Questions tagged [genetics]
The science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms.
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Can the Bajau people stay underwater for as long as 13 minutes?
National Geographic 4/2018: 'Sea Nomads' Are First Known Humans Genetically Adapted to Diving claims:
But a group of people called the Bajau takes free diving to the extreme, staying underwater for ...
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Is dandruff an indicator of an "unhealthy scalp?" Can a shampoo cure the underlying problem?
In this video (sponsored by Head and Shoulders) by Veritasium entitled "What Actually Causes Dandruff?", you can hear Dr. Jim Schwartz a Research Fellow at Head & Shoulders say:
The ...
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Did a 'Black History Month website' call white people ‘genetically defective descendants of albino mutants’?
Telegraph.co.uk reports that 'A Black History Month website' has made claims such as :
[white people are the] genetically defective descendants of albino mutants
[white man can] “fantasise that he ...
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Did BGI genetically test Uyghurs in Xinjiang?
In July of last year the U.S. Commerce Department publicly accused subsidiaries of BGI (formerly Beijing Genomics Institute) of genetically testing Uyghurs in Xinjiang as part of a campaign of ...
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Is an egalitarian inclination largely genetically determined?
A 2017 study titled A Genetic Basis of Economic Egalitarianism
seems to have concluded that:
We use Minnesota Twin Study data from 2008, collected from samples of monozygotic and dizygotic twin pairs ...
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Are crocodiles more closely related to birds than lizards and snakes?
In this video Owl, The Best Pet Reptile? you can hear Clint say,
Crocodiles are more closely related to birds than they are to lizards and snakes.
Is this claim true?
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Do the hemoglobin genotypes of a couple affect whether their offspring will get Sickle Cell Disease?
I just read this (currently unanswered) Quora quesion:
What should I do? After seven years in a relationship, I just find out that our genotype is AS.
Since I never heard of this before I googled ...
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Have more than a million people had their whole genomes sequenced by the end of 2018?
The news article https://www.wired.com/story/whole-genome-sequencing-cost-200-dollars/ (mirror) published on 2018-11-18 claims that
Today, slightly more than a million people have had their whole ...
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Do only ~2.4% of participants in large-scale genetic studies have African ancestry?
From a February 18 23andMe tweet:
Only about 2.4% of participants included in large-scale genetic studies have African ancestry.
Is this claim true?
user48578
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Is it possible have a cell fusion by just injecting human sperm to an unfertilized chicken egg?
I stumbled upon these video documentation titled 'Humonculus' in Youtube (I know Youtube is not reliable source, but the video to me looks legit and well video documented) by channel named Planet ...
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Fewer shared immune genes in a couple correlate with (or even cause) more female orgasms?
I found in a psychology blog that
Researchers have found that women who share fewer immune genes with their male partners also report more frequent orgasms (Garver-Apgar et al., 2006).
And the ...
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Is divorce caused (or influenced by) genetics?
From Independent headline:
Divorce does run in the family and could be genetic, researchers have suggested.
... the study – carried out by Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and Lund University ...
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Was Zana from a relict hominid population?
Did Zana (a 19th century Russian "ape-woman") belong to a relict hominid population?
In his 2015 book, "The nature of the beast: The first scientific evidence on the survival of apemen into modern ...
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Of all humans ever born, did most men not become fathers?
I quote in full a passage from the book Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men by Roy Baumeister, pages 63 – 64:
Counting Ancestors
Let’s return now to the ...
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Are new genes created through duplication?
In an creationist article, about molecular virologist, Dr Yingguang Liu, it says:
Evolutionists commonly invoke ‘duplication’ as a way to create brand new genes. A copying error can lead to an ...
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Do humans share 50% of their DNA with bananas?
It's widely claimed that we share 50% of our DNA with bananas. Does this have actual basis or is it a myth?
Example claims The Mirror (UK), NHGRI
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Are humans descended from chimp-pig hybrids?
Geneticist Dr. Eugene McCarthy claims that humans have descended from hybrids of pigs and chimpanzees:
A 2013 Phys.Org article explained:
he has amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that ...
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Are red-heads going extinct?
There is a widely-held belief that there will no longer be humans with red hair in the future (sometimes cited by 2060 or 2100).
For example, these Facebook groups:
"Save the ginger kids, there ...
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Did Homo sapiens have children with Neanderthals?
One of my friends told me that Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals had children together when the homo sapiens came to Europe about 50 000 BC.
But is it possible that Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals had ...
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Is 8% of human DNA from viruses?
According to 23andme's Twitter
Image reads,
Approximately 8% of DNA is originally from viruses, which infected your ancestors and became integrated into their cells.
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Is this image of eye colour inheritance accurate?
This image is circulating on social media (e.g. Pinterest).
It implies that if you have green eyes, then you can't possibly have one biological parent with blue eyes and the other with brown.
The ...
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Ethnoreligions: what religions explicitly claim heritability? [closed]
Several SE/SO questions (e.g., this) address what is often claimed to be (often correctly) confusion between ethnicity and religion. Certainly (IIUC, ICBW) most modern religions tend to be avowedly (...
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Are Ashkenazi Jews genetically more European than Semitic?
Referring to this article Surprise: Ashkenazi Jews Are Genetically European.
But a new study suggests that at least their (Ashkenazi Jews) maternal lineage may
derive largely from Europe.
...
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Are Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen fraternal twins?
Wikipedia claims that American actors Mary Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen are fraternal twins. They have also both claimed this. Other sources claim the same: Washington Post, St. Petersburg Times, and ...
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Did Neanderthals keep Cro-Magnons as sex-slaves?
Some time ago, it was thought that modern people came from Cro-Magnons, and Neanderthals became extinct. But after the Neanderthal genome project, we found that modern people have from 1% to 4% of ...
