The wages of a life science Ph.D. (not high!)
A few people have emailed me about this article in The Washington Post, U.S. pushes for more scientists, but the jobs aren’t there. Other people cover this area well (for example), so I’m not going to say much. But first, ignore the article in …
Sleeping like a Neandertal
Forgot to highlight one of the coolest abstracts from SMBE 2012, A genomewide map of Neandertal ancestry in modern humans:
2. The map allows us to identify Neandertal alleles that have been the target of selection since introgression. We identified ove…
Sleeping like a Neandertal
Forgot to highlight one of the coolest abstracts from SMBE 2012, A genomewide map of Neandertal ancestry in modern humans:
2. The map allows us to identify Neandertal alleles that have been the target of selection since introgression. We identified ove…
What do you think about group selection?
I just received a review copy of E. O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth. One of the reasons why this book is “hot” is that Wilson has recently been revisiting the “levels of selection” debates, and significantly downg…
Another look at mtDNA
The new article in The American Journal of Human Genetics, A “Copernican” Reassessment of the Human Mitochondrial DNA Tree from its Root, is open access, so you should check it out. The discussion gets to the heart of the matter:
Supported by a con…
The milkmen
Dienekes and Maju have both commented on a new paper which looked at the likelihood of lactase persistence in Neolithic remains from Spain, but I thought I would comment on it as well. The paper is: Low prevalence of lactase persistence in Neolithic South-West Europe. The location is on the fringes of the modern Basque […]
James F. Crow profile
The University of Madison-Wisconsin, has a long piece up on the late James F. Crow. Much recommended.
James F. Crow, 1916-2012
Sad news. John Hawks passes along that James F. Crow has died. Further mention from the National Center For Science Education. A little over 5 years ago I sent Crow an email with only minimal expectation of response, asking about an interview. He responded in less than 24 hours! I think it says a lot […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The perils of human genomics
A friend pointed me to the heated comment section of this article in Nature, Rebuilding the genome of a hidden ethnicity. The issue is that Nature originally stated that the Taino, the native people of Puerto Rico, were extinct. That resulted in an avalanche of angry comments, which one of the researchers, Carlos Bustamante, felt […]
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 […]
Evolution doesn’t fit our generalities
“Is Evolution Predictable?” asks a piece in Science. Here’s the first paragraph:
If one could rewind the history of life, would the same species appear with the same sets of traits? Many biologists have argued that evolution depends …
Why the human X chromosome is less diverse
The Pith: The human X chromosome is subject to more pressure from natural selection, resulting in less genetic diversity. But, the differences in diversity of X chromosomes across human populations seem to be more a function of population history than …
Massive Neandertal & Denisovan introgression
Update: John Hawks’ lab is working in the same area, and he disagrees with the specific results presented here. Always reminds you to be careful about sexy results presented at conference! (someone should do a study!)
So claimed Peter Parham at a…
Evolution’s gears don’t reverse easily
Evolutionary Adaptations Can Be Reversed, but Rarely:
Physicists’ study of evolution in bacteria shows that adaptations can be undone, but rarely. Ever since Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution in 1859, scientists have wondered wheth…
We, Robot & Hamilton’s Rule
The original robots
We are haunted by Hamilton. William D. Hamilton specifically, an evolutionary biologist who died before his time in 2000. We are haunted because debates about his ideas are still roiling the intellectual world over a decade after h…
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…