Category Archives: Human Genetics

Early humans left behind clues footprints, chiseled rocks, genetic material and more that can reveal our species survived and spread across Earth. These ancient people weren't so different from us; they traveled far and wide, hooked up with one another and even mined for natural resources (in this case, the reddish mineral ochre). Here are 10 things we learned about our human ancestors in 2020.

Early humans (Homo sapiens) didn't sleep with just one other. About 1 million years ago, H. sapiens had several rendezvous with another mystery species, and our species still carries some of these genes today, a study in the journal PLOS Genetics found.

It's possible this mystery species was Homo erectus, but we may never know for sure because H. erectus went extinct about 110,000 years ago, and scientists don't have any of this species' DNA.

Read more: Mystery ancestor mated with ancient humans. And its 'nested' DNA was just found.

The oldest known human DNA belongs to Homo antecessor, a species that may have practiced cannibalism. And at 800,000 years old, it's a record breaker.

Scientists found the remains of six H. antecessor individuals in Spain in 1994, but it wasn't until this year that a team of researchers extracted DNA from one of these individual's teeth, using the proteins found in the enamel to determine the segment of DNA that coded them. The team then compared this DNA sequence with recent human tooth samples, and determined that H. antecessor is not a close relation. Rather, it was likely a sister species of an ancestor that led to modern humans.

Read more: World's oldest human DNA found in 800,000-year-old tooth of a cannibal

When modern humans (Homo sapiens) left the Horn of Africa about 130,000 years ago, they trekked along the Arabian Peninsula. But which path did they take? Now, scientists have an idea, after finding sharp, human-crafted flint points in Israel's Negev Desert that are just like "breadcrumbs" marking an ancient route, according to ongoing research at the Israel Antiquities Authority.

Read more: Ancient stone 'breadcrumbs' reveal early human migration out of Africa

So, where exactly did humans walk on the Arabian Peninsula? Scientists know at least a few exact locations. Researchers have found 120,000-year-old human footprints among those of other ancient animals preserved in an ancient lakebed in the Nefud Desert of Saudi Arabia. These footprints are the earliest evidence of Homo sapiens on the Arabian Peninsula, the researchers said. During that time, the Arabian Peninsula was green and dotted with lakes, a hospitable place for migrating humans.

Read more: Prehistoric desert footprints are earliest evidence for humans on Arabian Peninsula

The first people to set foot in the Americas may have arrived 30,000 years ago, two new studies found. That's much earlier than researchers previously thought, with some scientists historically saying that the first Americans showed up as late as 13,000 years ago.

In one study, published in the journal Nature, the excavation of a remote cave in northwestern Mexico revealed human-made stone tools dating to 31,500 years ago. In the other study, also published in Nature, scientists took already-published data on early human activity in Beringia (the area connecting Russia to America during the last ice age), and entered them into an equation that modeled human dispersal. The model showed that early humans likely arrived in North America at least 26,000 years ago.

However, the Americas were sparsely populated that long ago. There wasn't a population boom until 14,700 years ago, as the last ice age was beginning to end, the latter study found.

Read more: First Americans may have arrived to the continent 30,000 years ago

Just like today, thousands of years ago the Americas were a diverse place. An analysis of four ancient skulls found in underwater caves in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo shows that these individuals looked nothing alike: one skull looked like people from the Arctic, another has European features, a third looks like early South American people and the last doesn't look like any one population.

The skulls date to between 13,000 and 9,000 years ago, just as the last ice age was ending, according to the study, published in the journal PLOS One.

Read more: Skulls from ancient North Americans hint at multiple migration waves

Those same Mexican caves, which are now underwater, hid another secret, scientists learned in 2020. For years, divers have found the skeletons of ancient people, including the skulls mentioned above. This begged the question: What were ancient people doing there in the first place?

Now, new evidence suggests some of these ancient people were miners. About 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, ancient people mined the caves for the red mineral ochre and left signs of their work, including the charred remains of fires, stone tools and stone markers so they wouldn't get lost in the pitch black maze. Ochre was used for rituals and everyday activities, including possibly as insect repellent or sunscreen.

Read more: Ice age mining camp found 'frozen in time' in underwater Mexican cave

More than 10,000 years ago, a woman carrying a toddler on her hip set down the child, readjusted, and picked up the child again as she continued her journey across the playa of what is now New Mexico.

Researchers found this woman's footprints, and those of the squirmy toddler, in White Sands National Park. At 0.9 miles (1.5 kilometers) long, this trackway is the longest late Pleistocene epoch double human trackway on record.

Read more: 10,000-year-old footprints show journey of squirmy toddler and caregiver

Four children who died young between 8,000 and 3,000 years ago in what is now Cameroon had secrets in their DNA. After analyzing the DNA from these ancient children's remains, scientists were surprised to discover a previously unknown "ghost" population of humans had contributed to these children's genomes.

About one-third of the children's DNA originated from ancestors that were closely related to known hunter-gatherers in western Central Africa, the researchers found. But the other two-thirds hailed from an ancient source in West Africa, including a "long lost ghost population of modern humans" that weren't known about until now, the scientists reported in the study, published in the journal Nature.

Nowadays, dating apps can help people find partners. But 800 years ago, the Polynesians and Indigenous people of Colombia didn't have apps they had boats, and apparently one of these groups boated to the other and hooked up.

When researchers looked at Polynesian DNA, they realized some carried a genetic signature similar to Indigenous Colombians. But it's unclear whether the Polynesians traveled to Colombia and then returned to Polynesia (with their Colombian-Polynesian children), or whether Colombians traveled to Polynesia, the researchers said.

"We can't say definitely who made contact with whom," study lead researcher Alexander Ioannidis, a postdoctoral research fellow of biomedical data sciences at Stanford University, told Live Science.

Read more: Polynesians and Native Americans paired up 800 years ago, DNA reveals

Originally published on Live Science.

Read more:
10 things we learned about our human ancestors in 2020 - Livescience.com

A massive study published in 2020 found evidence that blood iron levels could play a role in influencing how long you live.

It's always important to take longevity studies with a big grain of salt, but the research was impressive in its breadth, covering genetic information from well over 1 million people across three public databases. It also focused on three key measures of ageing: lifespan, years lived free of disease (referred to as healthspan), and making it to an extremely old age (AKA longevity).

Throughout the analysis, 10 key regions of the genome were shown to be related to these measures of long life, as were gene sets linked to how the body metabolises iron.

Put simply, having too much iron in the blood appeared to be linked to an increased risk of dying earlier.

"We are very excited by these findings as they strongly suggest that high levels of iron in the blood reduces our healthy years of life, and keeping these levels in check could prevent age-related damage," said data analyst Paul Timmers, from the University of Edinburgh in the UK.

"We speculate that our findings on iron metabolism might also start to explain why very high levels of iron-rich red meat in the diet has been linked to age-related conditions such as heart disease."

While correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation, the researchers used a statistical technique called Mendelian randomisation to reduce bias and attempt to infer causation in the data.

As the researchers noted, genetics are thought to have around a 10 percent influence on lifespan and healthspan, and that can make it difficult to pick out the genes involved from all the other factors involved (like your smoking or drinking habits). With that in mind, one of the advantages of this new study is its sheer size and scope.

Five of the genetic markers the researchers found had not previously been highlighted as significant at the genome-wide level. Some, including APOE and FOXO3, have been singled out in the past as being important to the ageing process and human health.

"It is clear from the association of age-related diseases and the well-known ageing loci APOE and FOXO3 that we are capturing the human ageing process to some extent," wrote the researchers in their paper published in July 2020.

While we're still in the early stages for investigating this association with iron metabolism, further down the line we could see the development of drugs designed to lower the levels of iron in the blood - which could potentially add extra years to our lives.

Besides genetics, blood iron is mostly controlled by diet and has already been linked to a number of age-related diseases, including Parkinson's and liver disease. It also affects our body's ability to fight off infection as we get older.

We can add this latest study to the growing evidence that 'iron overload', or not being able to break it down properly, can have an influence on how long we're likely to live, as well as how healthy we're likely to be in our later years.

"Our ultimate aim is to discover how ageing is regulated and find ways to increase health during ageing," says Joris Deelenwho studies the biology of ageing at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Germany.

"The 10 regions of the genome we have discovered that are linked to lifespan, healthspan, and longevity are all exciting candidates for further studies."

The research has been published in Nature Communications.

A version of this article was first published in July 2020.

