Myths of descent
2025-09-11 20:10 It is common to ascribe to someone the characteristics of a specific ancestor.  Why would this particular one matter and not all the others?  As I have pointed out before genetic similarity decrease by half for each degree of relationship.
The difference between ethnicity and population
2025-08-30 18:24 I don’t want to speak of “human races”.  It would far too easily lead to the myth that they would be essentially different from each other.  In addition there is often a belief they would have sharp borders.
African involvement in the Transatlantic slave trade
2025-08-24 19:18 There is an idea of only Europeans having enslaved people from Sub-Saharan Africa.  They are claimed to have raided and kidnapped the locals.  The trouble is the slave trade went on for several centuries.
The American catastrophe
2025-08-11 16:43 The depopulation of the Americas took place in the 16th and 17th centuries. Naturally, regional collapses had already taken place earlier. Maybe the most famous is the Mayan culture’s collapse.
How infectious diseases work
2025-08-08 12:20 Infectious diseases is always something transferred to the affected.  Contagions don’t arise spontaneously when people do certain things.  Instead they have to be conveyed from someone already infected.
What is hygiene?
2025-07-31 19:57 Nowadays hygiene is foremost associated with washing and removing. But it may also mean keeping things separate. Such a separation between things is often taken for granted today.
Why I am for vaccination
2025-07-25 20:36 Vaccine is the only medical treatment having larger effect on life expectancy.  Not a negative one – as vaccine opponents believe – but a positive.  If vaccine was potentially deadly it would have been noticed.
To differ pharmaceutical industry from modern medical care
2025-07-15 19:15 Modern medicine is subject to the same error as denial of the existence of space.  Everyone occupied with it are taken for granted to be part of the same organisation.  In reality medical care is offered by loads of different groups.
What is genetic engineering?
2025-07-10 18:34 There is a reason why the word genes is linked in the last few blog posts.  A great deal have a wrong idea of what genes are.  I have read about people believing that genes are something artificial added to food.
What is DNA?
2025-06-29 19:02 It is the very substance our genes are made of.  Usually it is depicted as a rope ladder twisted like a helix.  One can say the molecule is shaped approximately like that.  It is in turn built from four smaller molecules.