Arctic News Or Science Abuse?


As I write these words, media reporters and bloggers are gleefully reporting the recovery of the Arctic ice.

There has been snow in many parts of the northern temperate zone recently, and, predictably, there have been cries of "what happened to global warming?"

It is Spring.  The evidence of global warming is all around for anyone who has eyes to see it.  But there are none so blind as those who will not see.

Propaganda

Evidence that environmental factors can contribute to autism has been around for several decades. The first clue comes from studies of monozygotic (‘identical’) twins, who share 100% of their inherited genes, but do not show complete concordance, i.e., one twin can have autism and the other not, or the two can be extremely different in terms of the severity of their symptoms. These discordant twin-pairs demonstrate that genes alone cannot tell the whole story: environment must explain part of the causal process in the neuropathology of these disorders.

A new study by scientists at the University of Michigan and Taiwan's National Health Research Institutes suggests that the evolution of morphology and physiology are controlled by different genetic mechanisms.

The finding that form and function are shaped by different evolutionary genetic processes can not only aid in future evolutionary studies, but can also be helpful in the study of human disease, the study's authors say.

The research appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.