Excerpt from:
Study of More Than 1 Million People Finds Intriguing Link Between Iron Levels And Lifespan - ScienceAlert

Bathinda: The Department of Human Genetics and Molecular Medicine of the Central University of Punjab, Bathinda (CUPB) under the patronage of Vice Chancellor Prof. Raghavendra P. Tiwari organised an invited lecture on How to organise Biology Teaching. The keynote speaker of this program was Prof. Kambadur Muralidhar, Former Jawaharlal Nehru Chair Professor, UoH, former Sir JC Bose National Fellow, South Asian University, New Delhi, and Former Professor and HoD, Dept. of Zoology, University of Delhi. Faculty & Students from different educational institutions online attended this program through Google Meet.

The programme commenced with the Welcome Address by Dr Jaswinder Singh Bhatti, HoD, Dept. of Human Genetics and Molecular Medicine, where he put a light on the topic of the webinar. While introducing the keynote speaker Prof. R.K. Wusirika, Dean In-charge Academics, stated that Prof. Kambadur Muralidhar is a distinguished Biologist of the country who is the elected fellow of the prestigious Science Academies of our country i.e.NASI, Allahabad, INSA, New Delhi and IASc, Bangalore.

Keynote Speaker Prof. Kambadur Muralidhar mentioned that Biology is the study of living organisms and is one of the three pillars of Natural Science along with Physics and Chemistry. He shared that Biology started as a set of observation with the help of human eyes related to morphological features, organism life cycles etc. by curiosity-driven man. After the introduction of Microscopy observation technique, the field got divided into Botanists, Zoologists and Microbiologists. While talking about the story of the growth of Biological knowledge and the biology teaching departments in educational institutions, he stated that Biology as a discipline for teaching at UG and PG levels has not materialized in any university for various reasons, and suggested a close reading of New Education Policy to develop a better interactive classroom environment. He said, In the days of Online education, technology and innovation used in the creation of content might take over teaching pedagogy. But teachers have to be trained to become future-ready.

Prof. Anjana Munshi, Dean Research, expressed her gratitude towards the keynote speaker for enlightening the participants with his scholarly lecture. Towards the end, Dr. Narender, Program Coordinator, thanked the Registrar Shri Kanwal Pal Singh Mundra & Vice Chancellor Prof. Tiwari for providing necessary support to organise this program. He thanked faculty, students and other participants for actively participating in this program.

The rest is here:
Central University of Punjab conducted expert talk on 'How to organise Biology Teaching - India Education Diary

Illustration by Joe Ciardiello.

Jewish.

Im Jewish.

Excuse me? Are you talking about me?

Excuse me, but I think I am the consciousness I woke up with this morning. And I think thats more or less the consciousness I wake up with every day and have woken up with every day since my birth. Right? And my consciousness has no race.

Now. Im associated with my body. Somehow. But its complicated. Very complicated. When I walk down the street and I catch sight of myself in the mirror of a shop window, I ask, Whos that? and I answer, Oh yes. Its that guy again.

But that guy has been assigned to me. Theres a connection there. Hes connected to me. Hes my body. If you hit him, I suffer. If you caress him, Im comforted. If you torture him, he almost becomes mealmosttheres not much me left beyond the pain that he feels. And if you kill him, Im gone. But all the same, hes a body, and Im not. Hes not me.

And yes, my body has a certain history behind it. It is what it is because of its genes. It made itself, bit by bit, following the instructions of its genes. And the genes gave their instructions according to some very strict laws. Sowhere did the genes come from, I wonder? Did they come from Israel? Is my body Jewish? Did my genes come from some people who called themselves Jews?

Wellas there were no people at all who called themselves Jews before around 3300 BC, obviously my genes dont come from them entirely. Before about 3300 BC, there were no Jews, but there were other humans, called different things, or called nothing, and the genes of the Jews came from them. The Jews did not invent their own genes. The Jews inherited their genes from their ancestors, who, like everybody elses ancestors, were descendants of the early humans, our original ancestors, who lived in Africa. Most of my genes are direct copies of the genes of the African ancestors. But of course the African ancestors got most of their genes from proto-humans and various primates and early mammals and early fish-like creatures.

So, if you like, you can say that my genes came from various people, some Jewish and some notor you could say that they came from cells, from egg cells and sperm cells, cells that had developed in certain human bodies, without, interestingly, any intervention of the people, the personalities, associated with those bodies. In other words, the genes didnt know whose body they were in, and the people who carried those genes didnt know where their genes came from or how they got there.

Is my body Jewish? Did my genes come from some people who called themselves Jews?

I was sitting at my breakfast table, and it was November 25, 2020, six months to the day since George Floyd, an African-American father of five, had been asphyxiated on a public street by Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis policeman. Id finished my breakfast, and I was reading two things at the same time. To one side of me, there was a cereal box with writing on it, and to the other side of me there was my open computer. The cereal box, in bold letters, proudly declared that the cereal inside it was Made From American Corn. And the computer was open to the mornings email and specifically to one of the many newsletters I seem to receive every morning from different Jewish organizations. The killing of George Floyd and the extraordinary response it provoked had made meand probably almost everyone in the United Stateshyper-conscious of the issue of race, and so on this particular morning I was wondering idly whether the daily appearance of these newsletters meant that my name was somewhere inscribed on some list of people whod been determined to be members of the Jewish race. And at the same time, I was wondering about the cereal box and inevitably asking myself, Well, can corn really be American? Yes, the corn used in the cereal in the box may be grown in America, but can an ear of corn actually be American? Can it be American even though it doesnt know that it is? The ear of corn has a complicated ancestry going back to the origin of life in the primeval ocean. And rather than saying that its associated with America, couldnt you just as well say that its associated with the primeval ocean? And of course my body also has a complex ancestry. For example, along with asking, Is my body associated with people who called themselves Jews? one might possibly ask, Is my body not equally associated with those remarkable fish who figured out how to survive on land? And I might also ask, If I say that Im Jewish, does that mean, for example, that my liver is Jewish? What if some of the particular genes that served as the blueprint for my liver came from ancestors who didnt call themselves Jews? Would I then have an alien non-Jewish liver in a Jewish body?

If a dog is born in America, is the dog American?

Or is my body African? Am I African?

If a horse is born inside the state of Israel, is the horse Jewish?

The subject of these Jewish newsletters is, first and foremost, anti-Semitism. Not for the most part the horrible murders of Jews that have occurred in the last few years in Europe and the United States, or the desecrations of Jewish cemeteries or the swastikas written on wallsmost of the newsletters have devoted much more space to hinting or outright declaring that certain individuals, including various American and British politicians, are anti-Semitic.

We live in a world obsessed by race, a world in which people are killed again and again because of race. But what is race, exactly?

The idea of race itself first became popular in the 18th century, but humans learned how to categorizeand, specifically, how to categorize each otherlong before the invention of race. Individuals learned how to see themselves as belonging to a specific group, to formulate the thought that the people in their own group were very, very different from the people in other groups, and also to imagine that the people in other groups were inferiorbad, ugly, dangerous, disgusting, frightening, perhaps uncannily disturbing. And still, today, this ability to categorize, along with the ability to like and dislike, remain key to our functioning, and strangely these capacities operate independently of our will, in fact they operate in a part of our minds to which we dont have conscious access. That is, they live in the part of our minds that is hidden from our own awareness and that we ourselves had no role in creating. So if a dove happens to land on my windowsill, I feel happy, and I think, Hello! I like you, but if a pigeon lands there, I feel slightly repelled, and I think, Oh, I dont like you, can you please go away? And why do I have these particular feelings? I have absolutely no idea. Whoever put those feelings inside me, it wasnt me.

We live in a world obsessed by race, a world in which people are killed again and again because of race. But what is race, exactly?

The concept of race is based on the belief that humanity consists of a few distinct groups of humans that developed quite separately from each other in separate geographical areas. To put the belief in race into the language of genetics would be to claim that each of the groups or races is genetically distinct, so that the individuals in each race are genetically similar to each other and genetically dissimilar to individuals from other races. Those who believe in race believe that each particular race has certain infallibly defining physical markers, such as skin color and certain facial features. And of course some believers in race believe that the members of each race share distinct inherited moral attributes. Adolf Hitlers officials routinely measured different parts of peoples bodies in order to determine whether or not those people were members of the Jewish race, and, if it was determined that they were, Hitler believed that they inevitably had inherited various despicable moral qualities and deserved to be killed, even if they were children or infants who hadnt had a chance to manifest many qualities at all.

