Speaking as a PhD candidate in biostatistics, the article quotes thoroughly discredited theories of the effects of cell phones on humans. Unfortunately, the media routinely quotes the opinions of obviously fraudulent scientists, or quotes others out of context, to sell the "conspiracy theory" angle to the willing masses.
Medical misrepresentation in the media has a long history -- in the 18th century, when a British physician developed a smallpox vaccine based on cowpox, newspapers at the time described people turning into cows, causing a national panic. Mistrust of vaccines lingered for decades afterwards. In 1999, anti-vaccine hysteria again surfaced when an extremely poorly designed study managed to be published in Lancet, claiming that 80% of children with autism had received the MMR vaccine. (80% of British children received vaccinations in the first place.) Lancet retracted the article, and years of wasteful research went into re-examining the vaccine theory -- plenty of other locations had rising incidences of autism despite reductions in vaccination rates. There is no controversy among epidemiologists today, but the media continues to describe this as a "controversial theory". The incidence of autism has since leveled off, suggesting that the observed increase was just based on changes in diagnostic criteria and public awareness; the true prevalence has likely never changed.
The bee disorder in question is probably caused by viruses such as black queen cell virus or bee paralysis virus. Also, South African apiaries have had a problem with transposons (jumping genes), possibly viral in origin, that cause drone workers to produce children, disrupting the hive. Despite what you may have learned in high school, honeybees are a domesticated species with an unnatural pattern of reproduction in the first place. Wild bees do not always have strict hierarchies.
Will it be one of those weird corporate mega-projects that will get shut down as soon as its built? The corporation had no intention of using the facility, it was just building something for the sake of pleasing investors, getting tax breaks. This is routine business in IT -- Silicon Valley was full of billion-dollar empty campuses when I lived there.
Uh...yeah. Did you even bother to read your own manuscript? From the methods: "Given that the number of SNPs...is more likely to exponentially distributed, rather than uniformly distributed on chromosomes, a Poisson approximation model was used...."
Are you fabricating quotes? I do not see such a sentence anywhere in the paper.
In other words, you didn't find that SNPs are distributed according to a Poisson process, you chose a Poisson process to develop a tool (because it's a reasonable first assumption -- which is exactly what I said), and then found that the tool worked well enough as a background model (remember: your scan statistic is looking for SNP clusters that deviate from the poisson model).
That sounds quite contradictory. If SNPs aren't distributed according to a Poisson process, then the scan statistic found those deviations. The model appeared to work quite well, as the diagnostics indicate.
Now, wouldn't it have been easier to simply answer my question with a straightforward, polite response, rather than writing me off as someone who wouldn't understand your brilliant work?
My initial response was polite. You chose an angry tone in your other responses.
Did I say that? Because that would be odd, considering that I'm very near the end of a PhD in computational biology.
You had said "Note: I am not an expert in this field, so it's a serious question."
I've noticed some other bioinformatics types like yourself who aren't too well educated in any particular topic, so they become aggressive and make misinformed criticisms. When I was choosing grad schools, I went to a bioinformatics conference at Stanford and met a lot of unemployed bioinformatics graduates, so I steered clear from that field. But ok, I guess you're in "computational biology", the latest marketing term for the same thing.
If "point replication errors occur randomly and without mechanistic bias", that would imply a uniform distribution. A uniform distribution looks very different from a Poisson process (note I said process, not distribution).
If you stare at a graph long enough, you can make it have any pattern you want.
There is, of course, much ongoing research in finding mathematical patterns in DNA. I had a paper published about how DNA SNPs seem to follow a Poisson process in their distribution. Does someone know a good way to visualize Poisson processes? When graphed as they do, it just looks like a sequence of randomly spaced dots.
Scientists have been building 3-D computer models of organic molecules since at least the 1980s, using the same equations to predict likely reactions. It sounds like plain biochemistry given a new window dressing.
Normally, we would test a difference in means between two populations by a t-test. If the sample size is large enough, then even a difference that is only a fraction of a standard deviation can be statistically significant.
