The Court Jester and the averaging fallacy
The Pith:Climatic and biological evolutionary pressures on an ecosystem complement at different scales. Neither is “dominant,” as that framing is not even wrong.
Yesterday I alluded to the Court Jester hypothesis of evolutionary change, whi…
23andMe, Stanford, personal genomics study
Call to Participate in a New Study on Social Networking and Personal Genomics:
Do you share your information with others? How has your personal genetic information influenced your lifestyle and the way you approach your health and medical decisions? Ca…
The poorest community in the United States
Its demographics:
As of the census…of 2000, there were 13,138 people, 2,229 households, and 2,137 families residing in the village. The population density was 11,962.2 people per square mile (4,611.5/km2). There were 2,233 housing units at an ave…
The coincidental intersection of sociology & genetics
Hispanic – Definitions in the United States:
The 1970 Census was the first time that a “Hispanic” identifier was used and data collected with the question. The definition of “Hispanic” has been modified in each successive …
Who “hearts” science among liberals
First, if it is clear that you haven’t read the post itself and leave a comment I won’t just not publish it, but I’ll ban you. Second, if you complain about this in the comments, I’ll ban you too. Now that you feel appropriately…
Getting academic papers for free
Some strategies (H/T Michelle). Unfortunately the efficacy of many of these tactics varies by discipline, and it is often really hard to get a hold of something without academic access when it comes to the biological sciences. There’s arXiv and S…
John Gillespie, “the evil scientist from America”
I own a book of Motoo Kimura’s collected papers, and of course I have a copy of John Gillespie’s Population Genetics: A Concise Guide. But I’d forgotten the acrimony between the two men. Gillespie has been retired for half a decade no…
Evolutionary pressures, within and without
Foraminifera, Wikimedia Commons
The Pith: The tree if life is nourished by agon, but pruned by the gods. More literally, both interactions between living organisms and the changes in the environment impact the pulsing of speciation and extinction.
No…
Razib Khan’s 23andMe v3 genotype
I said a few weeks ago that I would release a ~1 million markers out to the public. I haven’t gotten around to it because of legalities. Well, I finally went to the Creative Commons website and filled out their form. So all the details below̷…
Europeans as Middle Eastern farmers
The Pith: Over the past 10,000 years a small coterie of farming populations expanded rapidly and replaced hunter-gatherer groups which were once dominant across the landscape. So, the vast majority of the ancestry of modern Europeans can be traced ba…
Incest, “the children,” and personal genomics
Mischa Angrist and Brendan Maher point me to two interest personal genomics related stories. First, a follow up on inadvertent uncovering of incest story from last winter in GenomeWeb, Incidental Findings:
Recently, he and his colleagues encountered a …
Language and serial founder effects
Mr. James Winters has finally offered his take on Phonemic diversity supports a serial founder effect model of language expansion from Africa. The Return of the Phoneme Inventories:
There are several assumptions made in the paper that I’ve already co…
Jared Diamond was right!
At least about some things. In Guns, Germs, and Steel he argued that latitudinal diffusion of agricultural toolkits was much easier than longitudinal diffusion. This seems right, but, one thing which Diamond did not emphasize enough in hindsight I sus…
Around the Web – Tax Day 2011
Jason Collins has been blogging up a storm at Evolving Economics. If you haven’t, I suggest adding his RSS feed.
Teenager stabs himself to death onstage at open mic night in front of shocked crowd at coffee shop. “”It was really uncle…
A genealogy of alphabets
The Xibo are one of populations in the Human Genome Diversity Project data set, so you’ve probably seen them here and there. They’re a Tungusic group affiliated with the Manchus, which explains why their script is a modified form of the nea…
Evolution in higher dimensions
Ornithomimosaurian dinosaur & ostrich, image credit Nobu Tamura & James G. Howes
The Pith: This post explores evolution at two different scales: the broad philosophical and the close in genetic. Philosophically, is evolution a highly conti…
Two opinions on D.T.C. personal genomic testing
It’s Mischa Angrist and some medical geneticist M.D. offering their opinions in The Los Angeles Times. You know what Mischa is going to say, so what’s the good doc’s opinion? It’s the first and last paragraph which are really i…
The value of “open genomics”
Zack Ajmal has been methodically working his way through issues in the public genomic data sets. Often it just involves noting duplicate samples across data sets, which need to be accounted for. But sometimes there seem to be problems within the upload…
Evolution may explain why baby comes early
Image credit
The Pith: In this post I review a paper which covers the evolutionary dimension of human childbirth. Specifically, the traits and tendencies peculiar to our species, the genes which may underpin those traits and tendencies, and how that …
African ur-language reconsidered
Mark Liberman at Language Log has looked through the Science paper Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa. Overall he seems to think it is an interesting paper, but he has some pointed criticisms. …