Theres never been any evidence that moral qualities can be found in our genes or that moral qualities could be inherited. Bodies, when born, have no beliefs, no customs, and no moral traits. And the study of human pre-history has revealed that, far from snuggling down in a few distinct geographical areas, as the race theory would have it, our particular variety of humans, possessed of a wild and dynamic restlessness. was constantly breaking up and splintering off into different groups, moving from one place to another, repeatedly crossing astonishing distances to reach distant continents, and because of the strange nature of sexual desire, and the frightening brutality of the human male, as these groups broke up into still other groups, some staying put in their old locations, others moving on, as they traveled, explored, sought to avoid starvation, sought to find a better life, plundered, fought, conquered, formed new communities, ran into other groups and sometimes joined them, as they inter-married and raped, their genes kept crazily jumping over every mountain, river, and desert. Some groups settled down long enough for genetic mutations to spread in the group, so that almost everyone in the group would have the same characteristic eyebrows, but somehow, a few thousand years later, people could be found with those very same eyebrows a few thousand miles away. By today, very few people on the planet, if any, have genes that come from only one group or only one geographical area. In any case, it turns out that people who belong to a particular race, as defined by their skin color, facial features, or other measurable characteristics, may have fewer genes in common with members of their own race than they have with people who are not members of their race at all, so that, in other words, the whole idea of race is based on a series of misconceptions and refers to something that doesnt actually exist.

Nonetheless, for most of us today, the principal categorizing obsession continues to be categorization by race. Indeed, the idea of race remains so invincibly powerful that it floods the basement of our minds, the not-conscious part, and it influences our behavior when were not aware of it, and it weaves itself through the semi-conscious thoughts that are our banal burden as we go through each day.

Bob walks into a room. Joe is already sitting there. Bobs grandmother came from China, and Bob spent many years of his childhood in China and was deeply influenced by Chinese culture. But the laws of genetics gave him his fathers dark skin. So Joe thinks, Theres Bob. Bobs black. Joe thinks that he himself is white, and Bob thinks that Joe is white. Bob lives in a country in which most people are identified as white, so Bob is less aware that Joe is white than Joe is aware that Bob is black. The situation is potentially scary for Bob, and the country he lives in is a scary place for Bob, because Bob can be shot because people think hes black. But Bob is not black. Bob has genes from all of his ancestors. Some of his ancestors were slaves. Some of them were slave-masters. And some of them were neither masters nor slaves. Some were Chinese. The laws of genetics gave Bobs skin the very specific color it has, which is not black, and the same laws gave Joes skin the very specific color his has, which is not white.

It turns out that people who belong to a particular race, as defined by their skin color, facial features, or other measurable characteristics, may have fewer genes in common with members of their own race than they have with people who are not members of their race at all, so that, in other words, the whole idea of race is based on a series of misconceptions and refers to something that doesnt actually exist.

Knowing the color of Bobs skin and the shape of his facial features tells you nothing about Bob as a human being. Knowing the color of Joes skin and the shape of his facial features tells you nothing about Joe as a human being. But Bob and Joe cant escape the power of the race idea.

Bob and Joe are both professors. Joe is sitting in the faculty lounge. Bob and Joe have met a couple of times, but they dont know each other. Bob approaches Joe and says, Hey, are they having that meeting tomorrow? and Joe replies, No, its going to be Friday. But as Bob approaches him, Joe cant help thinking, Here comes Bob. Bob is black. Black black black black black, even though he tries not to think it, and Bob, because he lives in a world in which most of the people he meets every day are people he thinks of as white, is not that surprised that Joe is someone he thinks of as white, but Bob is a rather worn-out guy, because he has a hundred encounters every day like this, and each is an effort. Bob and Joe both wish that their encounters could be relaxed, easy, un-worried, unselfconscious, unconstrained, spontaneous, and effortless, that is, without an awareness of race, without an awareness of the ways in which its bad luck to be seen as black and good luck to be seen as white, and without an awareness of the fact that Bob might possibly feel resentful towards people seen as white, or Joe might possibly be afraid of people seen as black or feel guilty towards people seen as black, or both, and theyre both probably saying to themselves, Dont think about all that. But were rarely very successful when we tell ourselves Dont think about X or Dont feel Y. And if Im poor and youre rich, even though it might in certain circumstances be much better for both of us if we both forgot those facts, the problem is that if I remain poor, its really only going to be a matter of time before I re-discover the situation and think, Hey, youre rich.

Beyond race, we continue our compulsive categorizing into smaller groups. In the United States, where I live, everyone boringly and pointlessly categorizes all day long by national background, along with race. Individuals with Spanish ancestry may have a skin color identical to someone with French ancestry, but those with French ancestry are called white, while those with Spanish ancestry are called nonwhite or Hispanic. And for each racial or national category, there are various corresponding stereotypes and prejudices. So, according to common usage, if Person X looks at Person Y through the lens of a negative preconception or prejudice because of their presumed background or ancestry, we call that racism, even if the prejudice is connected to background or nationality, not race.

A friend promised to give me a book, and he said that the book had been written by a man who was a physicist. When he gave me the book, I experienced a moment of surprise. I was surprised to see that the author had an Italian name. I simply hadnt expected that the physicist would be Italian. After a few micro-seconds, I recalled that many of the worlds greatest scientists had been Italian and that there was no reason to be surprised that this physicist was Italian. But the moment of surprise revealed a not-conscious attitude. I wouldnt have been surprised if an opera singer had turned out to be Italian, but apparently I was surprised that a physicist had turned out to be Italian. If anyone had asked me if Id been surprised to learn that the author of the book, the physicist, was Italian, I would certainly have denied it. And I would have denied it with a certain feeling of sincerity, as my conscious self was not surprisednot after the apparently meaningless initial moment of surprise. And its not the sort of moment I would normally ever mention to anyone else or even remember or even explicitly admit to myself.

The not-conscious, the basement, happens to be the biggest room in most of our houses, and the stereotypes, the fears, and the beliefs about different groups that have been ladled like a sort of hideously unhealthy dishwater into that basement since our childhoods, have all become part of the vast oceanic chaos of our not-conscious minds, along with countless irrational taboos, the folklore about sex, the outlandish and inaccurate stories about people we know and dont know, the books weve read but no longer remember, the lessons from school about the weather and the solar system, the old comic books, the old television shows, and all the thoughts that have ever been expressed to us. Its very easy for thoughts to get into the basement of our minds, but because we dont have direct access to it, its not so easy for us to reach into that basement and pull thoughts out, and this is true for all of us, no matter how enlightened or well-meaning or intelligent or sophisticated we may think that we are. And in addition, the prejudices and stereotypes and other ludicrous ideas in our not-conscious basement minds are not even usually the most up-to-date ones. Personally, although born in the 1940s, I consider myself extremely hip and fully at home in the world of the 2020s where I live today, but if, looking at them objectively, my conscious thoughts are, on average, typical thoughts of the 1990s, my not-conscious thoughts are probably, on average, typical thoughts of the 1950s. And of course my conscious thoughts wrestle with my not-conscious thoughts every day. Sometimes they win, and sometimes they lose. But the not-conscious thoughts, when vanquished, dont evaporate. They simply hide in a deeper part of the basement, waiting for a day which I hope will never come, the day when the worst parts of me are somehow activated, and I become the dreadful person I know Im capable of becoming.

And considering the very real problems that have always threatened ushunger, ill health, starvation, and now the rising temperatures, the rising seasits a fantastical and almost unbelievable fact that humanity has invented for itself a ridiculous and utterly unnecessary problem, racism. And its mind-boggling as well that all over the world, and over the years, and most particularly today, grotesquely swaggering, bloated creatures called political leaders have actually convinced large numbers of people to love and revere them precisely by encouraging those who listen to them to drink deeper and deeper from the cup of racism. But to add to the depressing facts about this unnecessary invention, racism, we have to observe not only that racism is awful, but that many of the most natural responses to it are also awful.

Obviously, to speak of myself, although my genes came from countless different people, a lot of them were people who called themselves Jews, and my parents and most of my relatives, with varying degrees of interest, commitment, or enthusiasm, thought of themselves as Jews, and if by chance I walk into a room and catch the whiff of a lit cigar, Im suffused with a sensation of warmth and coziness, because my Jewish grandfather and uncles smoked cigars, and in fact Ive even felt at certain moments a twinge of pleasure and maybe almost of pride when someone has said something like, Hey, did you know that Camille Pissarro was Jewish? But basically for the most part Ive thought all too little about my ancestry, and days and weeks go by without my thinking about whether Im Jewish or notor even thinking the word Jewish for any reason at all.

