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Tibetans Inherited High-Altitude Gene From Ancient Human
sciencehabit writes A "superathlete" gene that helps Sherpas and other Tibetans breathe easy at high altitudes was inherited from an ancient species of human. That's the conclusion of a new study, which finds that the gene variant came from people known as Denisovans, who went extinct soon after they mated with the ancestors of Europeans and Asians about 40,000 years ago. This is the first time a version of a gene acquired from interbreeding with another type of human has been shown to help modern humans adapt to their environment.
This is the first time a version of a gene acquired from interbreeding with another type of human has been shown to help modern humans adapt to their environment.
I'd have to say the genes for red hair were pretty damn helpful in making some of our women really attractive.
Wish I could get laid...
Be seeing you...
Could this be used to determine whether certain people are invasive? And they should leave on moral grounds. Or that they will face misery because of a gene they don't possess?
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
came from people known as Denisovans, who went extinct soon after they mated with the ancestors of Europeans and Asians
Well no wonder they died, there isn't enough oxygen at those higher altitudes to sustain banging.
The explanation of the evolution is terrible. If the gene was inherited from a "Denisovans" then that Denisovan didn't go extinct. His descendents are still among us. The gene did not spread through the population; the people who had the gene survived and people without the gene disappeared leaving more space for those survivors.
There is another obvious point in history where such a gene transfer could have occurred. European conditions favour light skin, and Neandertals had been hanging out there for some tens of thousands of years before modern humans turned up and so had evolved light skin. These newcomers, having recent ancestry in Africa, were probably dark skinned. Interbreeding could easily have introduced the beneficial-to-European-conditions light skin mutations into the modern population.
My memory of the literature (which I have followed just a little bit, not closely) is that this did not happen - genetic analysis shows that modern Europeans and Neandertals acquired light skin through different mutations. However, Wikipedia says this is still under debate.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Von Dana Kihn had it right all along.
More ammunition for the Republicans to claim that another group of brown people isn't human. Of course, with our without evidence, their kind will still try to kill them.
After all, if a story about interbreeding, genetics and extinction of humans appears on Slashdot, then it has to be true......
One of the definitions of "species" states, that if two can breed and produce viable offspring (unlike, say, donkey and horse or lion and tiger, which produce sterile hybrids), then they are the same species...
Why are Denisovans considered different species, rather than simply a different race (or breed?) of the same Homo Sapiens?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If they bred with humans, technically they didn't go extinct: their genes live on, at least some of them. "Extinct" is perhaps not a Boolean value.
Table-ized A.I.
Now we just need to cross breed Kenyan and Tibetan and we got ourselves a WINNER
If Tibetans inherit their genes from the Denisovans, which means that they are cousins to the Melanesians, who also inherit (some other) genes from the Denisovans
One group - the Tibetans, are on the left side of China while the other group, the Melanesians, on the right, and one curious thing is that according to the Chinese legend there was a great war in between 2 tribes, resulting one tribe which was defeated and ran away and the victors became the ancestors of the present day Chinese
Perhaps the Denisovans were the tribe which was defeated, and their offsprings split into two groupings - one went to the Tibetan highland while the other one sailed out to the sea and settled at the Melanesian island on the Western side of the Pacific Ocean
Table-ized A.I.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_VG-L...
Table-ized A.I.
1. Did they study this gene and all the systems of the human body that use genes to fully understand COMPLETELY and EXACTLY how it operates? In other words: Do they ACTUALLY KNOW what this gene does and all the side-effects its presence conveys with such certainty that if they had been given a sample of DNA with theis gene in it they could have worked from the other direction and said "Ah, the 'high altitude' gene...did this sample come from a Tibetan?" ----- Or is this yet another case of bioscience guys finding a statistical correlation between a gene and a particular human trait and then RUNNING to publish a paper, patent a gene, and start seeking more research money or investors?
2. Where's the proof that this is an abnormal trait inherited (like some sort of lotto win) by the Tibetans from ancient humans rather than being something lots of people had, but which most of our ancestors "lost". In other words: VERY few humans and ancient human ancestors died and got buried in ways that left remains for modern people to dig-up and study (some of our most famous evolutionary "links" are a half-dozen bone fragments... "Lucy" is about as famous as they get and is only 40% of ONE skeleton), so we're on REALLY "thin ground" here to play statistical games ---- where's the proof this was an additive "thing" rather than a subtractive one?
Rape doesn't count as "make up sex".
EVERY SINGLE SLAVE "OWNER" in the USA was a DEMOCRAT! Not even ONE Republican slave owner EVER existed in the USA.
EVERY SINGLE GOVERNOR who kept a black kid out of a "white" school was a DEMOCRAT
EVERY law that blocked a black person from a "white" drinking fountain or restroom in all of US history was put in place and enforced by DEMOCRATS
The US Federal Government was segregated by order of DEMOCRAT president Woodrow Wilson. Republican president Eisenhower de-segregated the federal government, pushed through the civil rights acts of 1957 and 1960, and EISENHOWER was the one who sent the federal troops into the south to force the democrats to let black kids into white schools.
Planned Parenthood was founded by Progressive Democrat Margaret Sanger for the sole purpose of eugenics (cleaning up the gene pool) by aborting as many black babies as possible.
