How a Virus Invades Your Body: An Eye-Popping, Animated Look. What Do Great Musicians Have in Common? DNA. At age 13, jazz great Thelonious Monk ran into trouble at Harlem's Apollo Theater. The reason: he was too good. The famously precocious pianist was, as they say, a “natural,” and by that point had won the Apollo’s amateur competition so many times that he was barred from re-entering.
To be sure, Monk practiced, a lot actually. But two new studies, and the fact that he taught himself to read music as a child before taking a single lesson, suggest that he likely had plenty of help from his genes. The question of what accounts for the vast variability in people’s aptitudes for skilled and creative pursuits goes way back — are experts born with their skill, or do they acquire it?
Other thinkers, perhaps more ethically palatable than Galton, have argued that mastering nearly any skill can be achieved through rote repetition — through practice. A 1993 study by Ericsson and colleagues helped popularize the idea that we can all practice our way to tuba greatness if we so choose. Why Do We Have Blood Types? A History of Slavery and Genocide Is Hidden in Modern DNA. Infinity Imagined. Infinity Imagined.
Infinity Imagined. Infinity Imagined. Infinity Imagined. Why do humans blush? Neanderthals came in all colors : Gene Expression. There’s a report in Science about a new short paper about Neandertal pigmentation genetics. The context is this. First, in 2007 an ingenuous paper was published which inferred that it may be that Neandertals had red hair, at least based on an N = 2 from two divergent locations. The new study looks at three Croation samples, and reports genotypes which are correlated with a swarthier phenotype in modern populations. But the results are neither here nor there: everyone interviewed in the paper assumes that like modern Europeans Neandertals were a polymorphic set of populations when it comes to pigmentation.
There are lots of reasons for this agreement, despite issues one might take with this paper. The report on the paper in Science has two sections which I want to zoom in on. But I also think that the Science piece did not do justice to what we know about pigmentation genomics, which is a lot. The scientists themselves sometimes have a problem communicating. This is artlessly rendered. Infinity Imagined. Infinity Imagined. Infinity Imagined. My life as liv. (the inside of a woman’s vagina during sex lmao...) Infinity Imagined. Why Blood Looks Blue Inside Your Veins. The Truth About Pheromones. How to change your blood type without even trying.