“[W]e share approximately 60% of our DNA with a banana plant.”
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“Mice and men share about 97.5 per cent of their working DNA, just one per cent less than chimps and humans.”
[source]
Category Archives: Genetics
Human Ova, Chicken Ova and Misinformation
From Useless Sexual Trivia: Tastefully Prurient Facts About Everyone’s Favorite Subject*:
“[T]he number of human ova necessary to repopulate the world could fit into a chicken egg.”
The human ovum appears to be roughly spherical:
The diameter of an ovum is ~120 µm. Continue reading Human Ova, Chicken Ova and Misinformation
Ashley Hegi and Progeria
[source]A southern Alberta community is remembering a girl described by teachers as a four-foot-tall teen with a 10-foot-high attitude who defied the odds of a rare genetic disease that causes premature aging.
Ashley Hegi, 17, was one of 53 people in the world — and three in Canada — with Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome. There is no known cure, and most children with the condition usually die around age 13.
Jewish Ethnicity
[source]“We perform a genome-wide population-genetic study of Jewish populations, analyzing 678 autosomal microsatellite loci in 78 individuals from four Jewish groups together with similar data on 321 individuals from 12 non-Jewish Middle Eastern and European populations. … We find that the Jewish populations show a high level of genetic similarity to each other, clustering together in several types of analysis of population structure.
John B. Watson Misrepresented
The following is a quote as it appears in Steven Pinker’s 1994 book The Language Instinct and in his 2002 book The Blank Slate:
“I should like to go one step further now and say, ‘Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.”
Here is the original quote, as it appears in Watson’s 1924 book Behaviorism:
“I should like to go one step further now and say, ‘Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years. Please note that when this experiment is made I am to be allowed to specify the way the children are to be brought up and the type of world they have to live in.”