F-tests are used in ANOVA tables, and yes, they do assume normal distributions, as well as homoskedasticity (same variance). Assuming they performed a linear regression, then one can perform a Type I F-test (added-in-order test) or Type II F-test (added-last test). One can also talk about an overall F-test, testing whether any of the effects in the model are nonzero.
However, as I indicated in another post, the study only had 184 patients from a single treatment center. There is selection bias, since the study only sampled patients who were already suffering from memory loss. How many other bilingual immigrants with memory loss are lurking in the general population, who aren't going to memory loss clinics due to lack of knowledge? Also, what method did they use to adjust for "cultural differences, immigration, formal education, employment and even gender" with only 184 patients?
The study only proves that bilingual patients who arrived at a particular treatment center were, on average, 4 years older than monolingual patients. It does NOT provide a causal link between bilingualism and cognitive reserve.
The study only had 184 patients from a single treatment center. There is selection bias, since the study only sampled patients who were already suffering from memory loss. How many other bilingual immigrants with memory loss are lurking in the general population, who aren't going to memory loss clinics due to lack of knowledge? Also, what method did they use to adjust for "cultural differences, immigration, formal education, employment and even gender" with only 184 patients?
The study only proves that bilingual patients who arrived at a particular treatment center were, on average, 4 years older than monolingual patients. It does NOT provide a causal link between bilingualism and cognitive reserve.
You're right, we don't believe in being constrained by two "official" languages. We believe in having hundreds of different languages, therefore no official language.
MIT has a few accomplishments in bioinformatics, but bioinformatics is a down-and-out field at the moment. A lot of ex-computer geeks went into the bioinformatics, thinking they could become dot-com billionaires in biotech. However, most problems in biology have proven resistant to computational solutions. Decoding the genome was a one-time project, but understanding the meaning of all the ATCG's remains a slow process centered on the biology. Pharmaceutical companies of the 1990s thought that computers would be a magical tool that would increase their discovery rate of drugs 10-fold, but the 1990s turned out to be a miserable decade where the rate of innovation actually slowed. Biologists have demonstrated that they can be easily trained to use computers; most organizations today have no particular use for a "bioinformatics expert".
While advances in biotechnology appears to be the next frontier of science, it can only be driven by funding the many different specialties of biology, from limnology, veterinarian science, to biochemistry, immunology. It is driving a new wave of democratization, where no school can claim to be the leader of biology in general.
What does having a seperate department for small sub-fields have anything to do with how much success a school has in this subject?
They aren't "small", they're huge. Putting everything under a "biology" department is like putting physics, math, computer science, and chemistry under one "physical sciences" department. MIT has an EECS department, as various other schools do, since the fields overlap.
Sure we don't have a medical school, but that's mainly because we are an engineering school. If we had a med school, we'd be good at that too.
Having a good medical school is about having a good social and academic infrastructure to accomodate it in the first place. MIT does not have good programs in social sciences, other than linguistics. You do not even have a psychology department. Medical schools are a demanding presence at universities, and the engineering-oriented status quo will not welcome the loss of power.
The research done in the Biology fields at MIT have caught up with the rest of the schools in the nation and is now one of the best.
Really? Since I am in biostatistics, tell me about how MIT has "caught up" with other biostatistics departments, considering you do not even have one. Some schools such as UCLA thought they could build a world-class biostat department overnight and brought in an all-star cast of researchers, but the department fell apart from internal squabbling and lack of focus. UCSF and Stanford do not have biostat departments either, for similar reasons. Nor is biostatistics some obscure field -- medical researchers absolutely depend on us.
MIT does not have a medical school -- just a "division of health sciences and technology", where some cross-training with Harvard occurs. MIT does not have various departments related to medicine, such as pharmacology, epidemiology, biostatistics, or public health. It does not have a statistics department, or an independent astronomy department. Nor does it have independent departments for various branches of biology such as microbiology, genetics, or immunology; everything is just lumped together in a "biology department", reflecting its history of mediocre accomplishments in biology. Until recently, MIT was almost entirely focused on physics and engineering; in the past decade, they realized the declining importance of these fields relative to biology, so they are playing catch-up now. However, biology is highly specialized and plenty of other schools have spent decades building up particular departments.
