The Genetic Correlation strikes again
How the ‘Black Death’ Left Its Genetic Mark on Future Generations: They found DNA in the skeletons of 198 Danes who lived between 850 and 1800. Mutations in immune genes […]
Cultural innovation leads to small populations being successful; small populations just lead to extinction
In a pretty informative piece in Gizmodo, Scientists Say New Research Tracing the Origin of Modern Humans to Botswana Is Deeply Flawed, there is an interesting quote that I would like to follow-up on: That said, Curtis Marean, a professor of archaeology at Arizona State University who wasn’t involved with the new research, is not […]
Drivers of selection for ghosts in the genome
A new preprint on bioRxiv, Strong selective sweeps before 45,000BP displaced archaic admixture across the human X chromosome, is suggestive of an exciting new phase in human evolutionary genomics. Basically, leveraging whole-genomes in diverse populations to explore selection dynamics. The authors looked at X chromosomes in males for reasons of technical tractability. Human males carry […]
A Kimura Age to the Kern-Hahn Era: neutrality & selection
I’m pretty jaded about a lot of journalism, mostly due to the incentives in the industry driven by consumers and clicks. But Quanta Magazine has a really good piece out, Theorists Debate How ‘Neutral’ Evolution Really Is. It hits all the right notes (you can listen to one of the researchers quoted, Matt Hahn, on […]
A historical slice of evolutionary genetics
A few friends pointed out that I likely garbled my attribution of who were the guiding forces between the “classical” and “balance” in the post below (Muller & Dobzhansky as opposed to Fisher & Wright as I said). I’ll probably do some reading and update the post shortly…but it did make me reflect that in […]
W. D. Hamilton, Darwin’s 20th century heir
Today on Twitter there was a discussion about why there wasn’t a biography of John Manyard Smith. One reason might be that John Maynard Smith was a pretty nice and congenial fellow. There wasn’t much excitement from what I know. In contrast, if you read R.A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist, you get the […]
Idle theories are the devil’s workshop
In the 1970s Richard C. Lewontin wrote about how the allozyme era finally allowed for the testing of theories which had long been perfected and refined but lay unused like elegant machines without a task. Almost immediately the empirical revolution that Lewontin began in the 1960s kickstarted debates about the nature of selection and neutrality […]
The Loneliest Neanderthal
Neanderthals are in the news again! This is good for me personally, as my company is selling Neanderthal trait analysis. Ooga-booga! In any case, the two papers which have triggered the current wave of Neandermania are The Contribution of Neanderthals to Phenotypic Variation in Modern Humans, and A high-coverage Neandertal genome from Vindija Cave in Croatia. […]
Synergistic epistasis as a solution for human existence
Epistasis is one of those terms in biology which has multiple meanings, to the point that even biologists can get turned around (see this 2008 review, Epistasis — the essential role of gene interactions in the structure and evolution of genetic systems, for a little background). Most generically epistasis is the interaction of genes in […]
Why the rate of evolution may only depend on mutation
Sometimes people think evolution is about dinosaurs. It is true that natural history plays an important role in inspiring and directing our understanding of evolutionary process. Charles Darwin was a natural historian, and evolutionary biologists often have strong affinities with the natural world and its history. Though many people exhibit a fascination with the flora and fauna […]
Fisherianism in the genomic era
There are many things about R. A. Fisher that one could say. Professionally he was one of the founders of evolutionary genetics and statistics, and arguably the second greatest evolutionary biologist after Charles Darwin. With his work in the first few decades of the 20th century he reconciled the quantitative evolutionary framework of the school […]
The color of life as a coincidence
I do love me some sprouts! Greens, bitters, strong flavors of all sorts. I’ve always been like this. Some of this is surely environment. My family comes from a part of South Asia known for its love of bracing and bold sensation. But perhaps I was born this way? There’s a fair amount of evidence […]
The post The color of life as a coincidence appeared first on Gene Expression.
The color of life as a coincidence
I do love me some sprouts! Greens, bitters, strong flavors of all sorts. I’ve always been like this. Some of this is surely environment. My family comes from a part of South Asia known for its love of bracing and bold sensation. But perhaps I was born this way? There’s a fair amount of evidence […]
The post The color of life as a coincidence appeared first on Gene Expression.
The causes of evolutionary genetics
A few days ago I was browsing Haldane’s Sieve,when I stumbled upon an amusing discussion which arose on it’s “About” page. This “inside baseball” banter got me to thinking about my own intellectual evolution. Over the past few years I’ve been delving more deeply into phylogenetics and phylogeography, enabled by the rise of genomics, the […]
Buddy can you spare a selective sweep
The Pith: Natural selection comes in different flavors in its genetic constituents. Some of those constituents are more elusive than others. That makes “reading the label” a non-trivial activity.
As you may know when you look at patterns of…
Don’t trust an archaeologist about genetics, don’t trust a geneticist about archaeology
Who to trust? That is the question when you don’t know very much (all of us). Trust is precious, and to some extent sacred. That’s why I can flip out when I realize after the fact that someone more informed than me in field X sampled biased…
What is going on with plant domestication?
PNAS has a paper on barley domestication out right now. It is nicely open access, so read it yourself, and come right back! I have to admit that I did not like the paper too much. It seemed to derive far too many conclusions from a few rudimentary (…
What the substrate tells
One of the weird things about genetics is that it encompasses both the abstract and the concrete. The formal and physical. You can talk to a geneticist who is mostly interested in details of molecular mechanisms, and is steeped in structural biology. F…
Nature’s Oracle finally out in 2013
Jerry Coyne alerts me to the fact that Ullica Segerstrale’s Nature’s Oracle: A Life of W. D. Hamilton is finally near publication. Specifically, early 2013. Coyne has looked at he pre-publication text, so it is probably in revision, though …
An ontology of genetic diversity
Implicit in the title The Origin Of Species is the question: why the plural? In other words, why isn’t there a singular apex species which dominates this planet? One can imagine an abstract system where natural selection slowly but gradually sift…