Chance Linkage is the Main Source of Change in Human Genes

I have not really being paying attention to the discussion of the paper Recent Acceleration of Human Adaptive Evolution by John Hawkes et al.  However, I was struck by this which comes at the end of one of Hawkes' blog posts about the paper:

... the most widespread source of change in human genes is chance linkage to a relatively small number of selected sites.

That is, most of the genes that have changed in recent human evolution have done so, not because they were beneficial, but because they were located on a chromosome near to a gene that was beneficial.  This seems to me to be quite an important point.  I think I might go back and read the original paper.

New Words

A couple of new words (well, new to me), via my daughter:

• Monobrow - a pair of eyebrows that join up; a person with such eyebrows
• Luvvage - love (Eg: "luvvage, xxx" on a Christmas card)

Monobrow is already quite common, there is even a wikipedia page devoted to it and its synonym, Unibrow.

Lotteries are for Losers

Ever since the UK National Lottery started, I have viewed it as a sort of voluntary tax on stupidity and unfounded wishful thinking.  By stupidity, I mean gullibilty and ignorance of basic mathematics and probability theory.  It seems to me that lotteries foster a sort of learned helplessness in which people give up on trying to forge their own success and, instead, sit back and wait for it to come to them.  Surely not the sort of thing that a government should be encouraging.

On the Benefits of giving School Children Homework

From an article by Alfie Kohn ( Principal, January - February 2007):

The positive effects of homework are largely mythical.  In preparation for a book on the topic, I’ve spent a lot of time sifting through the research.  The results are nothing short of stunning.  For starters, there is absolutely no evidence of any academic benefit from assigning homework in elementary or middle school.  For younger students, in fact, there isn’t even a correlation between whether children do homework (or how much they do) and any meaningful measure of achievement.  At the high school level, the correlation is weak and tends to disappear when more sophisticated statistical measures are applied.  Meanwhile, no study has ever substantiated the belief that homework builds character or teaches good study habits.

 I think someone should tell the children!

Verity Stob on Acrobat Reader

It pleases me to see I am not the only person that thinks that Adobe have lost the thread with recent versions of their PDF reader:

Recent versions of Adobe Reader (as it has now called) have shown distinct signs of megalomania, and I claim - rather boldly - that it has now put on its wetsuit and is paddling in Great White waters.

Here’s some circumstantial evidence:

• A splash screen lingers for so long that you get a chance to memorise that huge list of patents that Adobe claims to itself, and even perform some basic arithmetic on the first few numbers, by way of passing the time.  Have you spotted that sequence of primes yet?
• There is that groan of realisation that can be regularly heard everywhere on the internet, when an accidental click on a PDF in a search results page means that the user is now confined at Adobe’s pleasure for the next minute or so, until Acrobat chooses to give back control of the web browser.
• Have you ever made the mistake of letting the thing upgrade itself via Internet downloads?  I let version 7 have its way, and it rebooted the machine three or four times on the trot.  Honestly, one of the more gullible heuristic algorithms in the virus checker thought I had got an infection.

Enough. There is an alternative is called Foxit; it is time to remind Adobe that it is mortal too.

Wonderful stuff!  From here.  I must look up some more of Ms Stob's work.