The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 28: Altitude Adaptation and Denisovans
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 28: Altitude Adaptation and DenisovansK2This week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Podcasts) Razib talks to Emilia Huerta-Sanchez, a computational biologist at Brown University abou…
Adaptation, the gift of the Denisovans
The Tibetan PlateauThe city of Lhasa, the capital of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, is at ~12,000 feet above sea level. For comparison, Denver, Colorado, is on average close to ~5,500 feet above sea level. The “Mile High” city has nothing on Lhasa! But…
So merfolk are a real thing now: adaptation to diving
When Rasmus Nielsen presented preliminary work on diving adaptations a few years ago at ASHG I really didn’t know what to think. To be honest it seemed kind of crazy. Everyone was freaking out over it…and I guess I should have. But it just seemed so strange I couldn’t process it. High altitude adaptations, I […]
Adaptation is subtle, and that’s the problem
The figure above is from a very important new preprint, Human local adaptation of the TRPM8 cold receptor along a latitudinal cline. A marker in 09TRPM8, rs10166942, seem to be correlated with adaptation to cold. The abstract: Ambient temperature is a critical environmental factor for all living organisms. It was likely an important selective force […]
Buddy can you spare a selective sweep
The Pith: Natural selection comes in different flavors in its genetic constituents. Some of those constituents are more elusive than others. That makes “reading the label” a non-trivial activity.
As you may know when you look at patterns of…
How the Amhara breathe differently
I have blogged about the genetics of altitude adaptation before. There seem to be three populations in the world which have been subject to very strong natural selection, resulting in physiological differences, in response to the human tendency toward hypoxia. Two of them are relatively well known, the Tibetans and the indigenous people of the […]
We stand on the shoulders of cultural giants
In reading The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation in PNAS I couldn’t help but think back to a conversation I had with a few old friends in Evanston in 2003. They were graduate students in mathematics at Northwes…
Convergent evolution happens!
In the image to the left you see three human males. You can generate three pairings of these individuals. When comparing these pairs which would you presume are more closely related than the other pairs? Now let me give you some more information. The r…
The evolutionary effect of the sky gods
Last week I reviewed ideas about the effect of “exogenous shocks” to an ecosystem of creatures, and how it might reshape their evolutionary trajectory. These sorts of issues are well known in their generality. They have implications from th…
Sweeping through a fly’s genome
Credit: Karl Magnacca
The Pith: In this post I review some findings of patterns of natural selection within the Drosophila fruit fly genome. I relate them to very similar findings, though in the opposite direction, in human genomics. Different forms o…
Body odor, Asians, and earwax
When I was in college I would sometimes have late night conversations with the guys in my dorm, and the discussion would random-walk in very strange directions. During one of these quasi-salons a friend whose parents were from Korea expressed some surprise and disgust at the idea of wet earwax. It turns out he had […]
Natural selection in our time
Last month in Nature Reviews Genetics there was a paper, Measuring selection in contemporary human populations, which reviewed data from various surveys in an attempt to adduce the current trajectory of human evolution. The review didn’t find anything revolutionary, but it was interesting to see where we’re at. If you read this weblog you probably […]
The adaptive space of complexity
Evolution means many things to many people. On the one hand some scholars focus on time scales of “billions and billions,” and can ruminate upon the radical variation in body plans across the tree of life. Others put the spotlight on the change in gene frequencies on the scale of years, of Ph.D. programs. While […]
Chosen genes of the Chosen People
Last spring two very thorough papers came out which surveyed the genetic landscape of the Jewish people (my posts, Genetics & the Jews it’s still complicated, Genetics & the Jews). The novelty of the results was due to the fact that the research groups actually looked across the very diverse populations of the Diaspora, from […]
Hybridization is like sex
One of the major issues which has loomed at the heart of biology since The Origin of Species is why species exist, as well as how species come about. Why isn’t there a perfect replicator which performs all the conversion of energy and matter into biomass on this planet? If there is a God the tree […]
Disease as a byproduct of adaptation
How we perceive nature and describe its shape are a matter of values and preferences. Nature does not take notice of our distinctions; they exist only as instruments which aid in our comprehension. I’ve brought this up in relation to issues such as categorization of recessive vs. dominant traits. The offspring of people of […]
Why Tibetans breathe so easy up high
I said yesterday I would say a bit more about the new paper on rapid recent high altitude adaptation among the Tibetans when I’d read the paper. Well, I’ve read it now. Sequencing of 50 Human Exomes Reveals Adaptation to High Altitude:
Residents of the Tibetan Plateau show heritable adaptations to extreme altitude. We sequenced […]