Razib Khan

Category: Evolution

  • Snap, phenotype, genotype and fitness

    One of the main criticisms of the population genetic pillar of the modern evolutionary synthesis was that too often it was a game of “beanbag genetics”. In other words population geneticists treated genes as discrete independent individual elements within a static sea. R.A. Fisher and his acolytes believed that the average effect of fluctuations of…

  • 10,000 years ago there were no “Southeast Asians”

    Mexico: Ancient woman suggests diverse migration: A scientific reconstruction of one of the oldest sets of human remains found in the Americas appears to support theories that the first people who came to the hemisphere migrated from a broader area than once thought, researchers say. Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History on Thursday released…

  • 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…

  • 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 […]

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Hamilton’s Rule vs. Increasing returns to cooperation

    If you have even a marginal interest in evolutionary biology you will probably have heard of Hamilton’s Rule, a simple formal representation of the logic whereby a gene which favors altruism may spread through a population: rB > C, where r = coefficient of relatedness on the gene in question, B = benefit to those…

  • The origins of morality do not matter | Razib Khan

    Mothers will makes sacrifices for their children, whether they believe in God, karma, or a mindless evolutionary processIs morality meaningless when its natural foundations are exposed? No, unlike the naked emperor there is a clear substance to the gen…

  • The cultural animal as an evolving animal

    Nicholas Wade has an article in The New York Times, Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force. One point to highlight: By this criterion, many of the genes under selection seem to be responding to conventional pressures. Some are involved in the immune system, and presumably became more common because of the protection they provided against disease.…

  • Darwin wuz wrong, part n

    A review of a new book, What Darwin Got Wrong. Co-authored by Jerry Fodor, who has been continuing his war against natural selection. I’ve already read Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution (at the sugge…

  • PRDM9 and the evolution of recombination hotspots

    This week in Science, three papers report that the product of the gene PRDM9 is an important determinant of where recombination occurs in the genome during meiosis. Though this may sound like something of an esoteric discovery, it’s actually pretty rem…

  • Why whales get no bigger

    Carl Zimmer reports that it might be a function of physics. Bigger whales have proportionality bigger mouths, but at some point the biological engineering runs up against constraints:s they report today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Goldboge…

  • Creationism vs. Abortion, Left, Right, elites and the masses

    As a follow up to the post below on Sarah Palin and Creationism, it strikes me that those on the Right & Republicans seem more divided and emotive on this issue than abortion. More specifically, libertarian and secular Rightists seem more likely to express their displeasure about Creationism than abortion. Why? A lot of it…

  • 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…

  • 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…

Razib Khan