Of Christine Kenneally’s father’s father — a man neither Kenneally nor her father ever knew, a man who did the deed requisite to reproduction and promptly vanished — she asks, “Did he leave anything more significant than the loud bang of a door shut down the generations?” Of course he did. He left his DNA […]
Continue reading →How do genes generate traits? A prime answer emerging from the ever-increasing power of genetic studies is that genes create traits through accidental teamwork. That is, as far as our still-early tools and techniques can tell, many and perhaps most traits for which we can find any genetic contributions are influenced by many genes of […]
Continue reading →From Hawks: Jeff Leach, at the “Human Food Project”, has written pungently about a bout of microbiome self-experimentation: “(Re)Becoming Human: what happened the day I replaced 99% of the genes in my body with that of a hunter-gatherer”. AS THE SUN set over Lake Eyasi in Tanzania, nearly thirty minutes had passed since I had […]
Continue reading →How to Take a Picture of a Severed Head Or not. IS is working very hard to manage its media presence, and it’s working. By Sebastian Meyer and Alicia P.Q. Whitmeyer at Foreign Policy. H/t Alex Horton. Photo via Reuters via Foreign Policy. Mirwan was recruited to document IS’s recent attack on the town of Sinjar, he says […]
Continue reading →Today a group of over 130 prominent geneticists, responding to a review I wrote for The New York Times Sunday Book Review of Nicholas Wade’s book A Troublesome Inheritance, published a letter to the Review taking Wade to task for misrepresenting their work. Wade cited the work of many of these geneticists in arguing his book’s central contention, which is that humanity’s “major races” have genetic differences that […]
Continue reading →An unprecedently large genetic study of schizophrenia has linked a bunch of new genes to this confusing ailment. This’ll take years, decades maybe, to sort out, partly because if you repeated the study with a different set of 36,989 people, you might find a different set of 80 genes associated. NIMH director Tom Insel says […]
Continue reading →My journalist friend and colleague David Goodman had me on his radio show “The Vermont Conversation” this past Wednesday, over at WDEV’s fine studios in Waterbury, Vermont, and we spent a few minutes discussing writing about science; my review of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance; depression and neurology; and my mother’s lover. My segment starts shortly after the 2-minute mark and runs to about minute […]
Continue reading →As my own review of Nicholas Wade’s book suggested, his treatment of genetics has many deep and fundamental problems. And as my blog post noted, many others have called some of those out. I want to call out here a particularly clean such account, which came from evolutionary biologist Michael Eisen a few weeks ago. He cuts […]
Continue reading →Today the New York Times Book Review published its advance online version of my review of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance. (It will appear in print this Sunday.) Others have already reviewed this book elsewhere, with particularly sharp takes coming from Jennifer Raff, Eric Johnson, Michael Eisen, H. Allen Orr, Jerry Coyne, and, also at the Times, Arthur Allen. You’ll find a fuller […]
Continue reading →Best of the Week: Developmental Plasticity and the “Hard-Wired” Problem. by Patrick Clarkin. We’ve built a wall between genes and environment. Clarkin tears it down. And in Does Nature Need to be Nurtured?, Eric Johnson shows why such questions are important. The Racism Beat, by Jefferson Cord. Important and heartbreaking. Lean Out: The Dangers for Women […]
Continue reading →