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January 17 - May 10, 2019
thousand years ago, we Europeans share all of our ancestry. Triple that time and we share all our ancestry with everyone on Earth. We are all cousins, of some degree.
dastard.
anatomized
provenance
Six generations should contain 62 different people,
Eight generations should contain 254 different people.
fecund
Shock headlines and mock outrage by concerned politicians aren’t particularly useful.
splenetic
Racism is hateful bullying, and a means of reinforcing self-identity at the expense of others: Whatever you are, you’re not one of us.
There are no essential genetic elements for any particular group of people who might be identified as a “race.” As far as genetics is concerned, race does not exist.
The great irony is this: The science of genetics was founded specifically on the study of racial inequality, by a racist.
“travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
Marie Stopes is known today as a champion of women’s reproductive rights,
Genetically, two black people are more likely to be more different to each other than a black person and a white person.
key physical attributes that we identify as being “race-specific” are superficial and recent.
We know that the emergence of the pale skin we associate with Europe, and particularly northern Europe, only emerged in the last few thousand years,
We are naturally plagued by the tyranny of a discontinuous mind, as Richard Dawkins so eloquently said.
the question of how many races there are: It is unanswerable. It is a meaningless question.
The idea that Native Americans were genetically predisposed to alcoholism persists today, as it has done since the early days of the European occupation of the Americas.
Yet, the notion that the high rates of alcoholism in Native Americans—almost twice as high as in white European immigrant Americans—are somehow genetic remains an oft-repeated idea.
Certainly there will be higher levels of genetic similarity in families and in related groups, and indeed Tay-Sachs did for a long time have a higher frequency in Ashkenazi Jews than in some other groupings of people. But it’s not exclusive to Jews or Ashkenazi Jews or Sephardic Jews or Cajuns or any single identifiable group of people. Yet the myth persists.
There are several problems with the idea that slavery bred superhumans. The first is that 400 years is not enough time to establish particular alleles with that effect.
There are dozens of genes that are involved in the biology of sporting prowess, and these are not uniformly distributed across competitors of different sports: Sprinters do not make good long-distance runners.
The second problem is that I am unaware of any data that has analyzed positive selection for these alleles in black people with slave ancestry. Without this, assertions of slavery being effectively a program of selective breeding are merely vaguely racist wish-fulfilment, confirmation bias, or yet another form of adaptationism.
from the point of view of a geneticist, race does not exist. It has no useful scientific value.
Genetics has shown that the conflict is with people, and not embedded in biology.
motile.
Sometimes in this argument people might say “colors are just social constructs, but you can’t deny that they exist.”
The Jews once had high (but not exclusively high) rates of Tay-Sachs disease. Now they do not. Some Jews have ginger hair and pale skin, just like plenty of Scots. Others do not. The skin tone of the people of the Andaman Islands is very similar to that of the people of central Africa, but they acquired that hue via different historical and biological routes. Some black Africans are evolved to process oxygen at high altitudes, as are some Tibetans, but most are not. “Black” is no more a race than “long-distance runner” is.
Francis Galton’s inclination toward being a data junkie led him to instigate a science that he hoped would affirm his prejudices. The beautiful irony is that it did precisely the opposite.
conurbation
Dogma is a term that we science types have been trying to avoid since the seventeenth century, given that it means an incontrovertible belief laid down without evidence by an authority.
diktat
Heritability is a measure of how much of the differences we see in a population can be accounted for by genetics, and how much is determined by the environment.
All humans speak a language (for simplicity’s sake), which indicates that the capacity for language is genetically determined; which language you speak is entirely determined by where you are born, so it is environmental. So, there is no genetic influence on what language you speak, which means that all the diversity of languages spoken is environmental, and so its heritability is zero.
This is science, and what scientists do is work out what they know and what they don’t know, and slowly move things from the latter category into the former. We are all Rumsfeldian, if we are doing science right.
“It is well recognized” is one of those phrases that make me a bit twitchy. When I read that in a scientific journal, in my head I translate it to “we couldn’t find a reference for this”:
There are indeed archetypes of female beauty, but many of these are culturally specific, and far from universal even within those cultural bounds.
For every complicated problem there is a solution that is simple, direct, understandable, and wrong.
No one will ever find a gene for “evil,” or for beauty, or for musical genius, or for scientific genius, because they don’t exist. DNA is not destiny.
epigenetics, a word that literally means “in addition to genetics.”
ackamarackus*
happens with words like quantum, which offers up some magical scienceyness, none more so than in quantum healing—an unfathomable extension of reiki, which, let’s face it, is a load of old cobblers already.
Neuromarketing, neuroentrepreneurism, neuropolitics are all new fields in which flaky science is used to put a patina of credibility onto a product.
adiposity.
showed that men who smoked before puberty sired fatter sons than those who smoked after.
August Weisman tested a similar idea in an experiment in which he cut off the tails of sixty-eight mice over five generations. Of 901 pups born, none of them was born without a tail. He wasn’t really testing use of a trait, but nevertheless was asking whether evolution might follow an acquired trait. Of course, as geneticist Steve Jones enjoys pointing out, the Jews have been performing a version of this experiment for a few thousand years, and so far a boy without a foreskin is yet to be born.
Creationists (and others unencumbered by facts) cite epigenetics to assert that Darwin was wrong, and that these transgenerational epigenetic studies show Lamarckian evolution. They don’t, as the changes are not perpetual and do not change the DNA sequence itself, on which natural selection acts.
They applied six different tests to gauge when each of these alleles arose in history, including factoring in that our numbers as a species have increased more than a thousandfold since we started farming. Of these differences, three quarters had arisen in the last 5,000 years. Are we still evolving? The answer again is an undeniable yes: We’re a species not of mutants but of mutations.