Its natural for every person to wonder every once in a while, What am I? And in my own life so far, Ive thought about that subject every once in a while in the privacy of my own mind. But there are moments in history when other peoplein recent centuries, raciststry to answer the question for us.

The not-conscious, the basement, happens to be the biggest room in most of our houses, and the stereotypes, the fears, and the beliefs about different groups that have been ladled like a sort of hideously unhealthy dishwater into that basement since our childhoods, have all become part of the vast oceanic chaos of our not-conscious minds, along with countless irrational taboos.

If Id been born eighty or ninety years ago, anti-Semites would have defined me simply and without any hesitation as a Jew because of my ancestry and my facial features. And if because of being defined as a Jew, Id lost my job, and Id had to live in a ghetto, and Id been forced to wear a yellow star on my clothing, and Id been surrounded everywhere by people who showed contempt for me, and Id been spat on in the street, and Id been beaten up, and my aunts and uncles, my parents, my brothers and sisters, had been arrested or shot or seized at dawn and taken away to concentration campswell, then, of course I would have been obsessed by my Jewishness. I would have thought about it every minute of every day because it would have dominated my life every minute of every day. I couldnt have ignored the subject of my race, just as an African-American in the United States today cant possibly ignore the subject of their race.

If a person has been defined by others as being a member of a dis-favored group, and that group is being denigrated by everyone around them, they may respond by accepting the negative description of themselves, and they may become depressed and fall into a state of passivity, they may despise themselves and feel worthless, powerless, and weak. On the other hand, if people around them are speaking contemptuously about their group, they might possibly respond by wanting to honor their group. Or if others are trying to take away from them the styles of cooking, the songs, the games that they associate with their childhood, with their relatives, with their family, then they might feel motivated to appreciate and revere those cultural treasures. And if they and the people around them are subjected to a common assault, their response might be to identify with the threatened community. In fact, in certain circumstances of threat or danger, it wouldnt even be something a person would need to think about; the identification would be automatic and total.

The killing of Jews in Europe in very large numbers began in the 12th century. The myth spread that Jews used the blood of Christian children in their rituals, and for this mythical crime, for example, thirty-eight Jews were burned at the stake in the small French town of Blois in 1171. And when the Black Plague spread across Europe in the 14th century, Jews were accused of causing the plague by poisoning the wells, and Jews were massacred all over Europe, and when they were not massacred, they were frequently expelled from the places where theyd lived. Eventually the Jew became a symbol for many Christians of all that was vile, even as fewer and fewer Christians had the opportunity to meet a Jew during the course of their lives. So these sorts of things have been going on for a very, very long time. Remarkably, also for a very, very long time, Jews have collected together with other Jews and attempted to preserve their beliefs, culture, and sense of community. Some Jews also tried in a sense to form a community with other Jews long dead, with all the Jews who had lived in the previous five thousand years.

The idea of preserving or fortifying a five-thousand-year-old Jewish community persists today in various forms. In countries all over the world, there are Jews who pay respect to Jewish ancestors by celebrating Jewish holidays and observing Jewish customs. Others attend synagogues, study Jewish texts, or practice the religion of Judaism. And still others center their lives around their participation in small enclosed societies made up exclusively of Jews. For some, the we of the 5,000-year-old Jewish community is of much greater importance in their daily experience than is their own personal I. These individuals teach their children to recite the prayers and practice the customs which they believe to be the same as the prayers and customs that their ancestors had recited and practiced, and they tell their children, using the powerful word our, These are our prayers and customs. These are our beliefs. These are the prayers and beliefs and customs that my parents handed down to me and that you will hand down to your own children. They believe that they share the same attitudes towards life as their ancient ancestors, and some even dress like Jews of medieval times. The identification can be so complete that they will use the word we without reservation or self-consciousness even when they tell their childrenand encourage their children to tell their own future childrenWe had a great kingdom, we were warriors, we were invincible, we were persecuted, we were slaves, we suffered, we were killed.

Of course if a person in the modern world tries to say things and do things that a Jew from medieval times might have said or done, that doesnt make them a Jew from medieval times. For a person to imitate an owl doesnt make them an owl. And the fact that a person is descended from a one-celled organism doesnt make them a one-celled organism. Just as the medieval pronunciation and the medieval context and associations of the words used in medieval prayers can be guessed at but not known, the attitudes towards life of medieval Jews can be guessed at but not known. And while children can be taught to think of themselves as part of a group, they are not actually born as members of a group. The European racists believed that a persons physical ancestry, the ancestry of their body, determined what sort of person they would be, and if they were born to Jewish parents, the racists believed theyd be terrible people. Some of the more devoted protectors of the 5000-year-old Jewish community also believe in a destiny determined by ancestry, but they believe that if a person is born to Jewish parents, theyre born Jewish, as if the customs, prayers, and beliefs were part of their physical inheritance, innate in the new-born infants body.

After the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews, a more ambitious attempt to protect the Jewish community was organized, after many decades of preparation. And you might possibly think that after what had happened in World War I, and certainly after what had happened in World War II, every thoughtful person on earth would have very seriously begun to question the value of the nation-state. Certainly the idea that a nation-state provides physical safety to its citizens would seem to have been thoroughly and decisively shown to be incorrect. All the same, many Jews had concluded even by the end of the 19th century that, in a world of nation-states, founding a nation-state of their own was the only way that permanent safety could ever be provided to the Jewish people, and many of the devastated Jews who were still alive after World War II continued to pursue that objective. Most of the governments of the surviving nation-states were supportive of the idea, even governments which had coldly ignored the agony of the Jews being murdered in the camps and the pleas of those begging to be admitted to safer countries as refugees. So the world allowed the state of Israel to be established in Palestine, and just as the Jews had once been expelled from so many places over the preceding centuries, now Jews expelled the Palestinian Arabs from their homes and their land, and Jews, after centuries as victims of racism and injustice, increasingly learned how to practice racism and injustice themselves. Single-minded devotion to the preservation of the Jewish community had led to the subjugation of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, a subjugation that has developed through many events over the years into a well-known permanent regime of vicious and arrogant cruelty, exhibiting a heartlessness that is equal to that of many of the worst governments on earth. Of course there are many people, Jews and non-Jews, who still cant believe that this is the case and who try not to learn too much about the situation or to think too much about it. And then there are others who know all about it but attempt to interpret it all in a positive light.

And this brings me to the organizations whose newsletters I receive and their accusations of anti-Semitism. And in a way its appalling that a person like myself, who has had nothing but good luck in his life and has suffered little, a person of no great emotional depth whos sitting comfortably at his table finishing an agreeable breakfast, should presume to judge or criticize the newsletters of these organizations, which are in many cases written by people who have either suffered greatly themselves or whose parents and grandparents suffered and in many cases lost their families because of the murderous behavior of anti-Semites. So, while I give myself permission to have whatever opinion seems to me right about the subjects covered in these various newsletters, I enjoin myself at the same time to remember that whats written in themparticularly in the sections I find most impossible to acceptis written because the authors have been emotionally harried, wounded, and twisted by the anguish inflicted on earlier generations of their families. Marx used the wonderful phrase congealed labor to remind us of the workers whose difficult struggle was inextricably baked into the physical objects we casually use every day, and we can say about the newsletters sent out by these organizations that their sentences contain the congealed terror and the congealed grief of generations of persecuted people. For that reason, we need to remind ourselves not to derive too much enjoyment from uncovering the possible fallacies and sophistries of these haunted writers. The general well-meaning public in the generation before mine, overwhelmed by shame over what had been allowed to happen to the Jews, accepted without question many of the assumptions still shared by the writers of these newsletters. And of course theres a sort of triumphant, transgressive pleasure that can come to us when we defy what was the conventional wisdom of an earlier generation, particularly an earlier generation that contained a large quantity of self-satisfied people who had a complacently benign attitude towards the world but ignored a lot of things. But that pleasure is itself self-satisfied and preposterously self-congratulatory. Lets try to remember that the whole story is tragic.

If your view of the world is that there are Jews and then there are non-Jews, and if your view of your role in life is that you are a defender of the Jews, then if non-Jews are denouncing Jews, you may not pay that much attention to which Jews are being denounced and the various reasons the non-Jews give for their denunciations. And so you may well miss some of the distinctions between non-Jewish opponent A and non-Jewish opponent B. And indeed the central mandate of the organizations whose newsletters I receive at my breakfast-table is to ignore those distinctions with steely determination. But from any perspective on life other than theirs, the distinctions matter. Hitler denounced Jews because he believed in an insane fantasy about race. Contemporary Palestinians denounce the Israelis because the Israelis have stolen their land, killed their children, bulldozed their homes, made their daily lives unbearable, and starved them. To accuse contemporary Palestinians of anti-Semitism would be almost funny, as if one had said that Jews despised Hitler because they had an anti-Austrian prejudice.

