TEDxCambridge: George Church on genomics and human diversity

"George Church considers recent advances in genomics and personalized medicine and asks: as we seek to eliminate disorders like schizophrenia and dyslexia, or even rare genetic diseases, how should we think about preserving human diversity?"

Slide at 7:20:

"Rare [does not necessarily equal] Deleterious

MSTN: Lean muscles
LRP5: Extra-strong bones
PCSK9: Greatly reduced risk of heart disease
CCR5: Virus-resistance

Embrace the extremes: informative, easy, powerful"

Conclusion: "So anyway we and others are sequencing these long-lived animals and humans and we hope this will be part of a bigger project to measure and design humans going forward."

9 comments:

princenuadha said...

Interesting study

http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2012/04/ancient-dna-from-neolithic-sweden.html?m=1#comment-form

Northern Europe is more meso even though farmers and h/g lived side by side for a long time in some areas. So, could the farmers not outbread the h/g in those areas or was their later migrations bringing more meso?

(A cool aspect is that we don't need violence to explain replacement!)

Anonymous said...

Irving Fisher - Nordicist, eugenicist, Yankee, and son of Congregationalist minister:

http://yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2012_05/feature_eugenics.html

God and White Men at Yale

In the 1920s, leading thinkers—including the greatest economist America ever produced—focused their efforts on eugenics, preserving the Nordic stock, and the problem of “race suicide.”

On a sweltering Friday in June 1921, a 54-year-old Yale economics professor named Irving Fisher delivered a major speech at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. The pain of the recent war in Europe was still fresh, and Fisher was troubled by the quality of those who had died, and the damage to “the potential fatherhood of the race” by the loss of so many young men “medically selected for fighting but thereby prevented from breeding.”

In light of these losses, the issue, it seemed to Fisher, was that graduates of leading universities were failing to do their reproductive duty: the families “of American men of science” averaged just 2.22 children, versus a national average of 4.66. (Or as he put it, perhaps too lucidly, “The average Harvard graduate is the father of three-fourths of a son and the average Vassar graduate the mother of one-half of a daughter.”) This “race suicide” among “the well-to-do classes means that their places will speedily be taken by the unintelligent, uneducated, and inefficient.”

To prevent that, immigration from certain regions needed to be sharply curtailed, and birth control “extended from the white race to the colored” and to other “undesirable” ethnic and economic groups, ideally under the control of a eugenics committee established to “breed out the unfit and breed in the fit.” Otherwise, “the Nordic race … will vanish or lose its dominance.”

It was strong stuff, and from a seemingly impeccable source. Irving Fisher ’88, ’91PhD, a dapper, balding figure, with a white van dyke beard and rimless eyeglasses, was one of America’s best-known scholars. The New York Times ran long, flattering profiles about his work, and for years the Wall Street Journal published “Fisher’s Weekly Index,” for tracking market prices. The rich and powerful, including congressmen and presidents, sought his advice.

And with good reason: even today, Fisher is widely regarded as the greatest economist America has produced. He devised many of the basic concepts for analyzing the modern financial system and explained them so clearly that, at his death in 1947, the Harvard economics faculty en masse would sign a letter saying, “No American has contributed more to the advancement of his chosen subject.”

But Fisher was also a leading voice of the eugenics movement, which aimed to improve human populations through carefully controlled breeding. The aim, more precisely, was to build up the white northern European population, and discourage all others. This agenda, as it found its way into state laws, would mean evicting other Americans from their homes, depriving them of the ability to have children, and locking them away in institutions.

Anonymous said...

Compare that to today. How far we have fallen. Even so-called "White nationalists" and "radical traditionalists" won't touch Nordicism, if not being outright hostile to it.

When you look at who most of the people are doing the talking, it's swarthoids, queers, Asperger nerds and subracial hybrids with numerous character flaws and mental disorders, so it's no surprise. Most of whom under a proper eugenics platform would be sterilized.

Anonymous said...

Patrick Ewing could probably open up his own harem in Sweden. Nordic White power, brother.

princenuadha said...

oh noes, I heard that n/a has given up on evolution and turned super religious.

n/a said...

Where did you hear this?

princenuadha said...

Hehe, just checking if you're here.

I was a tad,bit disappointed/frustrated that all this good stuff was comming out and we didn't get your take.

At least I didn't say you died : )

princenuadha said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
princenuadha said...

"Where did you hear this?"

Hehe, I was just checking if were still here.

I was a bit disappointed/frustrated that all this good stuff was coming out and we didn't get your take.

At least I didn't say you were dead : )