The KKK was formed by DEMOCRATS and they listed both blacks and Republicans as their enemies in their propaganda
Gun control laws in the US were origninally advanced by Democrats to disarm black people, who had begun to arm themselves to defend themselves against the Democrats in the Klan; This was openly discussed in a Democrat national convention at the time. This is FACT. (SOME say the NRA was founded to help blacks in this situation - the evidence for that is inconclusive)
Of course, these FACTS always make liberal Democrats squirm, so they have a severely dishonest "talking point" to try to fool the ignorant: They usually say "well, THAT was before all those bad Democrats became Republicans {mumble, mumble,mumble} Nixon Southern Strategy!!!". This works as a ruse to distract the simple-minded but it is insanely illogical. When LBJ was trying to pass his civil rights bill, it was REPUBLICAN votes in congress that put the bill over the line and got it passed.... and today's liberal democrats want people to believe that those hate-filled racist southern Democrats lashed-out in response by ... joining the very political party that just forced black people onto them!?!?!? Sorry, logic FAIL. The decent, religious and/or patriotic southerners switched parties in the late sixties in reponse to the cultural meltdown of the Democrat party that was turning into the part of "flag-burners", "hippies" and drug-users. The nasty racist Democrats stayed in their party and simply switched tactics.... they pushed policies of putting blacks into poverty plantations (subsisized housing projects) where they could be controlled and kept down (the rules kicked people out of their homes if their income rose too much, but with a threshold too low to survive without a susbidy - a despicable TRAP designed to keep black Americans poor). Have you ever READ or listened to the evil racist rants of LBJ???? The man HATED black people; he used "the n-word" more times per hour than Samuel Jackson swears in a typical movie.
DEMOCRATS are and have ALWAYS been the party that puts people into racial categories and then makes decisions about them based on which group they are in... the tickets to all Democrat presidential conventions are ALLOCATED by RACE (so they look "inclusive" on TV). The Republicans are and have ALWAYS been the party philosophically committed to the argument that judging people by skin color is ALWAYS wrong and that NO law should work for or against a person based on skin color.
LOL.
abakallah!
How long have the sherpas been up there carrying shit for rich European thrill seekers?
Atmospheric pressure, and hence oxygen content, at the height Tibetans have lived naturally for thousands of years is a bit over half that of sea-level. This story has nothing to do with climbing Everest.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Well, I really think it should be race, even writing about different species might be dangerous. That could be really intresting but topic is a tabu.
The only safe route is to wrote that all people all almost same. In fact it would be intresting if people from really different race has problems get babies. But I fear event that is a bit dangerous subject. Only thing that I know for sure it that living as really diffent people is hard, that might have some effect.
But the Jew professors in college told me race is a "social construct" and that a German and a Nigerian are the same even though Germans have as much as 5% Neanderthal DNA and the Nigerian as 0%.
Light skin is beneficial? Racist motherfucker.
Yes. Very attractive.
And, make men too much of a troublemakers ...
Maybe their not alien, but they could be if they wanted.
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I win sports handicapping contests by using only weather variables to predict if a home team is going to win or lose. I have been doing this for several years. I won the NFL contest the last 2 years in a row, beating over 200 other contestants for the $1000 prize and I am the top MLB handicapper for the last three contests that I have entered. I believe that there is a gene that hunter gatherers depended on to warn them of poor weather conditions. I find certain weather conditions make the home team preform differently than the away team. So if bad weather is in the area the home team is not as productive (lazy and tired) and lose more often. This would help the hunter gatherer by subconsciously keeping him home if bad weather was coming in the near future and it would make the away team more alert so they could have the energy to get shelter.
Labelling #1 a "sleight" was a convenient way of dodging a fact: NOBODY yet understands completely how genetic mechanisms work so completely that, given some genetic material, they can examine it and tell you all about what the result will be. The current understanding is still so limited that the best anybody can do is say "we observe the presence of gene {insert ID here} and that's associated with {a higher risk of disease X} or {blue eyes} and so-forth. This is FUNDAMENTALLY different from saying "we see that gene and we know the body will use it in the following ways, which will have the following results...".
The first form of "knowing" something is a game of statistics and observed correllations (which, in science, often turn out to be wrong over the passage of decades with much more research) and the second form of "knowing" is NOT statistics; it's ACTUAL UNDERSTANDING and is FAR more useful.
Your second comment is equally dumb. Solve it by thinking? Really? I think you need to try your own prescription. Again, I was pointing out that statistical analysis is pretty shakey when used in a system with VERY FEW samples. I work in aerospace and people die if I screw up. If you have flown frequently your life probably depended on me at one point or another. I DO THINK, very hard and I take my work and that of my colleagues so seriously that I take things like statistical analysis very seriously. In my field, you cannot get away with the sort of lazy projections that people in other fields (where nothing of value other than possible a reasearch grant must be on the line) seem to routinely get away with. Given that background, I posted two basic questions, NOT to get an ignorant RANT reply by somebody probably sitting in mommy's basement and grinding some ideological fanboy axe, but to raise genuine questions relative to the information without wasting time getting too bogged-down in esoterics as would likely happen for a person contacting the article's author (I'm interested, but not THAT interested (grin)).
is that i should avoid mating with the ancestors of europeans and asians