Latest Kinship and descent Stories
New research suggests that Charles Darwin's family was a living human example of a theory that he developed about plants: that inbreeding could negatively affect the health and number of resulting offspring.Darwin was married to his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood. They had 10 children, but three died before age 10, two from infectious diseases. And three of the six surviving children with long-term marriages did not produce any offspring "“ a "suspicious" sign, researchers say, that these...
PHILADELPHIA, April 5 /PRNewswire/ -- On April 10, over 400 athletes will compete in the Frawgstomp Metro Dash, the first urban race of its kind. Teams of two will race across approximately six miles of urban terrain, decode 10 digital clues, and complete 10 grueling physical challenges taken straight from the playbooks of elite military forces and Olympic athletes. (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20100405/NE81250LOGO ) "There's no other race like it in the urban environment,"...
Whether it is about who gets to ride shotgun or who wore a shirt without asking, siblings fight. While seemingly innocent, a recent study at the University of Missouri reveals that certain types of fights can affect the quality of sibling relationships. MU researchers identified two major types of conflict among adolescent siblings and found that conflicts about personal space have a negative impact on trust and communication between siblings."The first conflict area we found includes issues...
Genealogy-based television show features records from the National Archives WASHINGTON, March 8 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- On Wednesday, April 14, at 7 p.m., the National Archives will host Megan Smolenyak, author of Who do You Think You Are?, a comprehensive guide for conducting genealogical research and the official tie-in to the NBC show of the same name that traces the genealogy of a famous person. Smolenyak, chief family historian and spokesperson for Ancestry.com, will be joined by...
Cultural views of evolution can have important ethical implications, says a Duke University expert on theological and biomedical ethics. Because the popular imagination filters science through cultural assumptions about race, cultural history should be an essential part of biomedical conversations.Amy Laura Hall, associate professor of Christian ethics at Duke University, argues that many popularized ideas about evolution assume that some human groups are more evolved than other human...
Middle-aged parents are more involved in their grown children's lives than ever, according to new research from Purdue University."We found that middle-aged parents help each of their grown children with many types of support at least every few weeks," said Karen Fingerman, the Berner-Hanley Professor in Gerontology, Developmental and Family Studies. "This is a dramatic increase from 20 years ago, when young adults received much less support from their parents."Not all...
People preferentially marry those with similar ancestry, but their decisions are not necessarily based on hair, eye or skin color. Research, published in BioMed Central's open access journal Genome Biology, shows that Mexicans mate according to proportions of Native American to European ancestry, while Puerto Ricans are more likely to settle down with someone carrying a similar mix of African and European genes.Neil Risch, from the University of California, San Francisco, worked with a team...
2 studies look at the benefits and limits of the information in personal geneticsTwo recent studies by Dartmouth researchers use individual genetic data to reveal the powers and limits of our current understanding of how the genome influences human health and what genes can reveal about the ancestry of the people of New Hampshire.Published in the Sept. 11 issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, Dartmouth Professor Jason Moore and Vanderbilt Professor Scott Williams analyzed how...
When it comes to health disparities between different groups, how society sees people in terms of race might play a greater role than genetics, according to a new University of Florida study.The study also showed that taking stock of socio-cultural factors might improve our understanding of how genes influence individual health "” regardless of race.Consider high blood pressure, a complex disease governed both by genetic and environmental factors. Not only was social classification better...
As the popularity of take-home DNA kits to trace ancestry or calculate the risk for serious medical conditions grows, there is an increasingly critical need for federal oversight of "direct-to consumer" genetic testing, as well as of the use of DNA samples for research, according to researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and several other academic institutions.In the past year, scientists, sociologists and bioethicists, among others, have come to agree that the...
