Tag: genetics
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Sergey Brin’s Search for a Parkinson’s Cure
After discovering that he held the LRRK2 mutation on his twelfth chromosome (indicating that his lifetime risk of developing Parkinson’s disease is 30-75% rather than the typical 1%), Google co-founder Sergey Brin became one of the first philanthropists to fund research into a disease based on the results of a genetic test. In Thomas Goetz’s…
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The Heritability of Happiness
A study looks at how much of our happiness can be attributed to our genes? Neither socioeconomic status, educational attainment, family income, marital status, nor an indicant of religious commitment could account for more than about 3% of the variance in well-being (WB). From 44% to 52% of the variance in WB, however, is associated…
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The New Nature-Nurture Argument
As it stands, the nature-nurture debate is wrong, proposes David Shenk in his book on the subject, The Genius in All of Us. Shenk submits the idea that we overestimate the effect genes have on many heritable traits, especially intelligence (or that ever-elusive ‘genius’). According to Shenk, and he is persuasive, none of this stuff…
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The Ambiguity of Sex
I’m not a big follower of athletics, but two news items have somehow made their way to my mental inbox from the IAAF World Athletics Championships in Berlin: how ridiculously fast Usain Bolt is, and the controversy surrounding Caster Semenya. On the latter, Caster is currently undergoing gender verification tests and in the process has…
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The Genetic Gap
I can’t write a better leading sentence than David already has: “In an article encouraging us not to use genetic tendencies for racist ends, William Saletan offers a possible genetic answer [to the question, Why are there so many black athletes?]” One example is the RR variant of ACTN3, a gene that affects fast generation of muscular…