Didja win? Didja win? Didja win?

Before everyone goes nuts with the queries, here’s the official word on the now closed commenting contest.

It will take a day for us to determine the winners of the contest. We have to make sure our data is correct before making the draw happen. We will email the winners directly. If you don’t hear, you didn’t win. It will probably take a week or so to contact and hear back from the winners.

I have no say in anything, and will not know anything until the winners contact the big guys managing the contest.

You are encouraged to go on commenting to run the tally up to a million.

Tandem repeats and morphological variation

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research
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All of us mammals have pretty much the same set of genes, yet obviously there have to be some significant differences to differentiate a man from a mouse. What we currently think is a major source of morphological diversity is in the cis regulatory regions; that is, stretches of DNA outside the actual coding region of the gene that are responsible for switching the gene on and off. We might all have hair, but where we differ is when and where mice and men grow it on their bodies, and that is under the control of these regulatory elements.

A new paper by Fondon and Garner suggests that there is another source of variation between individuals: tandem repeats. Tandem repeats are short lengths of DNA that are repeated multiple times within a gene, anywhere from a handful of copies to more than a hundred. They are also called VNTRs, or variable number tandem repeats, because different individuals within a population may have different numbers of repeats. These VNTRs are relatively easy to detect with molecular tools, and we know that populations (humans included) may carry a large reservoir of different numbers of repeats, but what exactly the differences do has never been clear. One person might carry 3 tandem repeats in a particular gene, while her neighbor might bear 15, with no obvious differences between them that can be traced to that particular gene. So the question is what, if anything, does having a different number of tandem repeats do to an organism?

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Any science entrepreneurs out there?

Here’s a strategy to make money from your expertise!

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There is some bad news, though.

  • It’s been done many times already, so there is “competition”. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of competition, though, and the market for this kind of “science” seems insatiable.
  • Wrong answers and bad answers seem to be much more valuable than truth and accuracy.

You, too, can be an agent of selection

Here’s a website of mutating pictures, a collection of images made with a splatter of scattered triangles. Your job is to browse through them and score them for how much they resemble a face — which isn’t easy. If I stare at any random pile of symmetrical shadings, they all start to look like faces to me.

Anyway, pictures that get higher scores produce more progeny, with slight mutations, in the next round of picture generation. You can see where this is going…

Luskin on gene duplication

Casey Luskin has to be a bit of an embarrassment to the IDists…at least, he would be, if the IDists had anyone competent with whom to compare him. I tore down a previous example of Luskin’s incompetence at genetics, and now he’s gone and done it again. He complains about an article by Richard Dawkins that explains how gene duplication and divergence are processes that lead to the evolution of new information in the genome. Luskin, who I suspect has never taken a single biology class in his life, thinks he can rebut the story. He fails miserably in everything except revealing his own ignorance.

It’s quite a long-winded piece of blithering nonsense, so I’m going to focus on just three objections.

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Brains feeling stretched…

Cosma has to go and show off with a magisterial demonstration of why he is the smartest man on the internet: he’s written an exceptionally thorough description of heritability and IQ. It’s not a light read (statistics and genetics!), but it’s probably the most informative thing I’ve read in a month or more.

I’m sure I’m going to have to read it a few more times before I’ve absorbed it all.

Lua Yar talks about…

The neurobiology of intelligence

Where do people get the idea that intelligence has a biological basis? Oh yeah, from those geneticists, whose research has shown that intelligence levels can be inherited. One fairly new development for researching intelligence is through the conduction of brain imaging studies.

Recently, two neuroscientists by the names of Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine and Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico, compiled a review of 37 such intelligence imaging studies. With this data, and current neurobiology studies that indicate intelligence is a measure of how well information travels through the brain, Haier and Jung formulated what they call the Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory (P-FIT). This theory identifies the stations of the brain, chiefly found in the frontal and parietal lobes, that network to produce intelligent information processing. So, whether you are smart or stupid depends, in part, on differences in connections between, and composition of, specific areas of the brain.

Haier and Jung have made many contributions to intelligence research. They discovered that it is unlikely that a single “intelligence center” exists, as the regions of the brain related to general intelligence are dispersed throughout the brain. In another study, general intelligence levels between the sexes were determined to have essentially no disparity, and yet their neural structures are different, with women having more white matter and men having more gray. This indicates that intelligence levels are independent of brain design.

Of course, can all of this just be taken with a grain of salt, because how does one really measure intelligence?

Animeme

Chris Clarke callously infected me with a meme. I’m supposed to answer these five questions.

An interesting animal I had

An interesting animal I ate

An interesting animal in the Museum

An interesting thing I did with or to an animal

An interesting animal in its natural habitat

My first thought was, “Dude! These are awfully personal questions. Why are you asking for these intimate details of my sex life?” But then I noticed that he brought up my little friend Snowball (you may not want to read that), and all of his stories were about non-human animals. Oh. Never mind. That’s completely different.

Or maybe not so different…

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