genetics books

	Jacob's Legacy: A Genetic View of Jewish History
	By: David B. Goldstein ISBN: 0300125836 Publisher: Yale University Press Release Date: 28 May, 2008 Bioscience book rank: 1327153
	Atlas of Genetic Diagnosis and Counseling
	By: Harold Chen ISBN: 1588296814 Publisher: Humana Press Release Date: 07 October, 2005 Bioscience book rank: 1167322
	Vascular Endothelium: Pharmacologic and Genetic Manipulations (Nato Science Series: A:)
	By: John D. Catravas, Allan D. Callow, Una S. Ryan ISBN: 0306458195 Publisher: Springer Release Date: 15 April, 1998 Bioscience book rank: 1427558
	Cell Division & Genetics (Cells & Life)
	By: Robert Snedden ISBN: 1588109348 Publisher: Heinemann Release Date: October, 2002 Bioscience book rank: 1212019
	Genetic Algorithms - Principles and Perspectives: A Guide to GA Theory (Operations Research/Computer Science Interfaces Series)
	By: Colin R. Reeves, Jonathan E. Rowe ISBN: 1402072406 Publisher: Springer Release Date: 31 December, 2002 Bioscience book rank: 1291518	Reeves and Rowe provide a very readable overview of what is currently known about evolutionary algorithms. While the book provides very good coverage of several recent models of GA dynamics, it would be worth the money if only for the chapter on the dynamical systems treatment of GAs. <br /> <br />Vose's "The Simple Genetic Algorithm" is a brilliant piece of work, but it also holds the distinction of being the earliest in a book that I have ever become utterly, completely, hopelessly lost. I refer to this book as "the one I use to figure out what Vose was talking about."
	Chemical Consequences: Environmental Mutagens, Scientist Activism, and the Rise of Genetic Toxicology
	By: Scott Frickel ISBN: 0813534135 Publisher: Rutgers University Press Release Date: July, 2004 Bioscience book rank: 1178775
	Genetic Testing and Screening: Critical Engagement at the Intersection of Faith and Science
	By: Roger A. Willer ISBN: 1886513112 Publisher: Kirk House Publishers Release Date: 01 August, 1998 Bioscience book rank: 1358374
	Current Topics in Human Genetics: Studies in Complex Diseases
	By: Hong-Wen Deng, Hui Shen, Yong-Jun Liu, Hai Hu ISBN: 9812704728 Publisher: World Scientific Publishing Company Release Date: 12 November, 2007 Bioscience book rank: 1445193
	The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story
	By: Stephen Oppenheimer ISBN: 0786718900 Publisher: Carroll & Graf Release Date: October, 2006 Bioscience book rank: 566190	In Britain, there is a mantra uttered by the PC lobby that "we have always been a nation of immigrants". History books concentrate on various "invasions" of our homeland which have supposedly changed our genes and made any idea of a British people just nonsense. <br />Oppenheimer shows that this is wrong. Most of our blood comes from men and women who arrived over 10,000 years ago from the Iberian peninsula when the last glaciers retreated. Recent developments in tracing DNA enables us to track them because the various regions of the British Isles still bear their genetic imprint. The same technology also sheds new light on the ancestry of the Celts. <br />This is all fascinating stuff and Oppenheimer should be congratulated for not dumbing down his story for the sake of popular appeal. <br />However, I must admit I struggled through those many parts of the book which detailed at great length exactly what percentage of people possess various gene variants. A few pages like that would have been fine, but we get rather too much. I'm afraid he could have done with a better editor and more appendixes. <br />It's still a very interesting book, but it's not for non-scientific readers or those whose interest in the subject comes from genealogy research. <br /> An excellent book, like being back in college and taking a fun course with a witty, funny and knowledgeable professor. I appreciated the linear format with thesis backed with evidence approach. As a precaution, just like college, there were many terms and ideas that went over my head, which meant having to do some additional homework to catch up with text, but well worth the detour. To this regard, the appendix and glossary were extremely valuable. I have always been fascinated with the origins of the Basque; why would they be the only non Indo-European, Sub-Saharan or Semitic language in all of Europe and the Mediterranean and why stuck in the middle of Pyrenees? My other linguistic quandry was the lack of celtic words in the English language and the lack of consistency between English and Dutch/German/Danish. Finally the technology catches up with speculative history and paints a different picture of Western Europe. It is human nature to embelish, pander to the audience or just plain preach propaganda. But blood doesn't lie and for me all the pieces of the puzzle came together in Mr. Oppenheimer's book. I have no doubt the thesis will be seminal in the re-writing of British History. Not the place to begin, but this book may reward advanced readers who can handle a popularized but scholarly work on the implications of recent findings in DNA. Earlier readers posting here frequently disparage this book's ponderous prose and its massive array of recondite DNA analyses. After reading more accessible, and considerably shorter (no coincidence!) works on genetics and anthropology by