In other words, the writers of the newsletters believe that the Jews have always had enemies and always will have enemies, that the enemies are all in a way interchangeable, and that paying attention to the differences between them would merely indicate that one had been duped; theyre all anti-Semites, and theyre anti-Semites because they hate Jews.

So then we have to consider the fact that there are unusual individuals in every country who habitually stand on the side of the un-privileged, the un-lucky, the weak, and the subjugated. And these defenders of the weak can often be particularly courageous people. Some of them routinely risk prison and even death because of standing up for oppressed people. And indeed, one might well say that these champions of the un-privileged are among the most admirable people in every country. And yet, consistently, because of their sympathy and support for the Palestinians, these are the very people repeatedly singled out for contempt and vilified as anti-Semites in my daily newsletters, even though no one can point to any particular things that theyve said or actions that theyve taken that would indicate that they have a prejudice against Jews or that their support for the Palestinians is based on a prejudice against Jews. Many of them are Jews themselves, almost all of them work side by side every day with Jews, and a few of them even have pictures of Jews like Karl Marx hanging on their walls.

And the accusation of anti-Semitism is a terrible and terrifying accusation. It casts a cloud of suspicion and doubt around a person that may be almost impossible to dispel, because the rumor that any given person secretly harbors a horrible and revolting inner hatred is weirdly easy to believe and impossible to decisively disprove. And the very word anti-Semite carries the association of the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz, and it places the person accused of it in the same category as those who slaughtered 6 million people.

Because human beings are mysterious entities, or I would say fundamentally un-knowable, it was easy, in medieval times, for a Christian to subject his neighbor, a Jew, to an entirely superstitious, utterly unscientific, and completely subjective form of observation and to conclude that the neighbor had literally made a personal arrangement with the Devil and had agreed to do the Devils bidding on earth, and its easy today for any one of us to suspect that our neighbor shows signs of prejudice, and in the right circumstances its not hard to convince others to share our suspicions. Prejudice comes of course in many flavors. Theres a spectrum that runs all the way from ignoring or vaguely not noticing members of a certain group all the way on up through mild disdain, distaste, disgust, fear, horror, and loathing. And for those who move through the world with the sense that a large proportion of the people they meet feel a certain disdain for them, much less some variety of disgust or loathing, life can become exhausting and demoralizing and eventually even unbearable. The problem is that, because we all grew up in a world full of prejudice, and because we are all victims of our own not-conscious minds, and because we do not have the ability to transform ourselves into the people wed ideally like to be, we are all at least a little bit prejudiced towards various well-defined or ill-defined groups. Quite apart from groups coming from different ancestries, we have irrational feelings about people who are by some standard over-weight or people who are short or people whose pronunciation of certain sounds is slightly abnormal and to us infuriating. So prejudice is very real. And those of us who belong to groups that have frequently been disliked or despised cant lightly dismiss the suggestion that a given individual may be prejudiced against our group. Under certain circumstances, we can easily begin to feel more and more convinced that a certain person, or two people, or a lot of people, are looking down on us, and we can even persuade others in our group to feel the same. And history tells us that some who have felt that way have basically been right. But its also possible to feel that way and be wrong.

Those who believe in race believe that each particular race has certain infallibly defining physical markers, such as skin color and certain facial features. And of course some believers in race believe that the members of each race share distinct inherited moral attributes. Adolf Hitlers officials routinely measured different parts of peoples bodies in order to determine whether or not those people were members of the Jewish race.

Of course the more we believe that our group is the object of prejudice, and the closer our identification becomes with the group, the greater is the danger that we will incorrectly believe ourselves to have more in common with the other members of the group than we really have, and less in common with individuals outside the group than we really have. And the truth is that we humans are not only not good at making guesses about the inner life of our fellow humans, we are absolutely terrible at it. Were wrong even about those we know well, those we live with and see every day. And so, yes, if a certain individual makes anti-Jewish statements or jokes, or if they discriminate against Jews in their personal or professional behavior, then undoubtedly we can feel confident in considering them to one degree or another anti-Semitic. But when we try to speculate about individuals apart from their words and their deeds, when we try to guess what they feel inside, we may very well be wrong about them, and we may very well make the mistake of categorizing as an enemy someone who in fact is a good-hearted person who could potentially be a friend.

A lot of what we consider human progress has occurred because various individual members of mis-treated groups identified passionately with their group and figured out how to fight for their group. If human beings had lacked the capacity for group identification, if human individuals had lacked the ability to see that they and their neighbor were both suffering under the same intolerable conditions, all of us today would probably be living as slaves under one or another pharaoh, and there would be no hope for anything better for us. All the same, to form an unconditional bond with a collective entityto answer the question What am I? by referring to a race, a nation, a group, a communityis always a very dangerous choice. In other words, in my opinion the B Minor Mass of Johann Sebastian Bach is great. And in my opinion Angela Merkels decision to welcome the Syrian refugees in 2015 was great. But I dont think that Germany is great. I dont think the United States is great. I dont think Great Britain is great. I dont think the German people are great. I dont think the American people are great. And I dont think the British people are great. No nation is great, and no group of people is great. A passionate admiration for ones own group can somewhat easily turn into some kind of contempt for others, and if one is speaking of races or national groups, it can even sometimes lead to the very type of racist contempt that was a necessary condition for British and European imperialism, slavery, and countless cases of the slaughter of the innocent down to our own day.

And so as I sit here reading my daily newsletters, I find myself gesturing frantically at my breakfast table. I feel almost desperate. I want to speak out loud to the writer of each article Im reading, to say I know, I know, each step you took in your reasoning over the course of your life was understandable, and each step made sensein a way. But look at where youve ended upyoure drowning in injustice, youre defending sadism, and youre heaping abuse every day on some of the worlds most admirable human beings, people who are not even your enemies. Somehow your thinking must have taken a wrong turn.

First of all, you distanced yourselves from all the other victims of racism and remorseless mass murder that have occurred in our world. Rather than identifying with other victims and trying to comprehend the mechanisms that might lie behind all such cases, you insisted on the uniqueness of the Jewish case. Of course theres no doubt that the Jewish case is unique in its nature, in its scale, and in its long twisted history. But can you explain what happened to the Rohingya in Burma in 2016 and 2017 or to the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994? No, you cant, because each of those cases of racism is also unique, and in fact most cases of racism have unique, long, and twisted histories behind them.

You consistently use a phrase that insists on the separateness of the Jewish case, the phrase racism and anti-Semitism. That phrase doesnt help us at all in any quest for insight, and it ought to be abandoned.

As self-appointed defenders of Israel, you dont understand why the countries of the world so often vote against Israel in the United Nations and why young people all over the world march in demonstrations against Israel and why so many thoughtful older people are irritated and annoyed by you, the supporters of Israel. Or you simply conclude that this is the way non-Jews have always felt about Jews, its based on the same eternal prejudice, and theres no need for you to think seriously about it. And its true that people born in the last seventy years or so may or may not be vividly aware of what happened to the Jewish people in earlier years. But the fact is that if asked to list the groups that have been most tormented during the time that they themselves have been alive, they are likely to mention the people of Vietnam, the people of Iraq, the people of Syria, and many other groups of people, before they mention either Jews around the world or the citizens of Israel, and this is why they dont accept the way that you seem to claim a unique moral authority, as victims, to be above criticism.

Unfortunately, its sad but true that, in part precisely because it so assiduously defends its right to commit the crimes it commits, Israel, very much like apartheid-era South Africa in its day, has become a country that is looked upon with almost unquestioned disdain by people around the world who care about protecting the un-protected and the weak. Some of these people may know a great deal about the current situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories and all the history that led up to the current moment, and some may know very little. But they are not wrong in seeing, for example, the shooting of unarmed protesters and the ghastly collective punishment of almost 2 million people in Gaza as among the current worlds most vicious, systematic, and merciless attempts to dominate or crush a defenseless population. And they resent the techniques you use every daythe endless and varied ways in which you wield the accusation of anti-Semitismto stop people from criticizing either the state of Israel or you, its tireless defenders.