The very same weather bureau predicted that 2006 would be a "record year for hurricanes" -- but instead, there were far fewer hurricanes than average.
I live in Alabama, and we've had nights that went down to -9C in December. If the Earth really is warming, how come subtropical regions are having deep freezes?
Hundreds of substances have already been demonstrated to cure mice of obesity, diabetes, or hypertension. They have all been published in prestigious journals as well. A few years ago, leptin was thought to be a wonder drug that would cure obesity in humans, because leptin caused mice to lose weight permanently.
Of course, human metabolism has turned out to be far more complicated than mice. The only value of mice tests is to
1. make sure it probably won't kill humans. 2. demonstrate an effect, and claim that the same will happen in humans
a) even though the same effect may not happen in humans
b) even though any number of drugs may have no effect on mice, but have an effect on humans
c) get venture capitalist funding
d) become the laughingstock of the science community a year later
Are you sure Ibn Fadlan did not describe a Rus human sacrifice in in 922? Or French archbishop Hincmar of Reims describing in 858 Swedish kings sacrificing human slaves at Yule, the pagan predecessor to Christmas? Swedish kings Domalde and Olof Trätälja were eaten alive by their subjects after years of famine. Adam von Bremen recorded human sacrifices to Odin in 11th century Sweden, at the Temple at Uppsala, a tradition which is confirmed by Gesta Danorum and the Norse sagas. According to the Ynglinga saga, king Domalde was sacrificed there in the hope to bring greater future harvests and the total domination of all future wars till the end of it all to his people. The same saga also relates that Domalde's descendant king Aun sacrificed nine of his own sons to Odin in exchange for longer life, until the Swedes stopped him from sacrificing his last son, Egil.
This is nonesense too. They didn't add alcohol to water, though those who could afford to preferred to drink beer, which last time I looked already contains it.
Until the 19th century, Europeans routinely sanitized their water by adding wine to it. The bible contains extensive recipes on how to prepare which mixtures of wine and water for which occasions. Modern wines, as we know them, are a commercial invention of the 17th century, when monasteries started selling them. Until then, it tasted like vinegar and nobody would drink it straight.
However, the reality remains that most Scandinavians today have blonde hair. If blonde hair is a recently introduced phenotype as you imply, then it is too recent to have had a role in the evolution of Vitamin D metabolism. If blonde hair is an older phenotype, but ancient Scandinavians ate as much seafood as other arctic peoples, then blonde hair played no evolutionary role in Vitamin D metabolism either.
No, as some primitive peoples with poor food habits are lactose tolerant.
Did you mean to say lactose-intolerant?
Is there an association between lactose tolerance and the success of populations or civilizations? I don't see any -- in East Asia, lactose-tolerant Mongolians and Tibetans have shorter life spans and more primitive lifestyles.
You are ignorant of European history. Go read, climb down from your particular pedistle, then we can talk.
Were you trying to say "pedestal"? Or were you saying you aren't ignorant?
You mean like Egypt and Syria? Those advanced ancient cultures of beer and wine?
"Advanced" ancient cultures with "amazing technologies" have been found in any number of places throughout the world. How one calls an ancient civilization more advanced than another is merely a matter of perspective.
Link to something more data-driven than your presumption.
Lactose intolerance caused by non-genetic reasons is on the rise.
Here you purposly omit that the American base is far more genetically diverse than the white Russians in Finland base.
Define what you mean by "base", since geneticists do not use that term.
You make it sound as if your comparitors are equal,
And define what a "comparitor" is.
Yeah, and a village in Italy has a beneficial gene for processing colesteral.
1. Did you mean "cholesterol"? 2. Source please (assuming you're serious).
Small populations which haven't expanded for some reason having a beneficial gene. Lucky them.
As you might know if you were familiar with Cavalli-Sforza's famous work in the 1950s, population size has little to do with the genetic diversity of the population.
No, as some primitive peoples with poor food habits are lactose tolerant.
Did you mean to say lactose-intolerant?