Spencer Wells and Bryan Sykes (for both authors, their two most recent books reviewed by me on Amazon), I felt ready to tackle Oppenheimer's work, despite its difficulty. While the time invested paid off in a better knowledge of the Celtic and British origin debate and the possible influence of Germanic cultural and linguistic influences preceding not only the Anglo-Saxon invasion but the preceding Roman occupation, Oppenheimer while he may be a better scholar than Sykes remains a less entertaining writer. Sykes can popularize his findings in "Blood of the Isles" & "Seven Daughters of Eve." He also can profit from them if you note the enterprise Oxford Genetics. As I commented when reviewing Sykes' "Blood," it remains curious that two geneticists both at Oxford do not even mention the other colleague in hundreds of pages of closely documented and meticulously referenced texts. <br /> <br />This apparent rivalry aside, Oppenheimer acknowledges very late in his text that names given to Rostov or Ian or Helena are merely "aides memoires" for R1B-11 or the like in an alphabet soup of markers all geneticists rely upon. Readers of both Sykes & Oppenheimer sniff disdainfully at this popularization, but surely both scientists and lay people need assistance in imagining "Eve" or "Lucy" or the "Ice Man" to make more personal the findings buried in blood types or bone samples. Oppenheimer carefully explains his reasons for clarifying relationships among these difficult classifications, numbering in the thousands by now. Much explanatory material on genetics here is relegated to appendices and a glossary; while Sykes & Wells integrate more definitions and analogies into their briefer, more readable books, Oppenheimer opts for density. <br /> <br />This can bore a reader. My eyes glazed over in the second hundred pages full of dull genetics. The first hundred, tackling the Celtic origins debate and guardedly based on scholars such as Simon James & Barry Cunliffe, and Iron Age archaeologists such as John Collis, argues a southerly direction into the British Isles for Celtic infusion, not the La Tene Danube-Central European homeland and its overland route for entry into the Isles. Personally, I'd have liked to have Bob Quinn's book "The Atlantean Irish" (reviewed by me) credited for its prescience regarding the Atlantic Celt "fringe" movement that Cunliffe and others have since fought to replace the Continental migration theories of the 19c. This vexed matter alone, building upon the past two decades of Celtic revision, or Celto-skepticism, could fill an entire book easily. <br /> <br />But, I did perk up eventually. This is more a reference book on a variety of unevenly covered but admittedly provocative topics. He writes clearly in places and dully in many others, depending it seems on his diligence vs. his enthusiasm! This is an arduous trek, but you need to weather this if your curiosity's aroused about this intellectual terrain that for the first time geneticists and linguists have entered to do battle over, not to mention archeologists and historians! <br /> <br />Advances in DNA may soon rely on its suggestions, or they may overturn its assumptions. But, Oppenheimer bravely piles all he has amassed for the benefit of science. It may be too clunky and over-ambitious, but he has done specialized researchers, armchair genealogists, and academics like myself needing a non-technical explanation of dozens of arcane debates all a service. <br /> <br />Oppenheimer builds on this fact-laden if recondite foundation to posit that many of today's ancestors came to the Isles perhaps as early as around 15-7,500 years ago. The land bridge before the end of the last Ice Age became submerged allowed two major inflows of migration, from a Ukrainian-Moldavian refuge, and an Iberian refuge. The former provided a basis for North Sea movements added to later by Scandinavians, Saxons, Belgae, and other Continental peoples. The latter brought people in on the Irish, Welsh, and Scottish sides closest to the Irish Sea that opened up in the later periods of global warming. Germanic languages cannot have diverged in Old English so rapidly after the Saxon incursions, nor were (against the Welsh historian Gildas' spurious claims of Celtic "wipeout") the indigenous natives necessarily Celtic-speakers all prior to the landing of Hengist and his post-Roman mercenaries. <br /> <br />Percentages of genetic disruption rarely reach even the point of "decimation" of 10% in a handful of Anglian areas, according to genetic studies of inhabitants today in these long-stable regions of Britain. Simply and ineradicably, this persistent divide, genetically and perhaps linguistically, Oppenheimer proposes, persists in our DNA. This parallels the Germanic vs. Celtic division of languages in the Isles, the spine of mountains serving as an insular border between these two major routes for farming and colonization. <br /> <br />The hoary myth of a Celtic genocide by Teutonic overlords that inspired Arthur's last stand, it seems, proves more a "Dark Age" screed than plausible history. Granted that this early medieval era remains fraught with dangers for those reliant only on chronicles or a misleading archeological record, Oppenheimer here makes his boldest suggestion. <br /> <br />Probably the first to enter this