HENRY

Mapuche indians in Chile are taking legal action against Microsoft for:

violating their cultural and collective heritage by translating the software into Mapuzugun without their permission

Information on Mapuzungun AKA Mapudungun here

The international HapMap project has a paper in this weeks Nature:

(we) report a public database of common variation in the human genome: more than one million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for which accurate and complete genotypes have been obtained in 269 DNA samples from four populations, including ten 500-kilobase regions in which essentially all information about common DNA variation has been extracted.

Full abstract, and you can get the paper from HapMap [pdf]

David Barash attempts to write a Gould-style essay on how to teach sociobiology:

“Should we revise Pink Floyd’s anthem “Another Brick in the Wall” – with its chorus “No dark sarcasm in the classroom/Teachers leave them kids alone” – to “No dark sociobiology in the classroom”? To answer this, we need first to examine that purported darkness.”

…and fails rather hilariously

One of the cooler sub-fields in evolutionary biology is phenotypic plasticity, where certain organisms have evolved the ability to modify their traits in some way. This is generally a response to rapidly changing environments. So, how does this affect species entering a new niche?

Peacor et al. have modeled this (less technical overview), and found that, unsurprisingly, invasive species competing with highly plastic organisms have a hard time. What is surprising, is that if the invasive species is plastic themselves, it’s much harder for them to invade the new niche too.

No: Shi et al., analyse over 14,000 genes and find no evidence to suggest that lots of genes specific to human brains have evolved more rapidly than those in Chimpanzee/Macaque brains.

There are a few genes which do seem to have evolved more rapidly in human brains (e.g. FOX P2 – implicated in language production, and ASPM ([1], [2]), which causes microcephaly when it goes wrong.

However, Shi et al’s study suggests that despite these (notable) exceptions, the genes involved in human brain evolution have undergone stronger purifying selection than those in the chimpanzee lineage.

This week in Nature, the Honey bee (Apis mellifera) genome, uh, lands.
Commentary includes an excited E.O. Wilson and a whole lot of bee-related miscellania

Edit: Science can’t compete with the bee genome, but they do have a paper by Poinar and Danforth who’ve found a fossilised bee in amber from ~100MYA. Wouldn’t this make a cool movie…?

Peleg et al in this weeks PNAS study the heritability of facial expressions . In order to rule out the problem of socially learned expressions, the authors compared congenitally blind subjects who would be less likely to have picked up the facial expressions of their family members.

They find a strong correlation between the facial movements in family members, and suggest that these emotions (especially ones like anger) are inherited.