Youve really established a preposterous set of rules for anyone who wants to talk or write about this particular subject, and you know just what to say if these rules are broken. If someone wants to criticize a Jewish politician in the United States, for example, if someone wants to say, Well, this particular politician always seems to defend Israel no matter what it does, he uses very deceitful and dishonest arguments and rhetoric, and by the way he receives a large part of his campaign funding from wealthy supporters of Israel, you will reply by saying, Well, the person who says that is clearly anti-Semitic because theyre using ancient and obvious anti-Semitic slurs; theyre saying that this fine politician is more loyal to the Jewish people and Israel than he is to his own country, theyre calling him tricky and sneaky, and theyre saying that rich Jews use their money to try to buy influence, bend people to their will, and control things. And so you do your best to force everyone to talk about whether whats been said about the politician does or does not echo things that anti-Semites said in various past centuries, and you hope that everyone forgets about the fact that what was said about the politician may simply be true.

You say that people who discuss the negative consequences of the founding of the state of Israel are anti-Semitic, because in mentioning those consequences theyre implying that Jews, and only Jews, had no right to found a state and no right of self-determination, and you say that people who criticize the actions of the state of Israel are anti-Semitic because they hold Israel to a standard of behavior higher than what is asked of any other country. Well, obviously, the hope of various groups to have a nation-state of their own, from the Kurds to the Basques and on and on, forms one of the endless painful themes of political history, but its unusual for a group to select a location for their nation-state where they themselves mostly dont live and where other people do live. And its hardly true that Israel is held to a higher standard than other countries. People who think about whats happening in the world savagely criticize countries other than Israel every hour of every day. They savagely criticize the United States, and in particular its founding. They savagely criticize Russia. They savagely criticize China. But the accusations of anti-Semitism still sting and can still dominate the conversation. Theyre arrows whose poison never seems to wear off.

Your obsession with the daily defense of every choice made by the Israeli state is perhaps a consequence of the fact that youre still reacting much too literal-mindedly to the statements that various ignorant and malevolent people made to your ancestors long ago. The ignorant and malevolent people said, You are Jews, you use the blood of children in rituals, you poison wells, and were going to kill you, were going to kill you because youre Jews. And then they tried to kill your ancestors, and they killed millions. But because of their terrible success, you took what they said too seriously. They said, The problem is Jews, we hate Jews, so you thought the problem was all about Jews and the hatred of Jews. Nothat was a mistake. Anti-Semitism was never really about Jews.

Marx used the wonderful phrase congealed labor to remind us of the workers whose difficult struggle was inextricably baked into the physical objects we casually use every day, and we can say about the newsletters sent out by these organizations that their sentences contain the congealed terror and the congealed grief of generations of persecuted people.

People dont need to know a great deal about Jews in order to be anti-Semites. In fact, they dont need to know anything. Most anti-Semites have known little or nothing about Jews. Many have never encountered a Jew. You think they hate Jews, and then they try to kill them. No. The truth is that in order for people to kill Jews, they dont need to hate them. They might hate them, or they might not hate them, or they might not be sure. But whether one looks at the Middle Ages or at Nazified Europe, the Jews werent killed because they were Jews. They werent killed because of any trait they possessed. They werent killed because people hated them. They were killed because history created certain circumstances in which a certain population grew desperate, and. maddened by desperation, sometimes under the sway of demonic leaders, sometimes not, they felt driven to blame a weaker group of people for their problems and their misery. Looking for an appropriate weaker group to blame, the deluded population looked around them, and in Europe the Jews were for centuries by far the most obvious target, because they were easily identifiable, they were alien and mysterious to those outside their community, and they were defenseless. And so the deluded population blamed them, and then they tormented them, and then they killed them.

This is why in a way it really isnt important whether Adolf Eichmann hated Jews or didnt hate them. Maybe he hated them on Monday, and on Tuesday he didnt care. He would have been up to his neck in killing them whether he hated them or not. If Franz Kafka had gone to meet Eichmann in his office, would Eichmann have hated him? We have no idea. In fact, well never know what sorts of odd, bizarre ideas were floating around in Eichmanns head. He organized transports of Jews to be killed. He wanted to kill Jews. But the Jews that Eichmann wanted to kill or that the citizens of Blois wanted to kill in 1171 were not the suffering human beings they actually killed. The Jews they wanted to kill were made-up fantasy characters. If the best-known and most accessible minority group in 20th century Europe had been the Armenians or the Kurds, Hitler might well have become fixated on the Armenians or the Kurds, and he might well have tried to kill the Armenians or the Kurds. And this is why, yes, it was kind of, sort of, great that after World War II many Germans who would formerly have vilified the Jews came to realize that the Jews were not bad people, and concert-goers in Munich cheered Leonard Bernstein. And similarly, in a way, it was kind of, sort of, great that as recent decades passed, many Americans whod once been very prejudiced against anyone seen as black became more accepting of people of color and even elected one to be president of the country. These were victories, and they may have saved lives. But from another point of view they were small victories, because the problem with the human species is not that some people in Germany dont like Jews, and some people in the United States dont like people with dark skin, and some people in Egypt dont like Coptic Christians, and some people in Africa dont like men who love other men, and some people in Mexico dont like transgender women, and some people in Indonesia dont like Communists, and some people in Hungary dont like immigrants. The problem is that human beings make up categories, put each other into them, and then, they turn the people in some of those categories into made-up fantasy characters, and then, when times are bad, when circumstances are bad, they persecute those people and kill them. And this is why the problem isnt solved simply by trying to defend Jews.

The horrors caused by the warming of the climate can to some extent be predicted, as can the horrors caused by an uncontrolled disease. The processes that create these problems are to a certain extent understood by science. The opposite is true for the horrors that flow from racism. We cant predict them, and were quite far from understanding them, even though, paradoxically, the developments in the climate and the dangerous diseases come at us from the outside, and racism is a force with which were intimately familiar, because some of its currents flow right through us. How close are we to understanding the economic, sociological, and political conditions that create racism in the first place? And how close are we to fully understanding what the historical circumstances are that can turn racismor prejudice, suspicion, and fearinto a drive towards violence? We dont understand the murder of old people and children by American soldiers in Vietnam. We dont understand why Robert Bowers, a citizen of Pennsylvania whod drawn little attention from his neighbors for 46 years, suddenly drove to a synagogue outside Philadelphia one morning in 2018 and killed 11 worshippers there. We dont know what was going on in the mind of the Minneapolis policeman, Derek Chauvin, who kneeled on the neck of George Floyd for a minute and 20 seconds after he was dead. And in the very same way, we simply do not understand the murder of the 6 million Jews in the 1940s. We dont understand it. We can read and reread the facts of the case, just as we can endlessly stare at photographs of the impassive faces of Robert Bowers and Derek Chauvin, but theres a mystery, a locked box, at the center of these stories. Perhaps by comparing them all, by studying them all at once, we might be able to make some progress in understanding them. But until we do, we live in terrible fear of ourselves, never knowing when one of us, or some of us, may strike. Because unfortunately something is wrong with us. Injustice and misery drive us all too easily into madness, and injustice and misery are everywhere. We are not healthily functioning animals.

See original here:
Breakfast Table With Jewish Newsletters - The Nation

The number of British babies born with Down's syndrome has halved as more parents opt for a controversial blood test to identify the condition during pregnancy, scientists have found.

The tests, known as NIPS (non-invasive pre-natal screening), involve cutting-edge DNA technology to identify potential genetic abnormalities in the foetus, yet spark criticism from campaigners who say that they encourage abortion.

Since it was introduced in the UK, the number of newborns with the condition has fallen by 54 per cent. This is the same average reduction rate across Europe, although figures vary wildly.

Dr Brian Skotko, a specialist in developmental disabilities, who is the senior author on the latest study, said: "These data are as close to accurate as possible."

Four years ago his team found a third fewer babies with Down's (DS) were born annually in the US as a result of pregnancy terminations.

Most people have 23 pairs of chromosomes. Those with Down's have an extra copy of chromosome 21.

This means they develop differently and have varying levels of learning disability and characteristic physical features. Certain medical complications (such as heart, gut, hearing, or thyroid conditions) are fairly common.

This study, the first of its kind, is based on information spanning 2011 to 2015 from multiple registries and databases in every country in Europe.

Dr Skotko, of Massachusetts General Hospital, said: "People with DS were being counted sporadically, inconsistently, or not at all, depending on the country.

"But without an accurate estimate, it's impossible for policymakers and advocacy organisations to determine how many resources and support services are needed for its Down's syndrome population."

It took three years to work out how many babies were being born with DS and the overall number with the condition.

Statistical models were applied for calculations in countries where there were gaps in data.

