It's the topography!
The discovery has astonished scientists studying the human genome - the genetic recipe of man. Until now it was believed the variation between people was due largely to differences in the sequences of the individual "letters" of the genome.It now appears much of the variation is explained instead by people having multiple copies of some key genes that make up the human genome.
Until now it was assumed that the human genome, or "book of life", is largely the same for everyone, save for a few spelling differences in some of the words. Instead, the findings suggest that the book contains entire sentences, paragraphs or even whole pages that are repeated any number of times.
The findings mean that instead of humanity being 99.9 per cent identical, as previously believed, we are at least 10 times more different between one another than once thought - which could explain why some people are prone to serious diseases.
The Independent article is rather poorly explained. This isn't really new information - it's the prevalence of coding repeats that seems to have taken researchers by surprise, This article is brief, but more accurate in its description.
Their focus has been to dig out deletions or duplications of code among relatively long sequences of DNA and then compare these so-called copy number variations (CNVs) across a range of volunteers of different ancestry.The researchers were astonished to locate 1,447 CNVs in nearly 2,900 genes, or around one eighth of the human genetic code.
"Each one of us has a unique pattern of gains and losses of complete sections of DNA," said Matthew Hurles of Britain's Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, one of the project's partners.
"The copy number variation that researchers had seen before was simply the tip of the iceberg, while the bulk lay submerged, undetected. We now appreciate the immense contribution of this phenomenon to genetic differences between individuals."
All the same, there are widespread differences in CNVs according to the three geographical origins of the samples. This implies that, over the last 200,000 years or so, subtle variants have arisen in the genome to allow different populations of humans adapt to their different environments, according to the researchers.
This is not new information at all. There are for example genetic diseases caused by too many or too few copies, and this has been known for years. See Ridley's book Nature via Nurture for some examples. So what we have here is a wild overhype by a reporter.
Mother Nature decides who or what survives. Science indicates probables while populations adapting to their environments either survive or not.
A small sampling of under 300 and expletives of groundbreaking breakthrough or equal = junk science.
This is a promo for funding................
Kate
Thanks for the links...even the Chinese one which forced me to reload some computer discy thingy...which is no small feat for a confirmed technoklutz.
The two articles you noted brought to mind this one from the November issue of Discover magazine.
http://www.discover.com/issues/nov-06/cover/
I believe it is worthwhile reading. A Clip:
Back in 2000, Randy Jirtle, a professor of radiation oncology at Duke University, and his postdoctoral student Robert Waterland designed a groundbreaking genetic experiment that was simplicity itself. They started with pairs of fat yellow mice known to scientists as agouti mice, so called because they carry a particular gene—the agouti gene—that in addition to making the rodents ravenous and yellow renders them prone to cancer and diabetes. Jirtle and Waterland set about to see if they could change the unfortunate genetic legacy of these little creatures.
Typically, when agouti mice breed, most of the offspring are identical to the parents: just as yellow, fat as pincushions, and susceptible to life-shortening disease. The parent mice in Jirtle and Waterland's experiment, however, produced a majority of offspring that looked altogether different. These young mice were slender and mousy brown. Moreover, they did not display their parents' susceptibility to cancer and diabetes and lived to a spry old age. The effects of the agouti gene had been virtually erased.
Remarkably, the researchers effected this transformation without altering a single letter of the mouse's DNA. Their approach instead was radically straightforward—they changed the moms' diet. Starting just before conception, Jirtle and Waterland fed a test group of mother mice a diet rich in methyl donors, small chemical clusters that can attach to a gene and turn it off. These molecules are common in the environment and are found in many foods, including onions, garlic, beets, and in the food supplements often given to pregnant women. After being consumed by the mothers, the methyl donors worked their way into the developing embryos' chromosomes and onto the critical agouti gene. The mothers passed along the agouti gene to their children intact, but thanks to their methyl-rich pregnancy diet, they had added to the gene a chemical switch that dimmed the gene's deleterious effects.
