Free Republic

Enlarge Image Zooming in. This diagram illustrates a chromosome in ever-greater detail, as the ENCODE project drilled down to DNA to study the functional elements of the genome. Credit: ENCODE project The human genome—the sum total of hereditary information in a person—contains a lot more than the protein-coding genes teenagers learn about in school, a massive international project has found. When researchers decided to sequence the human genome in the late 1990s, they were focused on finding those traditional genes so as to identify all the proteins necessary for life. Each gene was thought to be a discrete piece...

Native Americans spread out today from Canada to the tip of Chile descended not from one but at least three migrant waves from Siberia between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago, a study said Wednesday. The finding is controversial among geneticists, archaeologists and linguists -- many of whom have maintained that a single Asian ancestral group populated the Americas. But the new study, claiming to be the most comprehensive analysis yet of Native American genetics, claims to have found incontrovertible proof that there were three immigration waves -- a theory first put forward in 1986. Most Native Americans, said the study,...

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...