Don2 (Don1 Revised)
June 6, 2008, 09:56 AM
From New Scientist:
MEN are often accused of thinking with a part of their anatomy other than their brain. Simple observation of some men's behaviour at parties - and sometimes morning-after introspection by said men - tends to support this. However, while Feedback hesitates to invoke Occam's razor in this sensitive context - indeed, Feedback is now typing with legs crossed - it has to be done: "Do not introduce entities without necessity," Occam said. Surely the brain should take full responsibility.
Not necessarily, according to the marvel of digital databases of the human genome. "To obtain gene expression information for large-scale data analysis," J. Guo and colleagues write in Cytogenetic and Genome Research, vol 103, p 58) (http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?doi=10.1159/000076290), "expression data of 760 unigenes in 17 human tissues (liver, lung, testis, brain, ovary, uterus, colon, stomach, heart, eye, kidney, spleen, gall bladder, breast, thymus, prostate and pancreas) were retrieved..." A "unigene", we are told, is a set of one or more DNA sequences that produce effectively the same protein. "This expression data," the authors continue, "was subjected to clustering analysis... Results: Among the 17 tissues, the highest similarity in gene expression patterns was between human brain and testis."
So now we know.
http://www.newscientist.com/backpage.ns?id=mg19826592.600&DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg19826592.600_fb
MEN are often accused of thinking with a part of their anatomy other than their brain. Simple observation of some men's behaviour at parties - and sometimes morning-after introspection by said men - tends to support this. However, while Feedback hesitates to invoke Occam's razor in this sensitive context - indeed, Feedback is now typing with legs crossed - it has to be done: "Do not introduce entities without necessity," Occam said. Surely the brain should take full responsibility.
Not necessarily, according to the marvel of digital databases of the human genome. "To obtain gene expression information for large-scale data analysis," J. Guo and colleagues write in Cytogenetic and Genome Research, vol 103, p 58) (http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?doi=10.1159/000076290), "expression data of 760 unigenes in 17 human tissues (liver, lung, testis, brain, ovary, uterus, colon, stomach, heart, eye, kidney, spleen, gall bladder, breast, thymus, prostate and pancreas) were retrieved..." A "unigene", we are told, is a set of one or more DNA sequences that produce effectively the same protein. "This expression data," the authors continue, "was subjected to clustering analysis... Results: Among the 17 tissues, the highest similarity in gene expression patterns was between human brain and testis."
So now we know.
http://www.newscientist.com/backpage.ns?id=mg19826592.600&DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg19826592.600_fb