The pareto principle and stochasticity in COVID-19
Most of you know difference between parameters such as mean and standard deviation. Or, that distributions have variable dispersion or multi-modalities. Standard stuff. In relation to COVID-19 it was clear early on that “superspreader events” were critical. That in fact, these events were driving the pandemic in some deep way, with there being huge variance […]
Using 23andMe/Ancestry/Family Tree DNA to identify risk allele for respiratory failure with COVID-19
Several people have asked about the risk haplotype in the post below. If you have been genotyped on Ancestry, 23andMe, and Family Tree DNA (unless you are on 23andMe after summer of 2017) there is one SNP in high LD with the causal variant you can look up. It’s rs10490770. The risk allele is C […]
Living in a time of COVID-19
We’ve come really far over the past month or so in relation to coronavirus. There are lots of resources online and people should be making recourse to them. medRxiv and bioRxiv are great. If I were you, I would at least read the Report of the WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). But, […]
Of Plagues and Prehistory
The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire is an excellent book. I highly recommend it! But one of its assertions, which I accepted at face value at the time I read it, now seems to be less certain (likely wrong). The author contends that the network of trade and interaction […]
Kissing and cancer
I recently listened to Paul Ewald talk about how a lot of cancer is due to infection on the radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge. That wasn’t too surprising, Ewald has been making the case for a connection between infection and lots of disease…
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…
The city that kills you makes you strong!
Over the past day I’ve seen reports in the media of a new paper which claims that long-term urbanization in a region is strongly correlated with genetic variants for disease resistance. I managed to find the paper on Evolution’s website as an accepted manuscript, ANCIENT URBANISATION PREDICTS GENETIC RESISTANCE TO TUBERCULOSIS:
A link between urban living […]
Diseases of the Silk Road
Nature has two papers out about something called “Behçet’s disease.” It has apparently also been termed the “Silk Road Disease”, because of its associations with populations connected to the Central Eurasian trade networks.Though described by Hippocrates 2,500 years ago, apparently it was “discovered” only in the 20th century by a Turkish physician. The reason that […]
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 […]
Differences in swine flu response by population
Remember when there was talk about how SARS might disproportionately hit Chinese in comparison to other populations? Here’s a new paper on how Swine Flu may progress in different populations, Clinical Findings and Demographic Factors Associated With ICU Admission in Utah Due to Novel 2009 Influenza A(H1N1) Infection: The ICU cohort of 47 influenza patients […]