Geneticists have recognized for some time that many genes exhibit pleiotropy, meaning that one mutation can manifest in two or more distinguishable phenotypic effects. In a fascinating study recently published in Science [2014 Jan 10;343(6167):152-7....
In the past six months, I have encountered a review, by Thomas Nagel in The New York Review of Books (2012), of Alvin Plantinga’s latest book (Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, 2011 ) and a review, by Alvin Plantinga in The New...
In the book, The Winner-Take-All Society (1995), Robet H. Frank and Philip J. Cook discuss a hypothetical scenario in which a new genetic technique allows babies to be engineered so that they have a 99% chance of performing 15% better on the standardized tests used in...
In the April 16, 2010, issue of Cell Jon McClellan and Mary-Claire King published a commentary that addressed the nature of the genetic variation that accounts for common human diseases, an issue of profound importance in evolutionary medicine. The authors also...
Perhaps the main lesson we eventually learn in school is how little we actually know. In elementary genetics, we were taught that there are two alleles for eye color, blue and brown, with brown dominant, allowing simple assessment of whether we were more likely...