The gist of the article is that environmental influences can have multi-generational consequences on how genes assert themselves...or don't. This occurs through biochemical changes in epigenes. Essentially the switches in our genitical make-up.
This coupled with the recognition of CNV's may go a long way to explaining some culturally specific diseases.
I think first of the greater incidences of MS in people of northern european heritage who also live in a northern climate.
Could this be a combination of CNV's and epigenes?
This would seem to fit with the cultural differences noted in the Independant article.
What I find exciting is that the complex interconnections between nature and nurture are slowly beginning to be understood.
Then again the whole body of knowledge will probably be bastardized by the social engineers to further the helping industry. Now that is tragic. I offer another poignat quote from the Discovery article.
Michael Meaney, who studies the impact of nurturing, likewise wonders what the implications of epigenetics are for social policy. He notes that early child-parent bonding is made more difficult by the effects of poverty, dislocation, and social strife. Those factors can certainly affect the cognitive development of the children directly involved. Might they also affect the development of future generations through epigenetic signaling?
"These ideas are likely to have profound consequences when you start to talk about how the structure of society influences cognitive development," Meaney says. "We're beginning to draw cause-and-effect arrows between social and economic macrovariables down to the level of the child's brain. That connection is potentially quite powerful."
Lawrence Harper, a psychologist at the University of California at Davis, suggests that a wide array of personality traits, including temperament and intelligence, may be affected by epigenetic inheritance. "If you have a generation of poor people who suffer from bad nutrition, it may take two or three generations for that population to recover from that hardship and reach its full potential," Harper says. "Because of epigenetic inheritance, it may take several generations to turn around the impact of poverty or war or dislocation on a population."
Historically, genetics has not meshed well with discussions of social policy; it's all too easy to view disadvantaged groups—criminals, the poor, the ethnically marginalized—as somehow fated by DNA to their condition. The advent of epigenetics offers a new twist and perhaps an opportunity to understand with more nuance how nature and nurture combine to shape the society we live in today and hope to live in tomorrow.
"Epigenetics will have a dramatic impact on how we understand history, sociology, and political science," says Szyf. "If environment has a role to play in changing your genome, then we've bridged the gap between social processes and biological processes. That will change the way we look at everything."
On the other hand they devoted one paragraph to RESPONSIBILITY.
"Epigenetics is proving we have some responsibility for the integrity of our genome," Jirtle says. "Before, genes predetermined outcomes. Now everything we do—everything we eat or smoke—can affect our gene expression and that of future generations. Epigenetics introduces the concept of free will into our idea of genetics."
Now that lifted my spitits!!..........I guess that makes me manic/depressive or in the PC lexicon bi-polar.
I never could decide......
Syncro
Of course, Steve Sailer is all over this news like, erm, uh, white on rice, so to speak.
This can be considered confirmation of something suspected for a looooong time. The DNA of a human doesn't contain enough data points if you look at it as a one dimensional "tape". I mean, there are bacteria with much more DNA than what we have, why is that?
So now we have another dimension to the encoding, confirmed. This is good.
I fully expect two or three more more such dimensions to be discovered over the next several years as super computers get faster and faster.
The one that interests me is the mechanism for deciding where the brain cells go. I remember reading someplace that we have more brain cells than DNA codes, yet there is something that manages to get all those cells in the right places.
Fun stuff to look forward to, eh?
Look up so-called junk DNA as it applies to Zipf's language law.
Another reason why "Darwin" always works!
...gosh does this once and for all settle the fact females are different from males?
These crack-pots still try to claim we are related to apes what a load of poppycock and bull kaka EVOLUTIONISTS ARE THE MOST CRAZY AND INSANE PEOPLE AROUND AS WACKY AS THOSE GLOBAL WARMING GREEN NUTS
Good point plover. BTW how's Bob?
Syncro