Quest for the Malagasy genotype
I would like to throw out the word that I am looking for a person with Malagasy ancestry for the African Ancestry Project. To my knowledge there are no thick marker autosomal analyses of the Malagasy people. After my recent exploration of Southeast As…
How Chinese genetics is like Chinese food
Representatives of Szechuan and Shangdong cuisine
The Pith: The Han Chinese are genetically diverse, due to geographic scale of range, hybridization with other populations, and possibly local adaptation.
In the USA we often speak of “Chinese fo…
DIY admixture analysis
Dienekes Pontikos has just released DIY Dodecad, a DIY admixture analysis program. You can download the files yourself. It runs on both Linux and Windows. Since I already have tools in Linux I decided to try out the Windows version, and it seems to wor…
When sociology meets statistical genetics
In Dr. Daniel MacArthur’s post on Roots into the Future Blaine Bettinger left an interesting comment:
It will be interesting to see how 23andMe deals with the pool of people that respond to the 10,000 free kits. Doesn’t seem like they can p…
Roots into the Future
23andMe is announcing a new research initiative into African American genetics today. Dr. Daniel MacArthur has blogged it so well that I recommend you just read him: Personal genomics: not just for rich white folks. This looks like it will focus more o…
Dominance, the social construct that confuses
A story in The Los Angeles Times seems to point medical implications of being a sickle cell carrier, Sickle cell trait: The silent killer:
At least 17 high school and college athletes’ deaths have been tied to sickle cell trait during the past 11…
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 …
Southeast Asian migrations, Indians and Tai
If you have not read my post “To the antipode of Asia”, this might be a good time to do so if you are unfamiliar with the history, prehistory, and ethnography of mainland Southeast Asia. In this post I will focus on mainland Southeast Asia…
Shadows of phenotypes lost
I have posted on the existence of blonde hair amongst some Melanesians before. There are natural chemical treatments as well as extreme malnutrition which can result in blonde hair in dark skinned people. The latter seems unlikely from the photos IR…
Asian Negritos are not one population
Negrito, Philippines. Credit: Ken Ilio
In the post below I mentioned that the Malaysian and Philippine Negritos seem to be two very distinct populations. This was something I wanted to explore in more detail, so I naturally decided to poke around the…
Bacteria tell the tale of human intercourse
The Pith: the genetic relationships between bacteria in our stomach can tell us a lot about the relationships between various groups of people. Additionally, the distribution of different strains of bacteria may have significant public health implicat…
To the antipode of Asia
Markers show populations sampled by HUGO Pan-Asian SNP Consortium
The Pith: Southeast Asia was settled by a series of distinct peoples. The pattern of settlement can be discerned in part by examination of patterns of genetic variation. It seems like…
Harappa Ancestry Project ~100 browns
The Harappa Ancestry Project has ~100 unrelated South Asians. Unfortunately there is still a large gap from the “cow belt,” in particular Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The 1000 Genomes should be fleshing out the margins of South Asia even more within the year, but we’re still inferring when it comes to the core […]
Genetic privacy and “Big Brother”
Several people have pointed me to Mary Carmichael’s piece for Nature, Newborn screening: A spot of trouble. It’s free, but you have to register. The subheading is: “By raising hell about newborn blood-spot screening, Twila Brase could…
What one (or more) genomes can tell us
The Pith: We are now moving from the human genome project, to the human genomes project. As more and more full genomes of various populations come online new methods will arise to take advantage of the surfeit of data. In this paper the authors crunch …
Bearish wisdom!
A few years ago a paper came out which suggested that the brown bears of the ABC Islands of southeastern Alaska were more closely related to polar bears than they were to other brown bears. More precisely, polar bears and ABC brown bears formed a disti…
Blank slate when you want it that way
Tim Pawlenty debates Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ idea:
Gregory pressed, asking “Is being gay a choice?”
Pawlenty ultimately said, “I defer to the scientists in that regard.”
Again, Gregory pressed: “So yo…
How did modern humans settle the world?
In lieu of lots of text, above is a stylized representation of the routes which Neo-Africans took ~50 thousand years ago from their point of departure to parts unknown. The two colors represent two models. The red lines show two major streams issuing …
On the genetic structure of Afro-Indians
The Pith: Afro-Indians are mostly African, with a substantial Indian minority ancestry. The latter is disproportionately female mediated. It also seems that that ancestry is more northwest Indian, and that natural selection has been operating upon them…
Everything I didn’t know about sex
The Pith: The primary reason for the pervasiveness of sex among complex organisms is to maintain genomic integrity, not to increase genetic variation..
I just read a very strange article in the journal Evolution, Sex reduces genetic variation. In it th…