The New Mexico Supreme Court ruledlast month on an extraordinarily important question: Should a criminal defendant be allowed to argue that a specific gene rendered him unable to control his violent behavior? The court concluded the answer was no, in this instance: It upheld the conviction for second-degree murder of Anthony Blas Yepez, who killed a man in 2012. Yepez had sought at trial to introduce evidence that he had what’s been called the “warrior gene” — a version of a gene known as MAOA, which has been linked to violence in some studies. The district court of Sante Fe County excluded expert testimony on that subject; later, the New Mexico appellate court ruled that the exclusion was a mistake but that it did not affect the outcome of the trial. The New Mexico Supreme Court has now found that the district court’s original rejection of the evidence was reasonable.
The state Supreme Court, however, missed an important opportunity: It did not go nearly far enough in batting down the scientifically suspect claim that there is a gene...
By Anumita Kaur [cites CGS’ Katie Hasson], The Washington Post | 03.25.2025
Aggregated News
Genetic information company 23andMe has said that it is headed to bankruptcy court, raising questions for what happens to the DNA shared by millions of people with the company via saliva test kits.
By Peter Wehling, Tino Plümecke, and Isabelle Bartram | 03.26.2025
Biopolitical Times
This article was originally published as “Soziogenomik und polygene Scores” in issue 272 (February 2025) of the German-language journal Gen-ethischer Informationsdienst (GID); translated by the authors.
In mid-November 2024, the British organization Hope not Hate published its investigative research ‘Inside the Eugenics Revival’. In addition to documentating an active international “race research” network, the investigation also brought to light the existence of a US start-up that offers eugenic embryo selection. Heliospect Genomics aims to enable wealthy couples to...
This, more or less, is the line being taken by AI researchers in a recent survey. Asked whether "scaling up" current AI approaches could lead to achieving artificial general...
One recent evening in Shenzhen, a group of software engineers gathered in a dimly lit co-working space, furiously typing as they monitored the performance of a new AI system. The air was electric, thick with the hum of servers and...
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