Is there an association between lactose tolerance and the success of populations or civilizations? I don't see any -- in East Asia, lactose-tolerant Mongolians and Tibetans have shorter life spans and more primitive lifestyles.
You are ignorant of European history. Go read, climb down from your particular pedistle, then we can talk.
Were you trying to say "pedestal"? Or were you saying you aren't ignorant?
You mean like Egypt and Syria? Those advanced ancient cultures of beer and wine?
"Advanced" ancient cultures with "amazing technologies" have been found in any number of places throughout the world. How one calls an ancient civilization more advanced than another is merely a matter of perspective.
Link to something more data-driven than your presumption.
Lactose intolerance caused by non-genetic reasons is on the rise.
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j .1572-0241.2003.08670.x?cookieSet=1&journalCode=aj gHere you purposly omit that the American base is far more genetically diverse than the white Russians in Finland base.
Define what you mean by "base", since geneticists do not use that term.
You make it sound as if your comparitors are equal,
And define what a "comparitor" is.
Yeah, and a village in Italy has a beneficial gene for processing colesteral.
1. Did you mean "cholesterol"?
2. Source please (assuming you're serious).
Small populations which haven't expanded for some reason having a beneficial gene. Lucky them.
As you might know if you were familiar with Cavalli-Sforza's famous work in the 1950s, population size has little to do with the genetic diversity of the population.
Define "traditionally". Scandinavia (as well as most of northern Europe) was settled by people moving in from the east not too long ago (in an evolutionary scale - 2-4 millenia).
Do you have sources for this? My source says it was 10,000 years ago.
"Ten thousand years ago, as the ice sheet covering Scandinavia began to shrink, northern Norway is thought to have been colonized from two directions: from the east, by hunters from the Russian steppes who were pursuing migrating game such as reindeer, and whose rock carvings of reindeer have been found not far from Soroya on the Norwegian mainland; and from the south, by people who made their way up Norway's ice-free west coast. At the moment there is no way of telling which direction the Soroyans came from--or whether it was both south and east."
Also, the complexion thing has to do with vitamin D (produced in the skin if sunlight is present)
Again, there is no association with latitude. The arctic tribes of Siberia are dark-skinned, as are Tierra Del Fuegans on the tip of South America. All ethnic groups in question have eaten plenty of seafood for thousands of years. Tierra Del Fuegans have evolved square fingertips, but this also appears to be just another random artifact of genetic drift, rather than having any particular survival value in arctic climates.
not C (which has nothing to do with sunlight).
My point was that the ability to synthesize vitamin C appears unrelated to climate as well. The tundra has plenty of edible berries, which can be easily dug up even in the winter.
No, but it contains lactose, which can take over the function of vitamin D in calcium resorption.
On the other hand, Scandinavians have traditionally eaten herrings and other small fish including the bones. Lactose-intolerant peoples in other parts of the world have also traditionally obtained calcium this way. Whether lactose's coincidental ability to aid calcium resorption played a role in evolution is unclear.
Which fits perfectly, since their usual diet contains many items that are very good sources of vitamin D, such as fish. Since they also don't depend on sunlight for vitamin D, they were able to keep a much darker complexion than most other people living that far north.
Europe has plenty of rivers and oceans. The fairest skinned Europeans in Scandinavia have traditionally eaten plenty of fish, including whale muktuk that contains plenty of vitamin C. On the other hand, fair-skinned Europeans in Ireland ate almost no seafood until the 20th century, despite being an island country. There seems to be no association. Unfortified milk does not contain much vitamin D.
Slashdot Mirror
I grew up in Japan in the 1970s, and I had picture books that talked about how maglev trains would connect Japan's cities in the 1980s.
Oh and, weren't we supposed to have cities in space by now? Using computers that still spat out ticker-tape, of course.
Speaking as a PhD candidate in biostatistics, the article quotes thoroughly discredited theories of the effects of cell phones on humans. Unfortunately, the media routinely quotes the opinions of obviously fraudulent scientists, or quotes others out of context, to sell the "conspiracy theory" angle to the willing masses.