The findings, published in the European Journal of Human Genetics, come ahead of widespread adoption of even more sensitive blood tests. They will detect the likelihood of a chromosomal condition in a foetus as early as nine weeks instead of the current 11 to 14.

Even fewer babies with DS are expected to be born. Nine-in-ten people in the UK who know their child will have Down's have an abortion.

Sally Phillips, the Bridget Jones actress and comedian who has a son with DS, fears that more foetuses will be identified and aborted.

Continue reading here:
UK Down's syndrome births halve as parents opt for blood test to identify the condition - Telegraph.co.uk

Getting to the guts of local evolution

The microbiota of mammals is a product of coevolution. However, humans exhibit a range of adaptive peculiarities that can be quite geographically specific. The human microbiota also displays a variety of community compositions and a range of overlapping and redundant metabolic characteristics that can alter host physiology. For example, lactase persistence is a genetic characteristic of European populations, but in populations lacking the lactase gene, milk sugar digestion is endowed by the microbiota instead. Suzuki and Ley review the evidence for the role that the microbiota plays in local adaptation to new and changing human circumstances.

Science, this issue p. eaaz6827

When human populations expanded across the globe, they adapted genetically to local environments in response to novel selection pressures. Drivers of selection include exposure to new diets, climates, or pathogens. Humans harbor microbiotas that also respond to changes in local conditions and changes in their hosts. As a result, microbiotas may alter the adaptive landscape of the host through modification of the environment. Examples include changes to a foods nutritional value, the hosts tolerance to cold or low amounts of oxygen, or susceptibility to invading pathogens. By buffering or altering drivers of selection, the microbiota may change host phenotypes without coevolution between host and microbiota. Functions of the microbiota that are beneficial to the host may arise randomly or be acquired from the environment. These beneficial functions can be selected without the host exerting genetic control over them. Hosts may evolve the means to maintain beneficial microbes or to pass them to offspring, which will affect the heritability and transmission modes of these microbes. Examples in humans include the digestion of lactose via lactase activity (encoded by the LCT gene region) in adults and the digestion of starch by salivary amylase (encoded by the AMY1 gene)both are adaptations resulting from shifts in diet. The allelic variation of these genes also predicts compositional and functional variation of the gut microbiota. Such feedback between host alleles and microbiota function has the potential to influence variation in the same adaptive trait in the host. How the microbiota modifies host genetic adaptation remains to be fully explored.

In this paper, we review examples of human adaptations to new environments that indicate an interplay between host genes and the microbiota, and we examine in detail the LCTBifidobacterium and the AMY1Ruminococcus interactions. In these examples, the adaptive host allele and adaptive microbial functions are linked. We propose host mechanisms that can replace or recruit beneficial microbiota functions during local adaptation. Finally, we search for additional examples where microbiotas are implicated in human genetic adaptations, in which the genetic basis of adaptation is well described. These range from dietary adaptations, where host and microbial enzymes can metabolize the same dietary components (e.g., fatty acid and alcohol metabolism), through climate-related adaptations, where host and microbes can induce the same physiological pathway (e.g., cold-induced thermogenesis, skin pigmentation, and blood pressure regulation), to adaptations where hosts and microbes defend against the same local pathogens (e.g., resistance to malaria, cholera, and others). These examples suggest that microbiota has the potential to affect host evolution by modifying the adaptive landscape without requiring coevolution.

Well-studied examples of local adaptation across diverse host species can be revisited to elucidate previously unappreciated roles for the microbiota in host-adaptive evolution. In the context of human adaptation, knowledge of microbial functions and host genemicrobe associations is heavily biased toward observations made in Western populations, as these have been the most intensively studied to date. Testing many of the interactions proposed in this Review between host genes under selection and the microbiota will require a wider geographic scope of populations in their local contexts. Because genes under strong selection in humans are often involved in metabolic and other disorders and can vary between populations, future investigations of host genemicrobe interactions that relate to human adaptation may contribute to a deeper understanding of microbiota-related diseases in specific populations. Investigating host genemicrobe interactions in a wider variety of human populations will also help researchers go beyond collections of anecdotes to form the basis of a theory that takes microbial contributions to host adaptation into account in a formal framework. A better understanding of reciprocal interactions between the host genome and microbiota in the context of adaptive evolution will add another dimension to our understanding of human evolution as we moved with our microbes through time and space.

When human populations adapt genetically to new environments, their microbiotas may also participate in the process. Microbes can evolve faster than their host, which allows them to respond quickly to environmental change. They also filter the hosts environment, thereby altering selective pressures on the host. Illustrated here are examples of interactions between adaptive host alleles and adaptive microbiota functions where the microbiota likely modified the adaptive landscape in response to changes in diet (e.g., changes in levels of starch and milk consumption), exposure to local pathogens (e.g., malaria parasites and Plasmodium spp.), and changes in local climate (e.g., cold stress and hypoxia). In this paper, we discuss the resulting relationships between host-adaptive alleles and microbiota functions.

As human populations spread across the world, they adapted genetically to local conditions. So too did the resident microorganism communities that everyone carries with them. However, the collective influence of the diverse and dynamic community of resident microbes on host evolution is poorly understood. The taxonomic composition of the microbiota varies among individuals and displays a range of sometimes redundant functions that modify the physicochemical environment of the host and may alter selection pressures. Here we review known human traits and genes for which the microbiota may have contributed or responded to changes in host diet, climate, or pathogen exposure. Integrating hostmicrobiota interactions in human adaptation could offer new approaches to improve our understanding of human health and evolution.

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The role of the microbiota in human genetic adaptation - Science

Human beings tend to be fascinated with their beginnings. Origin stories are found across cultures, religions, ethnicities and nationalities and they are all deeply important. These stories tell people where they come from, how they fit in and how everyone fits together.

One of these stories, of course, is the story of human genes, and it's a story anyone with human DNA shares.

As scientists find more ancient human DNA, sample more modern DNA and develop more ways to analyze this genetic material, it's revealing a lot about how early humans moved and moved and moved around the world, coming to inhabit nearly every swath of land.

So after thousands and thousands of years of nearly constant migration, are there any people out there who have never left the spot where it's thought Homo sapiens evolved? Put another way, is there anybody on Earth who isn't an immigrant?

Related: Why haven't all primates evolved into humans?

"From a scientific point of view, maybe the only people that you could consider not to be immigrants would be some Khoe-San-speaking groups in southern Africa," said Austin Reynolds, an assistant professor of anthropology at Baylor University in Texas who specializes in human population genetics.

The designation Khoe-San (pronounced coy-sawn) refers to certain African communities in the areas of Botswana, Namibia, Angola and South Africa who speak similar languages with distinctive clicking consonants, Reynolds told Live Science.

Reynolds said there are two main factors indicating that Khoe-San groups may be non-migratory descendants of original humans: They live in the place where it's likely humans first appeared, and they have a high amount of genetic diversity. A good way to understand why high genetic diversity indicates original ancestry is by comparing genes to a bowl of M&Ms, Reynolds said. Handfuls taken out of the bowl i.e. people who broke off from the original human population might have only a couple M&Ms colors in them, but the original bowl will have all the colors.

Yet despite the Khoe-San groups' proximity to the proverbial "cradle of humankind" and their significant genetic diversity, identifying them as the last genetically aboriginal peoples is not cut and dry.

Firstly, researchers dont know for sure that southern Africa is the cradle of humankind. Some scientists think humans first evolved in East Africa, said Reynolds, and scientists haven't amassed enough archaeological evidence in either area to be completely certain just where Homo sapiens first came on the scene.

There's even a possibility people evolved in western Africa, Mark Stoneking, a molecular geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told Live Science. Different environments do a worse or better job at preserving fossil remains, Stoneking said, so just because human remains were or were not found in specific places doesn't mean humans didn't live there long ago.

Stoneking doesn't think there are any folks left on Earth who aren't scientifically, at least immigrants.

"People have always been on the move," Stoneking said. His recent genetic research on populations across Asia has shown that there's a touch of just about everyone in everyone else. "All human populations have been in contact with others," including the Khoe-San, he said, denoted by evidence in their genes, their cultures and their languages.

Early humans moved extensively around Africa for more than 100,000 years before leaving, at which point they probably moved out of eastern Africa into the Middle East, Stoneking said. It's likely that not long afterward, people headed southeastward along the Indian coast, with many more waves of migrants following these original adventurers over a span of tens of thousands of years. Along the way, there would have been a great exchange of DNA, Stoneking said, and these two components movement and intermixture is what he sees as a defining characteristic of the human species.