fray as a geneticist, he confronts linguistic assumptions about the rapid spread and dialectal evolution in only a few centuries of Anglo-Saxon in post-Roman Britain. Germanic languages, he opines, might have become established long before Romans, let alone Saxons, entered into what was not necessarily a Celtic-dominated Brittania. Celts themselves, whatever this term means given the looseness of this pseudo-ethnic linguistic concept, did not rush en masse into the islands, and they too were perhaps the harbingers of not a massive demographic invasion but an elite influencing cultural and linguistic trends among the natives, who may date back ten thousand years before the arrival of Celtic-language speakers. Unfortunately, traces of any words that are pre-Celtic lurk rarely in the archaeological record, according to most experts. We lack a Rosetta Stone to decode whatever insular peoples spoke before Celtic languages became the norm among both the newcoming elite and the long-settled old-timers. <br /> <br />Therefore, Oppenheimer turns to DNA for clues. He challenges linguists who for a century have been indoctrinated to ignore searching for language origins. He argues that science can offer tentative solutions that account for a Germanic undercurrent that may not be that apparent on the surface, but which aligns with what we know about rates of linguistic change that may have begun as long ago as 3000 BCE (estimates differ) that can be calibrated with patterns of genetic migration. <br /> <br />His thesis? Most of the original British Isles inhabitants descend from a massive "founder population"-- maybe far more than three-fourths or more of those today living in some locales. Due to genetics and settlement patterns, most humans stick to one place for millennia. This conservatism therefore provides a solid bedrock. It cannot be eroded even by the waves of more recent, and tribally-named, intruders. While closer to us in time and in the historical record (however tenuous!), these famous warriors themselves often number in the low single-digits (5% often!) in terms of percentages of genetic "material" we British and/or Celts carry today. <br /> <br />All subsequent immigrations, whether Celt, Roman, Saxon, Angle, Jute, Viking, or Norman, Oppenheimer states in the closing line of his epilogue, diminish by their traces in the descendants of the majority who trace their roots to British-resident or Celtic-origin DNA today. Most of the origins of the British predate even the Celts. Oppenheimer concludes: "we are all minorities compared with the first, unnamed pioneers, who ventured into the empty, chilly lands so recently vacated by the great ice sheets." (421)
	Genetic Algorithms for VLSI Design, Layout and Test Automation (Prentice Hall Modern Semiconductor Design Series' Sub Series: PH Signal Integrity Library)
	By: Pinaki Mazumder, Elizabeth Rudnick ISBN: 0130115665 Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR Release Date: 20 December, 1998 Bioscience book rank: 1333650	The authors do state in the conclusions that some of the GAs discussed throughout the book do not compare well with the state-of-the-art in place and route tools that have been developed during the last two decades (which is to their credit to mention it.) However, the book makes several very serious mistakes and pitfalls both in the design and implementation of the GAs they try, as well as in the choice of tools to compare their implementations against. For example, in partitioning, they choose for their GA the "obvious" object representation. There has been a lot of work on GAs tailored for "grouping problems" such as partitioning (read Falkenauer) that lead to much better results using an encoding based on "groups representations". Even worse, the algorithms they choose to compare against (standard F-M) is unfair, as there are many F-M based partitioners that beat almost any other algorithm that has been proposed by far!. Not to mention that the benchmarks they use are considered today less than "toy" problems!.<br>Finally, for a book published in 1999, the bibliography offered is missing a lot of important papers published during the 90's in the fields of physical design for VLSI as well as Genetic Algorithms. This book describes the application of genetic algorithms to electronics design in a clear, consise, and easy to understand way. Starting with a brief introduction covering terminology and concepts, it quickly moves to applications which facilitate comprehension via example usage. The facet I most appreciate about the book is its ability to apply the technology to real world problems while retaining a close connection with theory. While basic utilization is covered, advanced topics are also presented without sacrifice of detail. <p>This work specific to electrical engineering, in conjunction with Goldbergs's broader treatment of the general subject, together constitute an essential and complete treatment for both the experienced and learning engineer. I have been fortunate to attend professional lectures by one of the authors (Rudnick) and can attest her clarity of expression and ability to easily cover complex material is present throughout the text.<p>The author's lucid treatment of the subject makes this the fundamental work on application of GA technology to VLSI design.