Today it has just been announced that artificial life has been created and has been reproduced more than a billion times, sparking moral controversy: Scientists have created artificial life. In a world-first, Craig Venter, a maverick biologist and billionaire entrepreneur, has made a designer microbe from scratch. The creation of the new life form, nicknamed [...]
Posts Tagged ‘DNA’
Evaluating our tripartite qualities
Personal metrics and history data can reveal for us where we stand among others. This can be done in an impartial, analytical manner, divided in tripartite. Overlap between categories often comes into play, so the divisions are not strict, but simply serve to assist in understanding methodology. For example, inner drive derived from willful character [...]
Surprise, Surprise: Our Ancestors Weren’t Morons
Archeologists said yesterday that they had unearthed the oldest musical instruments ever found – several flutes that inhabitants of southwestern Germany laboriously carved from bone and ivory at least 35,000 years ago. Just a few feet away from a bone flute, researchers discovered one of the oldest examples of figurative art – the sculpture of [...]
More on Celtic mummies in China
Solid as a warrior of the Caledonii tribe, the man’s hair is reddish brown flecked with grey, framing high cheekbones, a long nose, full lips and a ginger beard. When he lived three thousand years ago, he stood six feet tall, and was buried wearing a red twill tunic and tartan leggings. He looks like [...]
The biological basis for race
Let’s hop into this question with both feet: Are racial-ethnic (when most people say race, they mean ethnicity, and vice-versa) differences innate, meaning biologically and genetically inherent? I would rather not get into comparing IQs and other abilities here, but simply answering the question: are races biologically different? Obviously, the answer will be somewhat complex. [...]
Science is Racist
Last September, Bruce Lahn, a professor of human genetics at the University of Chicago, stood before a packed lecture hall and reported the results of a new DNA analysis: He had found signs of recent evolution in the brains of some people, but not of others. It was a triumphant moment for the young scientist. [...]
Can we admit sexuality is genetic yet?
Yes, as mentioned before, some people are molested young and so become homosexual. But for most people sexuality is defined in the womb. The nature-versus-nurture debate rages on, but a new study of transsexuals has shown genetics plays a key role in determining our sense of gender. { snip } Researchers measured the variation in [...]
How genes regulate adoption of new traits
“Most species maintain abundant genetic variation and experience a wide range of environmental conditions, yet phenotypic—or physical— differences between individuals are usually small,” Siegal explained. “This phenomenon, known as phenotypic robustness, presents an apparent contradiction: if biological systems are so resistant to variation, how do they diverge and adapt through evolutionary time?” Siegal and Levy [...]
