The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection
I flog R. A. Fisher’s The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection a fair amount on this site. You don’t need to understand everything in the book, nor do you have to agree with everything in it, but it is a great point of departure toward understanding evolutionary genetics. I’ve noted that you can get it […]
Out of Africa to Out of Arabia
Dienekes and Greg Cochran have been talking about this possibility for a few years. But a combination of archaeological finds and the current unsettled nature of the human evolutionary genomics literature means that “Out of Arabia” is a real possibility (not laugh-out-loud crazy and weird). So I took the liberty of cooking up a new […]
The last word on dog genesis is not nigh!
In my post below Rob commented: Surely the genetic evidence is pointing towards a single domestication event (see http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/11/new-data-fuels-dogfight-over-the.html?ref=hp) My general response is not to accept the latest press release about the genetic origin of dogs. I keep track of the literature and it’s rather fluid. For example, I woke up this morning, and this […]
Modern humans in Arabia >100,000 years ago
The genetic model of the “Out of Africa” scenario is getting more complex. There may be two waves, as well as the likelihood of admixture between the Neo-Africans and “archaic” hominins, such the Neandertals and Denisovans. From what I can gather the genetic evidence is now converging upon the sequence of events where African populations […]
When trees turn into brambles
Genetics is powerful. The origins of the field predate Gregor Mendel, and go further back to plain human common sense. Crude theories of inheritance in the 19th century gave way in the early 20th to Mendelism, which happens to be a very powerful formal system for predicting the patterns of transmission of information from generation […]
Evolution is haram!
Ruchira Paul points me to this peculiar article, Muslim medical students boycotting lectures on evolution… because it ‘clashes with the Koran’: Muslim students, including trainee doctors on one of Britain’s leading medical courses, are walking out of lectures on evolution claiming it conflicts with creationist ideas established in the Koran. Professors at University College London […]
Lynn Margulis, 1938-2011
The New York Times has an obit. But if you don’t know who she is, really just read the Wikipedia entry.
Man is the environment of the rat
The above is a figure from a new paper in PLoS ONE, Multiple Geographic Origins of Commensalism and Complex Dispersal History of Black Rats. Here’s the abstract: The Black Rat (Rattus rattus) spread out of Asia to become one of the world’s worst agricultural and urban pests, and a reservoir or vector of numerous zoonotic […]
Evolution skeptical: not just fundamentalists
In the comments below Christopher Mims states: But evolution? It seems as if denial of evolution comes from a place so basic — religious fundamentalism — that I wonder whether something like this could ever have even the slightest impact. It’s hard to deny the relationship of religious fundamentalism and evolution denial and skepticism. […]
Evolutionary imperialism
So there’s a slick new webzine coming out, Evolution: this view of life. It’s another one of David Sloan Wilson’s projects. I don’t agree a lot with the specifics of David’s theories, but I admire his ambition. James Winters pointed me to the fact that they’re trying to raise money for this webzine via KickStarter. […]
The modern human coordination miracle
Thanks to Ed Yong several people on twitter have encountered my post, The point mutation which made humanity. My broader concern which I was attempting to highlight is that too often when we attempt to ascertain the origins of modern human success in relation to our archaic cousins/ancestors we presume that there must be a […]
Australia on fire
Fascinating, Orbital cycles, Australian lake levels, and the arrival of aborigines: But the other big feature is that the lake-filling events that occurred after 50,000 years ago were much smaller than those which occurred before. Climactically, the conditions 10,000 years ago should have been the same as the conditions 115,000 years ago. But the lake […]
The end of “archaic” H. sapiens
The Pith: The Bushmen branch of the human family tree diverged ~130,000 years ago. The non-Africans branched off from the Africans ~50,000 years ago. The Europeans and East Asians diverged ~35,000 years ago. One of the terms in paleoanthropology which can confuse is that of archaic Homo sapiens (AHS). This is in contrast to anatomically […]
When all probable things can not be right
I’ve been chewing on the modern human range expansion into Neandertal territory paper for a few days now. But I haven’t been able to bring myself to say much. There are two reasons. First, it’s a simulation paper, and I don’t exactly know what I can say besides being skeptical of the plausibility of some […]
Neandertal introgression and admixture
Ed Yong has a good good review of a new Neandertal introgression/admixture paper in PNAS. It’s not live on the web yet, so let me quote Ed: Even if the odds of successful interbreeding were just 5 percent, Neanderthal genes would make up the majo…
Of beasts and men
“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare [children] to them, the same [became] mighty men which [were] of old, men of renown.” – Genesis 6:4 Th…
Africans aren’t pure humans either
Last year when discussing the possible admixture of Neandertals with the ancestors of modern non-Africans I joked that Sub-Saharan Africans were “pure humans.” This was tongue-in-cheek in part because the results from the Neandertal genome …
The divisibility of human ancestry
The class human or H. sapiens refers to a set of individuals. On the grand scale it’s really not all that clear and distinct. When do “archaic” humans become “modern” humans? Taking into account human variation, what is a …
The rap guide to evolution
Darwin Got It Going On:
The lyrics are, for the most part, witty, sophisticated and scientifically accurate; and they lack the earnest defensiveness that sometimes haunts lectures on evolution. I spotted one or two small slips — a confusion of the pr…
People don’t accept evolution just because they’re smart
Mike the Mad Biologist asks:
If we look at each wordsum category separately, which ones are significantly different? I ask because the trend seems to reflect the liberal-conservative split (low and high lean left; middle leans conservative). It also se…