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Is approximately 80% of a child's intelligence acquired from the mother? [duplicate]
Uberfacts, a Twitter account with 9.43M followers claims that 80% of a child's intelligence is acquired from the mother. How true is this?
Gizmodo doesn't do a very good job of debunking this:
...
user7920
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Is height about as heritable as obesity?
The Thin Privilege FAQ explains:
Weight is about 50% - 80% heritable (sources disagree, but here’s a study that shows it to be 77% heritable). Height, for comparison, isn’t 100% heritable (I’ve ...
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Do the mother's genes almost exclusively determine the sons' intelligence?
According to this paper: Intelligence and the X chromosome by Gillian Turner, published by The Lancet (a highly regarded medical journal) in 1996, the X chromosome is dominantly responsible for coding ...
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Have scientists successfully cloned a dinosaur?
An article makes a claim that scientists have cloned a baby Apatosaurus.
From Article:
Scientists at Liverpool’s John Moore University have successfully cloned a dinosaur, a spokesman from the ...
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Is it possible for ingested dsRNA (or other genetic materials) to affect human gene expression?
I am usually pretty skeptical about claims on the danger of genetically modified crops because the issue of health for me logically breaks down to: Do the genes altered produce toxic chemicals in a ...
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Do races/ethnicities have different odors?
This is a serious question and not intended to demean any ethnic group or racial group. I'm Caucasian and have dated Asian (Chinese), black and South Asian (Indian and Pakistani) men. I have noticed ...
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Does speciation occur?
I am not questioning the theory of comment descent, but I am skeptical about the evolutionary mechanisms proposed for speciation.
Have we ever observed in detail how speciation occurs? We can take ...
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Did the Lenski experiments result in additional genetic information?
In the debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham on Feburary 4, 2014, Ham claimed the Richard Lenski experiments added no new genetic data. He went on to show a clip from Dr. Andrew J. Fabiach, a ...
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Do Jews mostly descend from Shem, son of Noah?
I mean, I am not exactly a creationist.
However, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shem
How come we have a race called "semite" as in anti-semite? It's as if people think that those people are descendant ...
user4951
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Can phobias be genetic, but created in one generation and not by natural selection?
I have seen this article floating around.
Pretty much they state that if a parent is traumatized, the child could be born with a phobia.
Researchers at the Emory University School of Medicine, in ...
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Is homosexuality primarily genetic? [duplicate]
It seems to me that, evolutionarily speaking, the fitness of a purely homosexual animal or human is much lower than that of a heterosexual one, and therefore would be strongly selected against. Thus I ...
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Is 80% of childs intelligence acquired from mother? [duplicate]
Several articles on internet claim that 80% of child's intelligence is acquired from mother. however not providing any scientific publications. Is it really true?
source: http://brooklynmutt.com/post/...
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Could the Australian Aborigines have Descended from Three People?
My anthropology professor claimed that certain genetic simulations showed that the Australian Aborigines could have descended from a population of only one man and two women. Those three people and ...
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Does homosexuality preserve the species?
From The Huffington Post:
For even without a causal link established between homosexuality and population management, the obvious reduction in population growth attributable to homosexuality by ...
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Did drinking milk cause an evolutionary change in the human genome?
In a recent Slate article "The Most Spectacular Mutation in Recent Human History. How did milk help found Western civilization?" (October 23, 2012), a claim was made that:
[Around 10,000 B.C.] a ...
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Could obligatory screening for Thalassemia in Cyprus violate the bioethical rules?
Stefan Beck, a visiting assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley, claimed:
“The obligatory screening and counseling for Thalassemia in Cyprus is one of the most successful ...
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Do humans share 99% of their DNA with rats?
I keep hearing this claim that a lab "rat has 99% of the DNA of a human?" Is that so? What exactly does this mean? One source for this claim seems to CNN which only says,
"About 99 percent of genes ...
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Does a gene predict the time of day one dies?
In this article from the Huffington Post it is mentioned that a certain gene can predict what time one will die (of natural causes). Not the date, but the time of the day.
"This particular ...
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Is intelligence declining due to the lack of selection pressure?
I have read lately that human intelligence has already peaked and that it will slowly decline over time because humans are no longer naturally selected for intelligence (Darwin award winners aside). ...
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Are Ashkenazi Jews largely descended from Khazars?
There is an obvious ethnic subdivision within Jews, between the Sephardic and the Ashkenazi. In several vaguely antisemitic websites (see for instance, here, here, and here ), but also in a completely ...
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Do corporations own human DNA sequences?
I came across the claim that Human DNA sequences are now owned by corporations:
FACT: HUMAN DNA SEQUENCES ARE NOW OWNED BY CORPORATIONS
Is this true?
If so, what does this mean?
(I realise ...
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Can a twin perceive that the other is in trouble?
There are many stories about twins being able to "feel" each other even when they are apart. Typically a twin would say that they felt that an accident or some other calamity happened to the other one ...
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Is there more genetic difference between men and women than men and male chimpanzees?
I got into trouble with someone yesterday for poo-pooing this idea as it smelled of apples and oranges to me.
The specific statistic was that genetically there is a 5% difference between men and ...
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Have scientists demonstrated an absent protein can cause chicks to be born with scales rather than feathers (as well as reptile scales to feathers)?
While researching and educating myself about evolution, I've come across an interesting claim that I'd like to learn more about, but so far, I've only been able to find the claim and no sources or ...
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Was Charles Darwin's family adversely affected by inbreeding?
I was reading the Wikipedia article on Inbreeding depression when I came across this:
Charles Darwin, through numerous experiments, was one of the first
scientists to demonstrate the effects of ...
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