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Posts Tagged ‘evolution’

If you’re a coffee drinker, you may have noticed the new super-sized portions available at Starbucks.  On this note, it may be worth noting that caffeine is a potent psychoactive substance of which – too much – can turn your buzz into a full-blown panic disorder.  The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for psychiatry outlines a [...]

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Image by muffintoptn via Flickr Humans are spiritual creatures – there’s no denyin’.  How & why we got this way is one of THE BIG questions of all time.  Since our genome shapes the development of our brain and its interaction with our culture, its not a surprise to see that, from time to time, [...]

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Just a pointer to onetime University of Edinburgh Professor C.H. Waddington’s 1972 Gifford Lecture on framing the genes vs. environment debate of human behavior.  Although Waddington is famous for his work on population genetics and evolutionary change over time, several of his concepts are experiencing some resurgence in the neuroimaging and psychological development literatures these [...]

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Image via Wikipedia In his book, The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner describes the great diversity of finches on the Galapagos Islands – so much diversity – that Darwin himself initially thought the finch variants to be completely different birds (wrens, mockingbirds, blackbirds and “gross-bills”).  It turns out that one of the pivotal events [...]

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Image via Wikipedia If you slam your hand in the car door and experience physical pain, medical science can offer you a “pain killer!“.  Certainly morphine (via its activation of the mu opioid receptor (OPRM1)) will make you feel a whole lot better.  However, if your boyfriend or girlfriend breaks up with you and you [...]

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*** PODCAST accompanies this post *** Nowadays, it seems that genomics is spreading beyond the rarefied realm of science and academia into the general, consumer-based popular culture.  Quelle surprise!?  Yes, the era of the personal genome is close at hand, even as present technology  provides – directly to the general consumer public – a  genome-wide [...]

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Image by juanpol via Flickr It was a great pleasure to speak with Professor Garet Lahvis from the Department of Behavioral Neuroscience at the Oregon Health and Science University, and learn more about how the biology of empathy and social behaviors in general can be approached with animal models that are suitable for genetic studies.  [...]

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Image by Oliver Lavery via Flickr Daniel R. Weinberger, M.D., Chief of the Clinical Brain Disorders Branch and Director of the Genes, Cognition and Psychosis Program, National Institute of Mental Health  discusses the background, findings and general issues of genes and mental illness in this brief interview on his paper, “A primate-specific, brain isoform of [...]

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Image via Wikipedia Many thanks to Dr. Christina S. Barr from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism-Laboratory of Clinical and Translational Studies, National Institutes of Health Animal Center for taking the time to comment on her team’s recent publication, “Functional CRH variation increases stress-induced alcohol consumption in primates” [doi:10.1073/pnas.0902863106] which [...]

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neo-Darwinist graffiti

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Am having a wonderful time reading, “Your Inner Fish” by Professor Neil Shubin – an exploration into the deep evolutionary roots of the human body.  Amazed to contemplate the embryonic structures known as the branchial arches, or gill arches – which we share with sharks! – and the role of the gcm2 gene that is [...]

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Image via Wikipedia What hurts more – a broken toe or a broken heart?  Ask a parent and their forlorn 15 year-old who was not invited to the party that everyone is going to, and you might get different answers.  In some cases, the internal anguish of social exclusion or estrangement, may even – paradoxically [...]

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Image by Kevin Steele via Flickr For more than a decade, we’ve known that at least 95% of the human genome is junk – or junque – if you’re offended by the thought that “you” emerged from a single cell whose genome is mostly a vast pile of crap – or crappe – if you [...]

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Image via Wikipedia pointer to this 5-part video discussion from the 2009 World Science Festival. In part 1 @ 8:30mins Sir Paul Nurse makes the plug for the nexus of neuroscience-genomics-humanities.  In part 3 @0:20secs Renee Reijo Pera makes the case for basic developmental biology as a key, while @12:00mins Francis Collins makes the case [...]

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Image via Wikipedia Recently, I’ve been reading Brian Boyd’s new book, On the Origin of Stories, – a lengthy work that relates human evolution to our creative processes.  This line of inquiry is closely related to an interest in genetics and brain function, since links between genetic variation and brain function can be used as [...]

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Image via Wikipedia Among mammalian species, moms can have it rough. THEY do the foraging and the child rearing usually without the help of dad who may or may not be prancing about defending his territory or doing who knows what.  The biological systems that manage such a predicament for the female would, not surprisingly, [...]

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Image by cobalt123 via Flickr Is the human brain a blank slate? or a pre-programmed machine that is ready to take the S.A.T.s right out of the box? Obviously neither, or both as it were. Some have gingerly waded into the nature vs. nuture debate and suggested that the human brain comes pre-wired to receive [...]

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Image by ChrisL_AK via Flickr How many “facebook friends” do you have?   Well, of course, this depends on many things – perhaps just a matter of how much time you spend “on” facebook.  We all know of a few super facebookers with +300 friends and super-duper profligate facebook whales with +1000 friends, but it turns [...]

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Cover via Amazon Few may pause on February 12 to note the 200 year anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and 150 years since the publication of  “On the Origin of Species” (click here to download).  To some extent, this may be expected since much of the controversy  (creator vs. autonomous biochemical processes) seems [...]

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