The naked geneticists
John Hawks, Genomes unzipped, unzipped:
What I wonder is, how much will personal genomics be like nude beaches? I mean, it’s been a long time since the first nude beaches, but most people don’t take advantage of the opportunity. Clearly, there’s variation in different countries! But most people neither feel compelled to see others’ data nor […]
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 Bushmen are not primitive! (not necessarily)
To the left is a figure from the 2009 paper The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans. This paper happens to have excellent coverage of African populations, and the figure is a phylogenetic tree generated from distances between those populations, as well as some non-African ones. I’ve labelled the broad clusters. The […]
Story of X
A month ago I pointed to a short communication in Nature Genetics which highlighted differences in the patterns of variation between the X chromosome and the autosome. I thought it would be of interest to revisit this, because it’s a relatively short piece with precise and crisp results which we can ruminate upon.
Sometimes there is […]
E. O. Wilson against Hamiltonian inclusive fitness
There is a new paper in Nature which is a full frontal attack on the utility of William D. Hamilton’s inclusive fitness framework in explaining eusociality. Martin A. Nowak, Corina E. Tarnita, & Edward O. Wilson are the authors. Wilson is famous in large part for his authorship of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, and is […]
One principal component to rule them all?
Despite the reality that I’ve cautioned against taking PCA plots too literally as Truth, unvarnished and without any interpretive juice needed, papers which rely on them are almost magnetically attractive to me. They transform complex patterns of variation which you are not privy to via your gestalt psychology into a two or at most three […]
The Price of Altruism
Sometimes in a narrative you have secondary characters who you want to revisit. What do to do after the story is complete? An convenient “work-around” to this problem is to find the story rewritten from the perspective of the secondary character. In broad strokes the picture is unchanged, but in the finer grained shadings different […]
Dispute over longevity research getting more coverage
Earlier this week I pointed to the controversy which has erupted around the widely reported new paper, Genetic Signatures of Exceptional Longevity in Humans. Newsweek did the most thorough early reporting, but now The New York Times has published a follow up story covering the scientific criticisms to the original paper’s methodology. There’s nothing new […]
Project your own probability
By now you’ve probably stumbled onto Wired’s profile of Sergey Brin, and his quest to understand and overcome Parkinson’s disease through the illumination available via genomic techniques. I want to spotlight this section:
Not everyone with Parkinson’s has an LRRK2 mutation; nor will everyone with the mutation get the disease. But it does increase the chance […]
The paternity myth: the rarity of cuckoldry
An urban myth, often asserted with a wink & a nod in some circles, is that a very high proportion of children in Western countries are not raised by their biological father, and in fact are not aware that their putative biological father is not their real biological father. The numbers I see and hear […]
Razib Khan: Darwinism provides a deductive tool, but many of the inferences leave much to be desired in explaining the world as it is
Darwinism provides a deductive tool, but many of the inferences leave much to be desired in explaining the world as it is
“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” So asserted Theodosius Dobzhansky, to which one might respond that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of physics. But what has quantum mechanics to do with behavioral ecology? The enthusiasm of many social scientists for the Darwinian paradigm resembles this ontological leap. An evolutionary psychologist may contend that a preference for blondes is the outcome powerful adaptations, how powerful can it be if only a small minority of humans are blonde? Darwinism provides a deductive tool, but many of the inferences leave much to be desired in explaining the world as it is.
Razib Khan: Polygamy may be the natural, though unfair, order of things
Some religions accept polygamy; others abhor it. But in nature, it’s often a case of winner-takes-all-the-wivesAmong mammals a larger proportion of females than males reproduce, the extent of the imbalance signalled by gender differences in size. Eleph…