ISG Professor Aaron Panofsky and former ISG postdoc Joan Donovan’s 2019 article, “Genetic Ancestry Testing Among White Nationalists” has just won the Star-Nelkin Prize for Best Article from the Science, Knowledge, and Technology section of the American Sociological Association. Abstract White nationalists have a genetic essentialist understanding of racial identity, so what happens when using genetic ancestry tests (GATs) to…
Written by Dina Fine Maron for National Geographic. [Excerpt] “Their goal is to uncover more information about how these animals move, eat, and what their genomes look like. Long hopes to detail how elephants without the benefit of tusks as tools may alter their behavior to get access to nutrients. Rob Pringle, at Princeton University, plans to look at dung…
Written by Mary Emily O’Hara for intomore.com [Excerpt]: “In plain English, the federal government is proposing reclassifying transgender people’s legal sex back to the sex assigned at birth. And if that sex at birth was listed wrong or left unclear, the government wants to put people through genetic testing to ensure a sort of “gender purity,” as it were. The…
“The persistence of elephant poaching has prompted researchers to wonder whether elephants really needed their tusks, and whether they might not be better off if the tuskless trait were to spread more widely through the African population. Shane Campbell-Staton, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues have begun systematically…
Scientists interested in finding specific genes that influence the behavior of humans and animals have a new tool, thanks to a two-year research effort aimed at describing how to apply the latest techniques of molecular genomics to the study of complex behavior. “There’s a really steep learning curve when you get into genomics, and if you’re starting from a place of…