Goodbye GATTACA, again ... do I have to change my phone number or what ... ?

GATTACA, I keep telling you it's all over between us, we are not just our "genes." It's not even clear any more that there is a gene, in that sense.

But you are just so not listening ...

If you want to predict how tall your children might one day be, a good bet would be to look in the mirror, and at your mate. Studies going back almost a century have estimated that height is 80–90% heritable. So if 29 centimetres separate the tallest 5% of a population from the shortest, then genetics would account for as many as 27 of them1.

This year, three groups of researchers2,3,4 scoured the genomes of huge populations (the largest study4 looked at more than 30,000 people) for genetic variants associated with the height differences. More than 40 turned up.

But there was a problem: the variants had tiny effects. Altogether, they accounted for little more than 5% of height's heritability — just 6 centimetres by the calculations above. Even though these genome-wide association studies (GWAS) turned up dozens of variants, they did "very little of the prediction that you would do just by asking people how tall their parents are", says Joel Hirschhorn at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led one of the studies3.

[ ... ]

There could be scarier and more intractable reasons for unaccounted-for heritability that are not even being discussed. "It's a possibility that there's something we just don't fundamentally understand," Kruglyak says. "That it's so different from what we're thinking about that we're not thinking about it yet."

Still the mystery continues to draw its sleuths, for Kruglyak as for many other basic-research scientists. "You have this clear, tangible phenomenon in which children resemble their parents," he says. "Despite what students get told in elementary-school science, we just don't know how that works." (Personal genomes: The case of the missing heritability by Brendan Maher, Nature News (Published online 5 November 2008 Nature 456, 18-21 (2008) doi:10.1038/456018a)

See also:

Farewell, fat gene ... goodbye gay gene ... so long, sloppiness gene. And can someone please text Lamarck and tell him ...

Goodbye GATTACA: Environment and lifestyle affect which genes are actually expressed



Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Farewell, fat gene ... goodby gay gene ... so long, sloppiness gene

When someone informs you that it (whatever it is) is in their genes - so forget asking them to grow up and accept some responsibility - show them this article:

.... new large-scale studies of DNA are causing her and many of her colleagues to rethink the very nature of genes. They no longer conceive of a typical gene as a single chunk of DNA encoding a single protein. “It cannot work that way,” Dr. Prohaska said. There are simply too many exceptions to the conventional rules for genes.

It turns out, for example, that several different proteins may be produced from a single stretch of DNA. Most of the molecules produced from DNA may not even be proteins, but another chemical known as RNA. The familiar double helix of DNA no longer has a monopoly on heredity. Other molecules clinging to DNA can produce striking differences between two organisms with the same genes. And those molecules can be inherited along with DNA.

The gene, in other words, is in an identity crisis. - "Now the Rest of the Genome" by Carl Zimmer (New York Times, November 10, 2008)

And will somebody please text Lamarck, and tell him he's being rehabilitated?


Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Birds: What you thought you knew about their evolution is ... wrong?

From both Science Daily and New Scientist comes the word that, in the words of New Scientist's Bob Holmes (June 26, 2008),

A new study – the largest analysis of birds to date using modern genetic methods – has turned up numerous surprising relationships that will force biologists to reevaluate much of what they thought they knew about avian evolution.

[ ... ]

This new tree contains several notable surprises. For example, falcons are more closely related to songbirds than to other hawks and eagles. The closest kin of the diving birds called grebes turn out to be flamingos. And tiny, flashy hummingbirds, according to the new tree, are just a specialised form of nighthawks, whose squat, bulky bodies make them an unlikely cousin.

and in the words of Science Daily, whose drudges toil nameless (June 27, 2008):

The results of the study are so broad that the scientific names of dozens of birds will have to be changed, and biology textbooks and birdwatchers' field guides will have to be revised. For example, we now know that:

Birds adapted to the diverse environments several distinct times because many birds that now live on water (such as flamingos, tropicbirds and grebes) did not evolve from a different waterbird group, and many birds that now live on land (such as turacos, doves, sandgrouse and cuckoos) did not evolve from a different landbird group.

Similarly, distinctive lifestyles (such as nocturnal, raptorial and pelagic, i.e., living on the ocean or open seas) evolved several times. For example, contrary to conventional thinking, colorful, daytime hummingbirds evolved from drab nocturnal nightjars; falcons are not closely related to hawks and eagles; and tropicbirds (white, swift-flying ocean birds) are not closely related to pelicans and other waterbirds.

Shorebirds are not a basal evolutionary group, which refutes the widely held view that shorebirds gave rise to all modern birds.

And, summing it up,

"With this study, we learned two major things," said Sushma Reddy, another lead author and Bucksbaum Postdoctoral Fellow at The Field Museum. "First, appearances can be deceiving. Birds that look or act similar are not necessarily related. Second, much of bird classification and conventional wisdom on the evolutionary relationships of birds is wrong."

Yeah. Wrong.

Or maybe not. This analysis depends on certain assumptions about bird genomes - and the assumptions may not be correct.

Here is what we now know for sure: No one living has any sure idea how different types of birds originated. Fanatics of one method clash with the fanatics of another.

And people wonder why there is an intelligent design controversy ...

Genome mapping: Oldest animals "more complex than thought"

In The Scientist, Melissa Lee Phillips writes:

The genome of the sea anemone, one of the oldest living animal species on Earth, shares a surprising degree of similarity with the genome of vertebrates, researchers report in this week's Science.

The study also found that these similarities were absent from fruit fly and nematode genomes, contradicting the widely held belief that organisms become more complex through evolution. The findings suggest that the ancestral animal genome was quite complex, and fly and worm genomes lost some of that intricacy as they evolved.

One really interesting example of the pervasiveness of Darwinism in academic culture is the inability (due to fear mainly, I should think) to spell out the implications of such findings except in a veiled way (the "more complex than thought" schtick).

Let's go over the argument: The Gospel according to Charles Darwin teaches that life originated and complexified by natural selection acting on random mutations over vast eons. In other words, there was a slow increase in complexity. As the item in The Scientist clearly spells out, in this case we actually see here huge complexity near the beginning of life, with losses among complex diversified species such as fruit flies. In other words, evolution meant reduced complexity. And the original complexity came from where, exactly?

No wonder there is an intelligent design controversy! It would actually be dangerous to a scientist's career to discuss these matters openly.

If you are interested in why there is an intelligent design controversy, and why it can't just go away, check out my book, By Design or by Chance?