Reading Time: 4 minutes Genetics has a more powerful influence on pupils’ GCSE exam results than teachers, schools or family environment, according to a new study published tonight.
Researchers from King’s College London found that genetic differences account for 58 per cent of the differences between pupils’ GCSE exam scores – while environment (home or school) only accounted for 29 per cent. They also found boys’ results were more likely to reflect their genes than girls.
Reading Time: 4 minutes Certain fears can be inherited through the generations, a provocative study of micereports. The authors suggest that a similar phenomenon could influence anxiety and addiction in humans. But some researchers are sceptical of the findings because a biological mechanism that explains the phenomenon has not been identified.
Reading Time: 3 minutes Using novel techniques to extract and study ancient DNA researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have determined an almost complete mitochondrial genome sequence of a 400,000-year-old representative of the genus Homo from Sima de los Huesos, a unique cave site in Northern Spain, and found that it is related to the mitochondrial genome of Denisovans, extinct relatives of Neandertals in Asia. DNA this old has until recently been retrieved only from the permafrost.
Reading Time: 3 minutes This is a fascinating article which will feed in to a post I will write about my own twins, and the power of genetics over behaviour, with its necessary mitigation of free will. From Science Daily:
Reading Time: 4 minutes An online friend of mine whom has a real interest in the concept of free will, and all the problematic baggage it brings with it. He has a proclivity for producing adverts for newspapers and publications like Free Inquiry that concern themselves with this erroneous philosophical belief. Here is one such piece from the Free Inquiry which does a good job of summing up the issues with an account of libertarian free will, and how that works in the context of Christianity. Let me know what you think.
Reading Time: 14 minutes Check out this fascinating article from Discover. H/T Neil Webber. Your ancestors’ lousy childhoods or excellent adventures might change your personality, bequeathing anxiety or resilience by altering the epigenetic expressions of genes in the brain. [This article originally appeared in print as “Trait vs. Fate”] Darwin and Freud walk into a bar. Two alcoholic mice […]
Reading Time: 4 minutes I am going to copy and paste a very normal article from Science Daily here. Nothing special. Just your bog-standard scientific journal publication press release. This one is about a fossilised horse which has had its genome mapped.
What I want people like JohnM, a regular commenter here, to do is to explain all of the aspects of this articles in terms of their Creationist framework. What I mean by this, is they (he) needs to take every claim in this article (most aren’t claims, but are simply givens) and produce a non ad hoc explanation which explains this evidence BETTER than evolution and naturalism. In order to be true, the explanation must have that explanatory power.
Reading Time: 3 minutes A multi-national team of researchers has identified genetic markers that predict educational attainment by pooling data from more than 125,000 individuals in the United States, Australia, and 13 western European countries.
Reading Time: 3 minutes Can’t believe I missed this one. Interesting, and something I will bring up in my talk tonight on free will at Southampton University to the Atheist Society. Research into prosocial (kind) behaviour is always interesting, and something I have documented here, here and here. there is a mix of genetic and environmental influences with this one. It seems that talking to children about giving, about kindness, is more important than role-modeling when measuring children’s kindness. Of course, children who do not have these environmental influences will be at a disadvantage to others who have, and these are variables outside of their control.
Reading Time: 3 minutes As if any was needed.
Science Daily – Feb. 14, 2013 — A genome-wide analysis searching for evidence of long-lived balancing selection — where the evolutionary process acts not to select the single best adaptation but to maintain genetic variation in a population — has uncovered at least six regions of the genome where humans and chimpanzees share the same combination of genetic variants.
