Sexy beast » « Where have all the flowers gone?

An hour of mathematical genetics homework

We Americans have all had a pleasant Thanksgiving and possibly an indulgent Black Friday, but it’s time to get back to work. Yesterday, Zach Hancock gave a presentation on why the hereditarian fallacy is a fallacy — the math doesn’t work. The video demonstrates an important truth: biology requires math. In this case, it’s a fairly simple level of math, so if you know a little algebra and maybe a little statistics, you should be able to cope.

It’s an important message, too. Racism and hereditarianism are built on a false premise, and anyone who tries to use population genetics to argue against evolution or for racism doesn’t understand some rather basic stuff.

It gets in some good digs against Steven Pinker, too, who clearly doesn’t understand genetics or basic math.

Now get to work. Your break is over.

Sexy beast » « Where have all the flowers gone?

Comments

  2. Reginald Selkirk says

    Genetics:

    Gene behind orange fur in cats found at last

    But when the researchers looked at Arhgap36’s genetic sequence in orange cats, they didn’t find any mutations in the DNA that encodes the Arhgap36 protein. Instead, they found the orange cats were missing a nearby stretch of DNA that didn’t affect the protein’s amino acid components but might be involved in regulating how much of it the cell produced. Scanning a database of 188 cat genomes, Barsh’s team found every single orange, calico, and tortoiseshell cat had the exact same mutation. The group reports the discovery this month on the preprint server bioRxiv.

    A separate study, also posted to bioRxiv this month, confirms these findings. Similar experiments run by developmental biologist Hiroyuki Sasaki at Kyushu University and his colleagues revealed the same genetic deletion in 24 feral and pet cats from Japan, as well as among 258 cat genomes collected from around the world. They also found that skin from calico cats had more Arghap36 RNA in orange regions than in brown or black regions. Moreover Arhgap36 genes in mice, cats, and humans acquire chemical modifications that silence them on one of the two X chromosomes in females, Sasaki’s team documented, suggesting the gene is subject to X inactivation…

  3. chrislawson says

    @2–

    And tortoiseshell cats are almost always female with mosaicism, and calico cats are almost always female because the allele is lethal in utero to male fetuses. (Male exceptions are extremely rare.) Found a great minimally-technical article on the genetics of mosaicism in cats.

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