"Humans what they like to do is migrate, and they like to have sex," Stoneking said. And so it seems to have been since time immemorial.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Is anyone on Earth not an immigrant? - Livescience.com

A new report added by Research Dive offers insights and puts forth the impact of COVID-19 catastrophe on the global human genetics market. According to the report, the human genetics market is estimated to grow at a significant rate and generate robust revenue share by 2027 during the forecast period from 2020 to 2027.

The report provides brief summary and an in-depth information of the market by collecting data from industry experts and different sources prevalent in the market. The statistics presented in the report are extensive, reliable, and the outcome of an exhaustive analytical research. The report offers qualitative and quantitative trend analysis for the period of 2020-2027 to assist stakeholders to understand the overall market scenario. Comprehensive analysis of the key segments validates the types of products used in the industry and their applications.

MARKET SEGMENTATION

On the basis of type, the global human genetics market is segmented into:

Product Type Segmentation Prenatal Genetics Cytogenetics Molecular Genetics & Symptom Genetics

For More Detail Insights, Download Sample Copy of the Report at: https://www.researchdive.com/request-toc-and-sample/2137

On the basis of application, the global human genetics market is segmented into:

Cytogenetics Molecular Genetics Prenatal Genetics Symptom Genetics Research Center Industry Segmentation Forensic Laboratories Hospital

On the basis of region, the global human genetics market is segmented into:

North America U.S. Canada Mexico

Europe Germany UK France Spain Italy Rest of Europe

Asia-Pacific Japan China India Australia South Korea Rest of Asia-Pacific

LAMEA Brazil Argentina Saudi Arabia South Africa UAE Rest of LAMEA

Connect with Our Analyst to Contextualize Our Insights for Your Business: https://www.researchdive.com/connect-to-analyst/2137

KEY COMPANIES COVERED

The research report summarizes and outlines several aspects of the key players operating in the global human genetics market such as company snapshot, business performance, product portfolio, recent developments & strategies, SWOT analysis, and many more. The key players listed are:

LGC Forensics Agilent Technologies QIAGEN N.V. Bode Technology Illumina Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. Promega Corporation Orchid Cellmark Inc. NextOmics GE Healthcare Takara Bio Inc. Oxford Nanopore Pacific Biosciences

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

The key players of the market are adopting several strategies to obtain a leading position in the global industry. For instance, in August 2020, Ancestry launched AncestryHealth, a product that features next-generation sequencing with an ability to screen the genes associated with blood disorders, breast cancer, colon cancer, and heart disease.

Contact Us:

Mr. Abhishek PaliwalResearch Dive30 Wall St. 8th Floor, New YorkNY 10005 (P)+ 91 (788) 802-9103 (India)+1 (917) 444-1262 (US) TollFree : +1 -888-961-4454Email:support@researchdive.comLinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/company/research-diveTwitter:https://twitter.com/ResearchDiveFacebook:https://www.facebook.com/Research-DiveBlog:https://www.researchdive.com/blogFollow us on:https://covid-19-market-insights.blogspot.com

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Insights on Human Genetics Market 2020 to 2027: COVID-19 Impact Analysis, Drivers, Opportunity Analysis, Restraints, and Forecast - The Courier

This article was originally published here

Nat Rev Genet. 2020 Dec 4. doi: 10.1038/s41576-020-00297-6. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Understanding how human genetics influence infectious disease susceptibility offers the opportunity for new insights into pathogenesis, potential drug targets, risk stratification, response to therapy and vaccination. As new infectious diseases continue to emerge, together with growing levels of antimicrobial resistance and an increasing awareness of substantial differences between populations in genetic associations, the need for such work is expanding. In this Review, we illustrate how our understanding of the host-pathogen relationship is advancing through holistic approaches, describing current strategies to investigate the role of host genetic variation in established and emerging infections, including COVID-19, the need for wider application to diverse global populations mirroring the burden of disease, the impact of pathogen and vector genetic diversity and a broad array of immune and inflammation phenotypes that can be mapped as traits in health and disease. Insights from study of inborn errors of immunity and multi-omics profiling together with developments in analytical methods are further advancing our knowledge of this important area.

PMID:33277640 | DOI:10.1038/s41576-020-00297-6

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Host genetics and infectious disease: new tools, insights and translational opportunities - DocWire News

Detailed look: Some mutations in the autism gene NCKAP1 interfere with a cells ability to transport NCKAP1 protein into and out of its nucleus.

Many people with mutations that disrupt a gene called NCKAP1 have autism or autism traits along with speech and language problems, motor delays and learning difficulties according to a new study. The results, from a large international team of researchers and clinicians, clarify how mutations in NCKAP1 affect people and solidify its position as a top autism gene.

Sequencing studies over the past decade have turned up three autistic people with de novo, or non-inherited, variants that likely disrupt NCKAP1, putting it on a list of genes strongly tied to autism. Other work has shown that mice that do not express the gene have atypical brain development.

But those reports contain little information about the outward characteristics of people with NCKAP1 mutations which are challenging to study because variants in the gene are rare, says Hui Guo, associate professor of life sciences at Central South University in Changsha, China.

In the new work, Guo teamed up with scientists and clinicians across the globe to identify and characterize 18 additional people with NCKAP1 mutations.

This study demonstrates that international cooperation among many institutions is becoming fundamental to advancing our understanding of rare variants, says Abha Gupta, assistant professor of pediatrics at Yale University, who was not involved in the study.

Painting a detailed picture of traits associated with NCKAP1 mutations can also improve a persons chance of being diagnosed and provide guidance about expected outcomes, she says.

Guo asked colleagues who collect genetic data for other research to sift through their records for people with NCKAP1 variants. He also used GeneMatcher, a site that connects researchers to clinicians interested in the same genetic variants.

For each person Guo and his colleagues identified, they followed up to assess that individuals clinical traits; they either contacted the person directly or asked medical professionals to review the persons records.

The researchers also collected genetic and clinical information about family members of the people with NCKAP1 mutations to determine if the variants had been inherited.

In all, the team identified and characterized the traits of 21 affected people across seven countries.

Thats a lot of work, considering how rare an NCKAP1 variant is, says Megan Dennis, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular medicine at the University of California, Davis MIND Institute, who was not involved in the study.

The people in Guos cohort ranged in age from 7 to 23 years at the time they were assessed.

The researchers diagnosed autism in 10 out of 15 participants who had been previously assessed for the condition; 2 others have autism traits but no formal diagnosis; the remaining 3 have no reported autism traits. Another 12 participants have difficulties with speech and language, 11 have delayed motor function, and 11 have intellectual or learning disabilities.

According to the clinical assessments, nine of the participants have had sleep problems and seven have experienced seizures, both of which are also associated with autism. The results were published in The American Journal of Human Genetics in November.

Guo and his colleagues further investigated the variants effects on NCKAP1 function by introducing mutations from five participants into cultured human embryonic kidney cells. They tagged NCKAP1 protein with a fluorescent marker to trace its location in the cells.

NCKAP1 protein is typically present throughout the cell. Two variants, though, cause it to appear mainly in the cytoplasm, suggesting that these mutations create problems with transporting the protein into and out of the nucleus.

The team also evaluated how NCKAP1 expression varies throughout development by using the BrainSpan atlas, which catalogs gene-expression data from human brain tissue from 8 weeks after conception to 40 years of age. NCKAP1 is highly expressed during the second and third month of prenatal development, and at multiple points throughout a persons life, they found.

They also found that the spatial distribution of NCKAP1 expression across the brain most closely resembles the spatial distribution of gene clusters associated with excitatory neurons and radial glia, and not with inhibitory neurons. This pattern suggests the NCKAP1 gene has a function that is specific for these cell types perhaps by regulating their structure or ensuring that they differentiate properly, the researchers say.

The team further compared the brains of typically developing mice with those of mice that were treated to express less NCKAP1 protein. They injected the embryonic mice with a fluorescent protein that tags nascent cortical neurons, and then assessed where those cells ended up after two or four days. In mice that express less NCKAP1, many of the neurons did not arrive at the correct final location, the team found, suggesting that the gene may play a role in the migration of these cells. That finding, though preliminary, fits with prior work tying premature NCKAP1 expression to delayed neuronal migration.

The functional studies shed some light on the mechanisms that may underlie a genetically based form of autism, Dennis says. But in terms of being able to have any kind of actionable clinical information, theres still more to be done.

Guo and his colleagues plan to characterize the traits tied to rare mutations in other top autism genes, with the goal of defining specific genetic or molecular subtypes of the condition.

See the article here:
Rare variants tied to neuronal migration, autism traits - Spectrum