. The pedophiles had significantly less of a substance called “white matter” which is responsible for wiring the different parts of the brain together. The study, published in the Journal of Psychiatry Research, challenges the commonly held...