Author: Justin Durand

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Truth about Kilts

“Today, a man’s pride in his Scottish heritage is often asserted by wearing a kilt made of his clan tartan—a fabric woven with the specific plaid pattern that is claimed by his family. You might assume with kilts being such an important piece of Scottish tradition that the clan tartans are several millennia old, or at least go back to the Medieval Period. But you would be wrong.“

Did you already know this? Most aficionados do; other people don’t.

More Information

Revised to add links. 

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How Long Do You Live After Death?

“Researchers at NYU’s Langone Medical Center have conducted a study of patients who have experienced near-death experiences, and the results are intriguing and chilling. Dr. Sam Parnia, the director of resuscitation research at NYU Langone, joins CBSN to discuss the findings of this mind bending study.“

People who have died, who shouldn’t be able to remember anything, sometimes come back with memories. They see and hear things after the moment of death. Does that mean consciousness survives death? That’s a very controversial interpretation.

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Behavioral Genetics

Some of my friends think Human Biodiversity is just alt.right propaganda. Others, equally liberal and progressive, think it’s a breath of fresh air in a field overburdened with political correctness. Me, I’m an agnostic. As I often remind people, I didn’t get the True Believer Gene.

With that out of the way, Jayman has what I think is a very nice intro article, “The Five Laws of Behavioral Genetics”. He offers this summary, then goes into a little more detail about each point:

“The five laws of behavioral genetics are:

  1. All human behavioral traits are heritable.
  2. The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes.
  3. substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.
  4. A typical human behavioral trait is associated with very many genetic variants, each of which accounts for a very small percentage of the behavioral variability.
  5. All phenotypic relationships are to some degree genetically mediated or confounded.

“All are simple. All can be said in one sentence. Yet all are incredibly profound and terribly underappreciated in today’s society.“

I’m not going to go further than this, at least not today. The article is worth reading if this is a subject that interests you.

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Shared cM Project

Shared cM chart Aug 2017

One of these days I need to take some time to write about calculating relationships between two people based on the amount of DNA they share. It seems like such a simple thing, but nothing is simple if no one has ever explained it to you. I run into a lot of people who just don’t get it, so they’re chasing down theories that make no sense.

In the meantime, here’s a quick intro from Your DNA Guide. Chart. Video. What more could you ask?

The way they explain it, “Blaine Bettinger at thegeneticgenealogist.com spearheaded the effort that became the Shared cM Project. He collected the shared cM data for known relationships from genetic genealogists just like you. This free tool gives you a good estimate of how much DNA should be shared for the different relationships.”

Maybe I can add that “cM” stands for centimorgan. A centimorgan is a unit of measurement for the distance between chromosome positions. Don’t worry about understanding it. It’s just a measurement word like feet and inches.

Blaine’s current chart is at August 2017 Update to the Shared cM Project. I like to go to his site directly so I can be sure I’m getting updated information. He has a summary of his posts at The Shared cM Project.

I also like Jonny Perl’s Shared cM Project 3.0 tool. Put in the number of cMs you share with someone and this tool with calculate the likely relationships.

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Pay to Play Indian

Did you know there was a time when you could pay to be Indian? I’m not sure about the reliability of this information but it has become a common meme about pretend Indians (“pretendians”). 

“It may be fashionable to play Indian now, but it was also trendy 125 years ago when people paid $5 apiece for falsified documents declaring them Native on the Dawes Rolls.”

The Dawes Rolls were designed to be a definitive citizenship list for the Five Civilized Tribes (Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole). When the rolls became final the lands held by the tribes were to be divided among tribal citizens. Become an Indian, get some land.

“‘What we had was simply white people claiming to be Indian,’ [Gregory Smithers] said. ‘They were early wannabes, just like we have today. Five-dollar Indian is just another term for that.’”