Medical misrepresentation in the media has a long history -- in the 18th century, when a British physician developed a smallpox vaccine based on cowpox, newspapers at the time described people turning into cows, causing a national panic. Mistrust of vaccines lingered for decades afterwards. In 1999, anti-vaccine hysteria again surfaced when an extremely poorly designed study managed to be published in Lancet, claiming that 80% of children with autism had received the MMR vaccine. (80% of British children received vaccinations in the first place.) Lancet retracted the article, and years of wasteful research went into re-examining the vaccine theory -- plenty of other locations had rising incidences of autism despite reductions in vaccination rates. There is no controversy among epidemiologists today, but the media continues to describe this as a "controversial theory".
The incidence of autism has since leveled off, suggesting that the observed increase was just based on changes in diagnostic criteria and public awareness; the true prevalence has likely never changed.
The bee disorder in question is probably caused by viruses such as black queen cell virus or bee paralysis virus. Also, South African apiaries have had a problem with transposons (jumping genes), possibly viral in origin, that cause drone workers to produce children, disrupting the hive. Despite what you may have learned in high school, honeybees are a domesticated species with an unnatural pattern of reproduction in the first place. Wild bees do not always have strict hierarchies.
Will it be one of those weird corporate mega-projects that will get shut down as soon as its built? The corporation had no intention of using the facility, it was just building something for the sake of pleasing investors, getting tax breaks. This is routine business in IT -- Silicon Valley was full of billion-dollar empty campuses when I lived there.
Are you sure Alabama doesn't have adult toy stores? I live in Alabama, and my ex-girlfriend took me to one.
I bought astrojax at wal-mart 4 years ago, how is this new?
I remember reading identical news articles from the 1980s and 90s about "water circuits". How is this an innovation?
Uh...yeah. Did you even bother to read your own manuscript? From the methods:
"Given that the number of SNPs...is more likely to exponentially distributed, rather than uniformly distributed on chromosomes, a Poisson approximation model was used...."
Are you fabricating quotes? I do not see such a sentence anywhere in the paper.
In other words, you didn't find that SNPs are distributed according to a Poisson process, you chose a Poisson process to develop a tool (because it's a reasonable first assumption -- which is exactly what I said), and then found that the tool worked well enough as a background model (remember: your scan statistic is looking for SNP clusters that deviate from the poisson model).
That sounds quite contradictory. If SNPs aren't distributed according to a Poisson process, then the scan statistic found those deviations. The model appeared to work quite well, as the diagnostics indicate.
Now, wouldn't it have been easier to simply answer my question with a straightforward, polite response, rather than writing me off as someone who wouldn't understand your brilliant work?
My initial response was polite. You chose an angry tone in your other responses.
Did I say that? Because that would be odd, considering that I'm very near the end of a PhD in computational biology.
You had said "Note: I am not an expert in this field, so it's a serious question."
I've noticed some other bioinformatics types like yourself who aren't too well educated in any particular topic, so they become aggressive and make misinformed criticisms. When I was choosing grad schools, I went to a bioinformatics conference at Stanford and met a lot of unemployed bioinformatics graduates, so I steered clear from that field. But ok, I guess you're in "computational biology", the latest marketing term for the same thing.
Ok, I'm not sure what you're arguing. As you say, you are not an expert in statistics, so I wouldn't know how to begin refuting your "pedantic" claim.
c t/112715921/ABSTRACT
I'll say that the paper was taken seriously enough to be published.
Journal of Genetic Epidemiology
November 2006
A scan statistic for identifying chromosomal patterns of SNP association (p 627-635)
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstra
If "point replication errors occur randomly and without mechanistic bias", that would imply a uniform distribution. A uniform distribution looks very different from a Poisson process (note I said process, not distribution).
If you stare at a graph long enough, you can make it have any pattern you want.
There is, of course, much ongoing research in finding mathematical patterns in DNA. I had a paper published about how DNA SNPs seem to follow a Poisson process in their distribution. Does someone know a good way to visualize Poisson processes? When graphed as they do, it just looks like a sequence of randomly spaced dots.
