There is reason to believe that among the key traits that distinguish humans from the primates that are phylogenetically closest to us are cognitive and social abilities as exemplified by language and diverse aspects of social interaction and cultural expression. It...
A prion is a protein that can adopt a conformation other than the ‘standard’ functional conformation and this alternative conformation favors self-association. The aggregation-associated conformation can then be imposed on additional copies of the protein in the...
This past December, science writer David Dobbs published an essay (2013) in the online magazine Aeon (aeon.co/magazine/) that purports to explain why the ‘selfish gene’ concept is outmoded and should be retired. It elicited a good deal of commentary, and in...
Three new papers (Kilpinen et al., 2013; McVickers et al., 2013; Kasowski et al., 2013) published earlier this month in Science all address the effects on human patterns of gene expression and other phenotypes of 1) genetic variation in non-protein coding regions of...
In lay publications, it is commonplace for writers to refer to the deoxynucleotide sequence of an individual’s nuclear genome as that individual’s “code” and to the determination of that sequence as “deciphering the code.” Molecular biologists mean by the “genetic...
