Natural law, natural philosophy, natural rights

Who or what is the creator (and how is that we can presume to read his mind and know his intentions) and how do we know there are inalienable rights? As will become clear in the pages below, the idea of the creator is a powerful concept that permeates western thought from at least the period of ancient Greeks to Jefferson\u27s day. In fact, it is the confluence of ancient pagan philosophy (here represented by Cicero)and seventeenth century science, with only a dollop of Christian thought, that combines to create the ideas so fundamental to the American civil experience

Socioeconomic Differences in Antenatal Care between the United States and Scandinavia

Despite their analogous status as economically developed nations, the United States and Scandinavian countries have marked differences in their healthcare systems. In particular both areas discernibly differ in the antenatal treatment provided for expecting women and their babies. Sweden and Denmark’s healthcare systems are universal, run primarily on taxpayer dollars, and provide equal antenatal care regardless of socioeconomic status. The United States’ healthcare system is run on a combination of private and government run insurance, in which socioeconomic status often determines insurance coverage. This variability in insurance coverage often results in differing levels of antenatal care. An overarching question remains as to how women of low socioeconomic status receive differing antenatal care in the United States and Scandinavia. Antenatal care discrepancies between the two systems emanate a difference in patient outcomes and patient satisfaction of their treatment. Analyzing the differences in these outcomes can better point to which health care system provides more effective antenatal care. Women of lower socioeconomic status in Sweden and Denmark receive superior antenatal care than women of a comparable socioeconomic status in the United States. [excerpt

The evolution of genetic architectures underlying quantitative traits

In the classic view introduced by R. A. Fisher, a quantitative trait is encoded by many loci with small, additive effects. Recent advances in QTL mapping have begun to elucidate the genetic architectures underlying vast numbers of phenotypes across diverse taxa, producing observations that sometimes contrast with Fisher's blueprint. Despite these considerable empirical efforts to map the genetic determinants of traits, it remains poorly understood how the genetic architecture of a trait should evolve, or how it depends on the selection pressures on the trait. Here we develop a simple, population-genetic model for the evolution of genetic architectures. Our model predicts that traits under moderate selection should be encoded by many loci with highly variable effects, whereas traits under either weak or strong selection should be encoded by relatively few loci. We compare these theoretical predictions to qualitative trends in the genetics of human traits, and to systematic data on the genetics of gene expression levels in yeast. Our analysis provides an evolutionary explanation for broad empirical patterns in the genetic basis of traits, and it introduces a single framework that unifies the diversity of observed genetic architectures, ranging from Mendelian to Fisherian.Comment: Minor changes in the text; Added supplementary materia