Love and arranged marriage
In the wake of yesterday’s review of a paper on heritable variance in trait preferences realized in romantic partners I couldn’t help but be intrigued by this new study out of PLoS ONE, Evolutionary History of Hunter-Gatherer Marriage Pract…
Love is not a hardwired battlefield
Judging by some of the amusing search queries I find every Friday people have a wide range of tastes and fetishes when it comes to pornography. From what I can tell the realized phenotypic interval in mate choice is less varied and eye-opening, but exi…
Neandertal hybridization & Haldane’s rule
Mr. James Winters at A Replicated Typo pointed me to a short hypothesis paper, Neanderthal-human Hybrids. This paper argues that selective mating of Neandertal males with females of human populations which had left Africa more recently, combined with
The continuing tangling of the human tree
Last summer I made a thoughtless and silly error in relation to a model of human population history when asked by a reader the question: “which population is most distantly related to Africans?” I contended that all non-African populations…
The Court Jester and the averaging fallacy
The Pith:Climatic and biological evolutionary pressures on an ecosystem complement at different scales. Neither is “dominant,” as that framing is not even wrong.
Yesterday I alluded to the Court Jester hypothesis of evolutionary change, whi…
Evolutionary pressures, within and without
Foraminifera, Wikimedia Commons
The Pith: The tree if life is nourished by agon, but pruned by the gods. More literally, both interactions between living organisms and the changes in the environment impact the pulsing of speciation and extinction.
No…
Evolution in higher dimensions
Ornithomimosaurian dinosaur & ostrich, image credit Nobu Tamura & James G. Howes
The Pith: This post explores evolution at two different scales: the broad philosophical and the close in genetic. Philosophically, is evolution a highly conti…
Evolution may explain why baby comes early
Image credit
The Pith: In this post I review a paper which covers the evolutionary dimension of human childbirth. Specifically, the traits and tendencies peculiar to our species, the genes which may underpin those traits and tendencies, and how that …
Paleoanthropological “telephone”
A few people have emailed me a link to this weird story, Kashmiri Neanderthal soup not scoop:
The study, conducted by the UC Davis Anthropology Department at the US, found that about four percent (ranging from two to five percent) of all modern humans,…
The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, free!
Long time readers are aware that one of my favorite books is R. A. Fisher’s The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. It’s a touch on the spendy side for a slim, though dense, book. But looking for stuff that’s public domain for my K…
The flat and the fit
The Pith: In evolution if you want to win in the long run you don’t want all your eggs in one basket, even if that’s the choicest basket. Sh*t happens, and you better have some back up strategies.
Diversity is a major question in evolution…
Darwin, eh?
At The Intersection Sheril Kirshenbaum posts some rather stark data from Gallup and a Canadian outfit on the differences in attitudes toward evolution between Americans and Canadians. Those Tories are different! The answers seem very similar to those o…
Can biologists admit they are wrong?
Jason Collins, an economist strongly grounded in biological principles, has a post up in response to Mike the Mad Biologist’s critique of economic misunderstandings of biology. Jason asks:
On the flip side, did Dawkins or Gould (or their respecti…
Space, the final evolutionary frontier
There’s a rather perplexing paper out in PNAS which I stumbled upon today, An evolutionary process that assembles phenotypes through space rather than through time. Perplexing because I wonder if it is almost so obvious as to be boring, in the tr…
Different Neandertal strokes
John Hawks, Europe and China have different Neandertal genes:
This is very striking. China and Europe by and large have different Neandertal-derived haplotypes. Haplotypes from Neandertals that are common in Europe — say, with more than two or th…
Where in the world did anatomically modern humans come from?
The Pith: I review a recent paper which argues for a southern African origin of modern humanity. I argue that the statistical inference shouldn’t be trusted as the final word. This paper reinforces previously known facts, but does not add much 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…
Evolutionary Genetics
Short comment: Enough mathematical formalism to be technically illuminating, but not so much as to be opaque to the non-specialist.
Evolutionary Genetics
Short comment: Enough mathematical formalism to be technically illuminating, but not so much as to be opaque to the non-specialist.
Dragon Bone Hill: An Ice-Age Saga of Homo erectus
Link to review: Dragon’s Battles