Scientists have been building 3-D computer models of organic molecules since at least the 1980s, using the same equations to predict likely reactions. It sounds like plain biochemistry given a new window dressing.
Normally, we would test a difference in means between two populations by a t-test. If the sample size is large enough, then even a difference that is only a fraction of a standard deviation can be statistically significant. F-tests are used in ANOVA tables, and yes, they do assume normal distributions, as well as homoskedasticity (same variance). Assuming they performed a linear regression, then one can perform a Type I F-test (added-in-order test) or Type II F-test (added-last test). One can also talk about an overall F-test, testing whether any of the effects in the model are nonzero. However, as I indicated in another post, the study only had 184 patients from a single treatment center. There is selection bias, since the study only sampled patients who were already suffering from memory loss. How many other bilingual immigrants with memory loss are lurking in the general population, who aren't going to memory loss clinics due to lack of knowledge? Also, what method did they use to adjust for "cultural differences, immigration, formal education, employment and even gender" with only 184 patients? The study only proves that bilingual patients who arrived at a particular treatment center were, on average, 4 years older than monolingual patients. It does NOT provide a causal link between bilingualism and cognitive reserve.
The study only had 184 patients from a single treatment center. There is selection bias, since the study only sampled patients who were already suffering from memory loss. How many other bilingual immigrants with memory loss are lurking in the general population, who aren't going to memory loss clinics due to lack of knowledge? Also, what method did they use to adjust for "cultural differences, immigration, formal education, employment and even gender" with only 184 patients?
The study only proves that bilingual patients who arrived at a particular treatment center were, on average, 4 years older than monolingual patients. It does NOT provide a causal link between bilingualism and cognitive reserve.
You're right, we don't believe in being constrained by two "official" languages. We believe in having hundreds of different languages, therefore no official language.
MIT has a few accomplishments in bioinformatics, but bioinformatics is a down-and-out field at the moment. A lot of ex-computer geeks went into the bioinformatics, thinking they could become dot-com billionaires in biotech. However, most problems in biology have proven resistant to computational solutions. Decoding the genome was a one-time project, but understanding the meaning of all the ATCG's remains a slow process centered on the biology. Pharmaceutical companies of the 1990s thought that computers would be a magical tool that would increase their discovery rate of drugs 10-fold, but the 1990s turned out to be a miserable decade where the rate of innovation actually slowed. Biologists have demonstrated that they can be easily trained to use computers; most organizations today have no particular use for a "bioinformatics expert".
While advances in biotechnology appears to be the next frontier of science, it can only be driven by funding the many different specialties of biology, from limnology, veterinarian science, to biochemistry, immunology. It is driving a new wave of democratization, where no school can claim to be the leader of biology in general.
What does having a seperate department for small sub-fields have anything to do with how much success a school has in this subject? They aren't "small", they're huge. Putting everything under a "biology" department is like putting physics, math, computer science, and chemistry under one "physical sciences" department. MIT has an EECS department, as various other schools do, since the fields overlap. Sure we don't have a medical school, but that's mainly because we are an engineering school. If we had a med school, we'd be good at that too. Having a good medical school is about having a good social and academic infrastructure to accomodate it in the first place. MIT does not have good programs in social sciences, other than linguistics. You do not even have a psychology department. Medical schools are a demanding presence at universities, and the engineering-oriented status quo will not welcome the loss of power. The research done in the Biology fields at MIT have caught up with the rest of the schools in the nation and is now one of the best. Really? Since I am in biostatistics, tell me about how MIT has "caught up" with other biostatistics departments, considering you do not even have one. Some schools such as UCLA thought they could build a world-class biostat department overnight and brought in an all-star cast of researchers, but the department fell apart from internal squabbling and lack of focus. UCSF and Stanford do not have biostat departments either, for similar reasons. Nor is biostatistics some obscure field -- medical researchers absolutely depend on us.
