The paradigm is dead, long live the paradigm!
Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution: Mitochondrial DNA from 147 people, drawn from five geographic populations have been analysed by restriction mapping. All these mitochondrial DMAs stem from one woman who is postulated to have lived ab7out 200,000 years ago, probably in Africa. All the populations examined except the African population have multiple origins, implying that […]
Heritability and genes as causes
Since the beginning of this weblog (I’ve been writing for eight years) heritability has been a major confusion. Even long time readers misunderstand what I’m trying to get at when I talk about heritability. That’s why posts such as Mr. Luke Jostins‘ are so helpful. I had seen references to a piece online, The Causes of […]
The year of the Other human
Update: Please see follow up post. Carl Zimmer, Siberian Fossils Were Neanderthals’ Eastern Cousins, DNA Reveals: An international team of scientists has identified a previously shadowy human group known as the Denisovans as cousins to Neanderthals who lived in Asia from roughly 400,000 to 50,000 years ago and interbred with the ancestors of today’s inhabitants […]
Romans & gods, Athens & Jerusalem
Ross Douthat’s latest column in The New York Times comes back somewhat to an exchange we had a little over five years ago. He concludes his column: Or to put it another way, Christians need to find a way to thrive in a society that looks less and less like any sort of Christendom — […]
Not misunderstanding the past requires suspicion
In my post on African farmers someone responded: It was famously reported last winter that Bushmen seem to differ genetically amongst themselves more than Europeans and Asians do. These two latter groups have been separate for at least 40,000 years. At least? Razib, you are way off on the separation time of Europeans and East […]
Around the Web – December 20th, 2010
Countdown to Christmas! Hope everyone has pleasant holidays. Apple v Google. Very long article highlighting the different strategies of the two companies. I do though think Google is starting to get a touch annoying trumpeting their “open ways.” They’re not a struggling start-up, they’re a massive corporation. More on “culturomics”. Also see the #ngrams hash-tag. […]
Some of the Indo-Europeans found?
School girls in Hunza, Pakistan A few days ago I observed that pseudonymous blogger Dienekes Pontikos seemed intent on throwing as much data and interpretation into the public domain via his Dodecad Ancestry Project as possible. What are the long term implications of this? I know that Dienekes has been cited in the academic literature, […]
The season
I used to love the stop action animation specials which would be replayed around Christmas….
Open Thread – December 18th, 2010
I really enjoy Frederick Pohl’s The Way the Future Blogs. If Isaac Asimov had made it to the internet age I’m sure he would have blogged quite a bit.
South Asians too are sons of the farmers?
I mentioned a few days ago that a friend was trying to get together some data to analyze the genetic variation of South Asians. By a strange coincidence Dienekes just published a more detailed analysis of South Asians…and uncovered something very interesting, though not that surprising. Some technical preliminaries: A note of caution: The reduced […]
Friday Fluff – December 17th, 2010
1. First, a post from the past:
Grooming => Language ~ Larger Social Groups.
2. Weird search query of the week: “scottish hair”.
3.Comment of the week, in response to
Sons of the farmers, the origins of Africans
Most readers at this point are aware that I am very curious as to the origin of Europeans at the interface of hunter-gatherer populations and Neolithic farmers. What we thought we knew around the year 2000 does not seem to align very well with the conflicting results coming out of recent analyses. There is no […]
Which nations think over the long term
One of the major parameters which shape individual success, and macroeconomic growth in the aggregate, is time preference. Time preference basically measures an individual’s future-time orientation. Would you for example take $1,000 in the present, or wait 30 days and accept $1,500 dollars? It doesn’t need to be money, children can exhibit time preference as […]
Goodbye Delicious
Delicious is shutting down. Since I use it a fair amount, can anyone recommend alternatives?
Arise culturnomics!
First, read Ed Yong’s post. There’s real reporting in it. Such as: There’s also an issue with attitudes among people in the field. “Biologists were already convinced that genes and genomic variation were key to understanding problems in their field,” he adds. “Social scientists and humanists do not now work with large digital text collections, […]
Sons of the farmers, the story of Japan
Ainu in 19th century Hokkaido, and rice paddies Unlike some islands Japan has a long history of human habitation. More interestingly, under the Jomon culture the Japanese archipelago was home to one of the earliest, if not the earliest, societies which used pottery. The Jomon do not seem to have been intensive agriculturalists. Rather, with […]
“Genome blogging”
Nature profiles Dodecad, the Pickrell Affair, and the emergence of amateur genomicists in a new piece. Interestingly David of BGA is going to try and get something through peer review. In particular, the relationship of Assyrians and Jews. So we have Genomes Unzipped, Dodecad, and BGA. What next? Who next? I hope Dienekes doesn’t mind if […]
Incest vs. polygamy
Today in Slate there’s an argument for why society should discourage first-degree incest. The main thrust of the piece seems to be broadly utilitarian, in that incest is destructive to the family unit and society has a rational motive in discouraging the practice. The reason that the argument is even made is because of analogies […]
To classify humanity is not that hard
In my post below I quoted my interview L. L. Cavalli-Sforza because I think it gets to the heart of some confusions which have emerged since the finding that most variation on any given locus is found within populations, rather than between them. The standard figure is that 85% of genetic variance is within continental […]
Re-visualizing European ancestry
I decided to take the Dodecad ADMIXTURE results at K = 10, and redo some of the bar plots, as well as some scatter plots relating the different ancestral components by population. Don’t try to pick out fine-grained details, see what jumps out in a gestalt fashion. I removed most of the non-European populations to […]