Joanne Kiernan's List: psychology

• Human altruism is a widespread phenomenon that puzzled evolutionary  biologists since Darwin. Economic games illustrate human altruism by showing  that behavior deviates from economic predictions of profit maximization.
• This is the first investigation showing that a common human polymorphism,  with antecedents in lower mammals, contributes to decision making in an economic  game. The finding that the same gene contributing to social bonding in lower  animals also appears to operate similarly in human behavior suggests a common  evolutionary mechanism.

• Conventional wisdom says that the neural crest gives rise to skeletal and  connective tissue of the head and face, as well as a wide diversity of other  stem cells that migrate to many places in the vertebrate embryo, where they  spawn the cells that create the peripheral nervous system, and pigment cells in  skin and hair (or scales and feathers)
• mutations in mice that adversely affected development of the peripheral nervous  system or pigmentation did not affect craniofacial structures, whereas mutations  that caused abnormal development of skeletal and connective tissue of the head  and face did not alter neural crest-derived pigment or peripheral nervous system  cells.
  
• They were able to see clearly that these cells came from the non-neural layer of  cells rather than from the neural crest
• non-neural epithelium is indeed distinct from the neural crest, because its  cells contain characteristically different molecules
• "These cells emerge at a different time in development and disperse in the  embryo before neural crest cells begin to migrate,"
• "First, it is important to identify and validate -- rather than ignore --  assumptions; and second, because we identified an alternative embryonic cell  lineage as the source of the head and facial structures, we can now more  effectively analyze and understand the molecular-genetic mechanisms that  regulate the normal and abnormal development of these structures."
  

4 more annotations...