MIT does not have a medical school -- just a "division of health sciences and technology", where some cross-training with Harvard occurs. MIT does not have various departments related to medicine, such as pharmacology, epidemiology, biostatistics, or public health. It does not have a statistics department, or an independent astronomy department. Nor does it have independent departments for various branches of biology such as microbiology, genetics, or immunology; everything is just lumped together in a "biology department", reflecting its history of mediocre accomplishments in biology. Until recently, MIT was almost entirely focused on physics and engineering; in the past decade, they realized the declining importance of these fields relative to biology, so they are playing catch-up now. However, biology is highly specialized and plenty of other schools have spent decades building up particular departments.
The very same weather bureau predicted that 2006 would be a "record year for hurricanes" -- but instead, there were far fewer hurricanes than average. I live in Alabama, and we've had nights that went down to -9C in December. If the Earth really is warming, how come subtropical regions are having deep freezes?
Hundreds of substances have already been demonstrated to cure mice of obesity, diabetes, or hypertension. They have all been published in prestigious journals as well. A few years ago, leptin was thought to be a wonder drug that would cure obesity in humans, because leptin caused mice to lose weight permanently.
Of course, human metabolism has turned out to be far more complicated than mice. The only value of mice tests is to
1. make sure it probably won't kill humans.
2. demonstrate an effect, and claim that the same will happen in humans
a) even though the same effect may not happen in humans
b) even though any number of drugs may have no effect on mice, but have an effect on humans
c) get venture capitalist funding
d) become the laughingstock of the science community a year later
Wrong.
Are you sure Ibn Fadlan did not describe a Rus human sacrifice in in 922? Or French archbishop Hincmar of Reims describing in 858 Swedish kings sacrificing human slaves at Yule, the pagan predecessor to Christmas? Swedish kings Domalde and Olof Trätälja were eaten alive by their subjects after years of famine. Adam von Bremen recorded human sacrifices to Odin in 11th century Sweden, at the Temple at Uppsala, a tradition which is confirmed by Gesta Danorum and the Norse sagas. According to the Ynglinga saga, king Domalde was sacrificed there in the hope to bring greater future harvests and the total domination of all future wars till the end of it all to his people. The same saga also relates that Domalde's descendant king Aun sacrificed nine of his own sons to Odin in exchange for longer life, until the Swedes stopped him from sacrificing his last son, Egil.
This is nonesense too. They didn't add alcohol to water, though those who could afford to preferred to drink beer, which last time I looked already contains it.
Until the 19th century, Europeans routinely sanitized their water by adding wine to it. The bible contains extensive recipes on how to prepare which mixtures of wine and water for which occasions. Modern wines, as we know them, are a commercial invention of the 17th century, when monasteries started selling them. Until then, it tasted like vinegar and nobody would drink it straight.
However, the reality remains that most Scandinavians today have blonde hair. If blonde hair is a recently introduced phenotype as you imply, then it is too recent to have had a role in the evolution of Vitamin D metabolism. If blonde hair is an older phenotype, but ancient Scandinavians ate as much seafood as other arctic peoples, then blonde hair played no evolutionary role in Vitamin D metabolism either.
Formatting corrected.
j .1572-0241.2003.08670.x?cookieSet=1&journalCode=aj g
No, as some primitive peoples with poor food habits are lactose tolerant.
Did you mean to say lactose-intolerant?
Is there an association between lactose tolerance and the success of populations or civilizations? I don't see any -- in East Asia, lactose-tolerant Mongolians and Tibetans have shorter life spans and more primitive lifestyles.
You are ignorant of European history. Go read, climb down from your particular pedistle, then we can talk.
Were you trying to say "pedestal"? Or were you saying you aren't ignorant?
You mean like Egypt and Syria? Those advanced ancient cultures of beer and wine?
"Advanced" ancient cultures with "amazing technologies" have been found in any number of places throughout the world. How one calls an ancient civilization more advanced than another is merely a matter of perspective.
Link to something more data-driven than your presumption.
Lactose intolerance caused by non-genetic reasons is on the rise.
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/
Here you purposly omit that the American base is far more genetically diverse than the white Russians in Finland base.
Define what you mean by "base", since geneticists do not use that term.
You make it sound as if your comparitors are equal,
And define what a "comparitor" is.
