Slashdot Mirror
Genome Surprise
Catskul writes "Along with the news that the polished and (more nearly) complete human genome being published Monday, comes a surprising observation about the genome: We have substantially fewer genes than expected; between 27,000 and 40,000 as compared to an original estimate of 140,000." Update: 04/14 01:22 GMT by T : For everyone who can't look at a Z, headline updated with an S in "surprise."
This does not equal _gene expression_, or does not explain epigenetic effects.
This kind of news always makes me wary. Did the reporters mean what the author had in mind? Yes, when it comes to genetics I am more suspicious, after all, as a political tool it is too powerful for lunatics to be based on empty air; if you see what I mean.
Some of those oddities like tails are awfully curious to me. They're only somewhat inactive and are expressed in some people, and carry on down through their offspring - are they then really 'inactive' in the whole human scheme of things. ie some theoretical gene for "tail" or "no tail" for example, which is active would create a tail when present or not. But some fully inactive ones like "feathers" or "no feathers" which aren't used no matter what their state.
I'd see genes like those for a tail as being awfully rare, but not completely inactive
Now I don't know what the point of my post is. I think I wanted to talk about tails as I always wanted one when I was little. Instead I got some extra vertebrae, ribs, and a couple of mirrored organs.
Unless you prepare your food in a cleanroom, I suspect that every dish you prepare has at least one copy of a human genome in it, if not more (not to mention the genomes of other organisms). . .
That may be, but race is still interesting.
Race is not much more than a way of classifying people based on appearance. It might also hint at a shared cultural background, but not always. But it is still potentially useful.
Nobody would say that the colour of a car should have anything to do with its handling. It's just paint, and has nothing to do with the insides. On the other hand, there are far more red sportscars than there are powder-blue ones.
If people are willing to accept that, maybe they'd be willing to look at other factors that happen to coincide with light skin tones or different-looking eyes. Unfortunately, any researcher wanting to look at this might as well put on a hood and join the KKK because people are so overly sensitive when it comes to race. If the environments different races evolved in were different enough to cause the obvious physical differences, wouldn't it be surprising if the differences stopped there? Even if the differences within a race are far greater than the differences between races, it would be interesting to see if there are tendencies towards something based on race.
Humans have allways been good at explaining why they are the better than someone/thing else
when was the last time you time you heard about a chicken that came home and beat the sh*t out of his hen? you dont see a chicken hooking up another guys nuts to a car batery do you? no because chickens are decent people!
"A year spent in artifical inteligence makes you consider more about religion"
The reason that there is no genetic basis for the naive (and racist) concepts of race is that all the racisits conveniently omit that large portion of humanity whose superficial charateristics fall between the racial stereotypes.
What are north africans? Are they black? "Yes," says the Norwegian racist, "because they don't have pink skin and blue eyes." "No," says the Kenyan racist, "because they have straight hair, and their skin is too light."
And so on, and on, for central asians (are they Caucasian, or Mongoloid?), and Dravidians (are they "black" or caucasian), etc. etc.
There's no genetic basis for races, because there's no real definition of what constitutes one race or the other. The only thing people ever define are the extremes (practically albino white, with straight blonde hair and blue eyes v. the darkest possible skin tone with very kinky hair) but no one can agree on where to classify the vast number of people who fall in between these extremes, and who occupy a substantial portion of the land area of our planet.
But so what? What's this mean? All the news programs tell me how this is going to bring an end to disease a longer life for all of us etc., etc. But nobody ever tells how. And everybody is supposed to have unique DNA, so whose DNA have they decoded? Not mine. So how does this help me?
It seems to me there is an awful lot of hype surrounding the Human Genome Project.
I can print my kernel on A4 as 1's and 0's - Does this mean an end to security vunerablilities an better use of memory?
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.