Thursday, November 13, 2008

Count your Great-Great Grandparents

How many great-great grandparents did you have? If the answer is less than 16 then there must have been some inbreeding. Don't worry- an Icelandic study has found that 3rd cousin marriages are the most fecund! (although the actual reasons behind this are hotly disputed).

In any case, we are all inbred- if we weren't we'd all have more ancestors than have ever lived on the planet. I got to thinking about this after listening to iTunes U Berkeley History 4A (again) on the end of the Roman republic- specifically regarding Cleopatra (VII) - empresss of Egypt.

Although the Ptolemaic dynasty were Greek ( descendents of one of Alex-the-Great's generals) - they continued the Egyptian tradition of inbreeding. Cleo herself only had 6 great-great-grandparents ... and most of these were related! Reminds me of the hysterical "30 Rock" episode with Prince Gerhard Messerschmidt Rammstein von Haupt - the genetically deformed Habsburg prince who falls in love with Jenna. I guess the character was based on the last Habsburg king of Spain: the mentally and physically disabled Charles II.

http://www.nbc.com/30_Rock/images/episodes/season1/111/rok_111_08.jpg


Wednesday, November 12, 2008

The New Genetics

Another great article by the always-brilliant Carl Zimmer on migrating exons, HERV's, epigenetics - and 'non-coding DNA'.

Fascinating that somebody just made up the word 'gene' ... just as somebody else made up (co-opted) the work "quark". I guess it makes sense - these two concepts are so revolutionary that they needed new words created for them. What will be the neologism that will define our current networked era? Probably "Spam".

http://www.evolutionnews.org/JunkDNA.jpg

Monday, November 10, 2008

No Need for Religion to be Religious

Probability waves- interacting and becoming particles, held together by nuclear glue, orbiting electrons, atoms and molecules, DNA unwinding, transcribing, proteins made on a ribosomal anvil, pushing out into the cytoplasm, nerves transmitting, thoughts, moving fingers made of bone, typing sentences made of language. Love, children, happiness, music. All this from a single cell- divided again and again- folded, kneaded and then pruned. Grown in my mother. The recipe now 14 billion years old. At midnight- staring out with monkey eyes at a starry sky - each point from a different age, a billion neutrinos silently streaming up from the sun through my feet. Imagining i'm pulling on the universe just as it is pulling on me.

http://www.dl.ket.org/webmuseum/wm/paint/auth/redon/redon.bouddha.jpg