Yeah, and a village in Italy has a beneficial gene for processing colesteral.
1. Did you mean "cholesterol"?
2. Source please (assuming you're serious).
Small populations which haven't expanded for some reason having a beneficial gene. Lucky them.
As you might know if you were familiar with Cavalli-Sforza's famous work in the 1950s, population size has little to do with the genetic diversity of the population.
No, as some primitive peoples with poor food habits are lactose tolerant. Did you mean to say lactose-intolerant? Is there an association between lactose tolerance and the success of populations or civilizations? I don't see any -- in East Asia, lactose-tolerant Mongolians and Tibetans have shorter life spans and more primitive lifestyles. You are ignorant of European history. Go read, climb down from your particular pedistle, then we can talk. Were you trying to say "pedestal"? Or were you saying you aren't ignorant? You mean like Egypt and Syria? Those advanced ancient cultures of beer and wine? "Advanced" ancient cultures with "amazing technologies" have been found in any number of places throughout the world. How one calls an ancient civilization more advanced than another is merely a matter of perspective. Link to something more data-driven than your presumption. Lactose intolerance caused by non-genetic reasons is on the rise. http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j .1572-0241.2003.08670.x?cookieSet=1&journalCode=aj g
Here you purposly omit that the American base is far more genetically diverse than the white Russians in Finland base.
Define what you mean by "base", since geneticists do not use that term.
You make it sound as if your comparitors are equal,
And define what a "comparitor" is.
Yeah, and a village in Italy has a beneficial gene for processing colesteral.
1. Did you mean "cholesterol"?
2. Source please (assuming you're serious).
Small populations which haven't expanded for some reason having a beneficial gene. Lucky them.
As you might know if you were familiar with Cavalli-Sforza's famous work in the 1950s, population size has little to do with the genetic diversity of the population.
Define "traditionally". Scandinavia (as well as most of northern Europe) was settled by people moving in from the east not too long ago (in an evolutionary scale - 2-4 millenia).
_ v15/ai_14990061
Do you have sources for this? My source says it was 10,000 years ago.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1511/is_n2
"Ten thousand years ago, as the ice sheet covering Scandinavia began to shrink, northern Norway is thought to have been colonized from two directions: from the east, by hunters from the Russian steppes who were pursuing migrating game such as reindeer, and whose rock carvings of reindeer have been found not far from Soroya on the Norwegian mainland; and from the south, by people who made their way up Norway's ice-free west coast. At the moment there is no way of telling which direction the Soroyans came from--or whether it was both south and east."
Also, the complexion thing has to do with vitamin D (produced in the skin if sunlight is present)
Again, there is no association with latitude. The arctic tribes of Siberia are dark-skinned, as are Tierra Del Fuegans on the tip of South America. All ethnic groups in question have eaten plenty of seafood for thousands of years. Tierra Del Fuegans have evolved square fingertips, but this also appears to be just another random artifact of genetic drift, rather than having any particular survival value in arctic climates.
not C (which has nothing to do with sunlight).
My point was that the ability to synthesize vitamin C appears unrelated to climate as well. The tundra has plenty of edible berries, which can be easily dug up even in the winter.
No, but it contains lactose, which can take over the function of vitamin D in calcium resorption.
On the other hand, Scandinavians have traditionally eaten herrings and other small fish including the bones. Lactose-intolerant peoples in other parts of the world have also traditionally obtained calcium this way. Whether lactose's coincidental ability to aid calcium resorption played a role in evolution is unclear.
Which fits perfectly, since their usual diet contains many items that are very good sources of vitamin D, such as fish. Since they also don't depend on sunlight for vitamin D, they were able to keep a much darker complexion than most other people living that far north.
Europe has plenty of rivers and oceans. The fairest skinned Europeans in Scandinavia have traditionally eaten plenty of fish, including whale muktuk that contains plenty of vitamin C. On the other hand, fair-skinned Europeans in Ireland ate almost no seafood until the 20th century, despite being an island country. There seems to be no association. Unfortified milk does not contain much vitamin D.