Author: p-ter

Daniel MacArthur points me to a Newsweek article on the bankruptcy of Decode Genetics. The author describes (one of) Decode’s problems like this:The genetics of illness turned out to be more complex than researchers expected. At deCODE and elsewhere, t…

In Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne has the following parenthetical aside about population variation in morphology in H. erectus:(H. erectus from China…had shovel-shaped incisor teeth not found in other populations) This stopped me dead in my track…

Last week, I made a silly error in describing a problem in the sickle cell anemia example given by Dickson et al. (2010) as an empirical example of the phenomenon they call “synthetic association”. So allow me to take a mulligan, and re-try this:The au…

There’s a bit of press surrounding the interesting result from David Goldstein’s group that, in certain situations, a number of “rare” (defined as an allele frequency less than 5% [1]) variants influencing a trait can lead to an association signal at “…

Understanding the precise molecular mechanisms underlying changes in animal morphology is a tricky problem–usually two species which have diverged morphologically (say, mice and humans) are now so unrelated as to make genetic study exceedingly difficu…