How Natural Selection Has Shaped the Texas SBOE
"Genetics is the foundation for modern biology, not evolution...Genetics goes back to a Christian monk who did precise data." --Don McLeroy, Chair of the Texas State Board of Education. I guess this NYT story on race and natural selection makes a monkey out of McLeroy - from the very first sentence:
In a worldwide survey of 50 populations, a team of geneticists has identified many fingerprints of natural selection in the human genome.Oh, dear, and again, in sentence three, it's pretty clear that advances in genetics are informed by the theory of evolution by natural selection :
The genetic regions where natural selection has acted turn out to differ in various populations, doubtless because each has been molded by different local forces on each continent.McLeroy is distinctly Western European, so he might be interested in this piece of his evolutionary heritage:
The three West Eurasian groups show very similar patterns of selection, which probably occurred before they separated into three geographically distinct populations but after their ancestors split from those of East Asians.And here we go with those darn experts claiming a longer timeline than 6000 years, so beloved by the creationists on the SBOE:
The principal human races presumably emerged as the populations of each continent responded to different evolutionary pressures. "Our work supports the notion that regional populations have adapted in a variety of ways, some shared, some not, to the selective pressures they encountered as they dispersed from the ancestral African homeland some 80,000 years ago," said Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago.For a real treat, watch McLeroy in real live convoluted action as he lectures the SBOE in March (and all of us in the room) about evolution . . . and how he is standing up to the experts (but bless their hearts, they are such nice people) . . . and how this is really all about textbooks: I think there's a clue in the NYT article as to how the 7 creationist SBOE members evolved:
Another set of genes found to be under selection in non-African populations are three NRG or neuregulin genes (the third, NRG3, is shown in red) and a receptor gene they all interact with (ERBB4, also in red). The NRG genes make signaling proteins that are active in the developing embryo in shaping tissues like the brain, heart and breast. A variant of NRG1 has been implicated in schizophrenia. The researchers do not know which of the several roles of the neuregulin genes has caused it to come under selection.Yep, there certainly is an implication that this Western Euroasian gene mutation is implicated in a brain-heart-breast-schizophrenia malfunction on the Texas State Board of Education.
1 comments:
On McLeroy's beginning comments, are there data that our students can not handle? Do we need to modify what our students hear so that they can only hear what we deem appropriate? That smacks to me of the same reasoning Chinese sensors use to justify their actions.
The great explosion of phyla that appeared at what is called the Cambrian Explosion can be explained by the appearance of short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) in the DNA/fossil records. When Steven J. Gould wrote the book mentioned by Mr. McLeroy (interesting that he did not give the title), scientists did not know about the regulatory role that RNA played in the cell. It was only after the work done during the sequencing of the human genome that we began to understand how much RNA regulates events in cellular development.
It is because of the regulatory role of these siRNAs that eukaryotes were locked into the body types you see today. This is all recent work that is being developed thanks to the growing number of genomes that are becoming available to scientists and bioinformaticists. Too bad that some people stop reading the scientific literature once they find an answer that they feel satisfies their arguments.
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