Present genetic variation is a weak guide to past genetic variation
As I’ve been harping on and on for the past few years that the patterns of contemporary genetic variation are probably only weakly tied to past patterns of genetic variation (though Henry Harpending warned me about this as far back as 2004). A …
The Cape Coloureds are a mix of everything
A Cape Coloured family
I’ve mentioned the Cape Coloureds of South Africa on this weblog before. Culturally they’re Afrikaans in language and Dutch Reformed in religion (the possibly related Cape Malay group is Muslim, though also Afrikaan…
Language, genes, & peoples of Southeast Asia
As I am currently reading Victor Lieberman’s magisterial Strange Parallels: Volume 2. So I was very interested in a new paper from BMC Genetics, Genetic structure of the Mon-Khmer speaking groups and their affinity to the neighbouring Tai populat…
No Khannnn!!!!
Very strange. I just saw referrals from this Rupee News website that Omar mentioned earlier today to my Discover blog. Here’s a comment from Dr khan: really interesting piece revisionist history, although quite easy to argue for and against! its a matter of hook or by crook or an easy fit for the glove, if […]
Behold, the Interpretome!
Zack and Dr. Daniel MacArthur have already pointed to the Interpretome tool (Chrome and Firefox only!). As Daniel noted the PCA option will probably be the most fun for people. Just load your raw (unzipped) 23andMe data file, and project yourself onto …
Domestication as introgression and assimilation
The Pith: the spread of domestic rice may be a function not of the spread of rice per se, as much as a specific narrow set of genes which confer domestication to disparate rice lineages.
This has been a big month for rice. At least for me. Despite my b…
You are a mutant!
The Pith: You are expected to have 30 new mutations which differentiate you from your parents. But, there is wiggle room around this number, and you may have more or less. This number may vary across siblings, and explain differences across siblings. …
Flavors of Afro-Asiatic
In the post yesterday I reported what was generally known about the Horn of Africa, that its populations seem to lie between those of Sub-Saharan African and Eurasia genetically. This is totally reasonable as a function of geography, but there are also…
A genomic sketch of the Horn of Africa
Iman, a Somali model
Since I started up the African Ancestry Project one of the primary sources of interest has been from individuals whose family hail for Northeast Africa. More specifically, the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia. The pr…
Genetics existed before -omics
In the post below, Moderate marginal value to genomics, I left some things implicit. It turns out that this was an ill-considered decision. In reality my comments were simply more cryptic and opaque than implicit. This is pretty obvious because even th…
Moderate marginal value to genomics
In the comments below when it comes to genomic privacy I expressed a rather carefree attitude toward the future possibilities of dark prediction. Over at FARK.com the comments were rather uniformly alarmed, and influenced by Gattaca. For example: ̶…
Against social constructionism
My first post over at HAP. The theses of some scholars who argue for social construction of caste has obviously gone too far, but I do want to add that I suspect there’s a lot correct about specific details. For example, it seems possible that the class “Kayastha” broadly refers to groups which uplifted from […]
The way the world looks now in human evolutionary genetics
Randy McDonald points me to this very nice Q & A formatted piece in BMC Biology from March, Who is H. sapiens really, and how do we know?. The lucidity and clarity is impressive. If scientists keep putting stuff out there like that open access the…
Why rice is so nice
The Pith: What makes rice nice in one varietal may not make it nice in another. Genetically that is….
Rice is edible and has high yields thanks to evolution. Specifically, the artificial selection processes which lead to domestication. The ̶…
Why genetic privacy could be doomed
I was having a discussion with some friends who have all expressed interest in being genotyped or have been about putting their information into the public domain. They were a pretty savvy lot (half of the six had been genotyped), but one expressed the…
HAP K = 11 bar plots
Two bar plots. The first has a bunch of populations and individuals, with a minimum threshold of S Asian + Onge = 25% from HAP K = 11. I tried to cluster by region/language. The second shows the ratio of SW Asian & European, again with the threshold of S Asian + Onge, and, a […]
ADMIXTURE bar plot
How I generated the plot below is outlined at my Sepia Mutiny post. I think there’s an error where several of the “Andhra Unspecified” are actually Reddys.
Mediterranean men on the move
Seriously, sometimes history matches fiction a lot more than we’d have expected, or wished. In the early 2000s the Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes observed a pattern of discordance between the spatial distribution of male mediated ancestry on the …
Ban them! (including ancestry analysis)
Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Tests Neither Accurate in Their Predictions nor Beneficial to Individuals, Study Suggests:
Direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic tests give inaccurate predictions of disease risks and many European geneticists believe that some of…
The mess that is mouse
Recently an evolutionary geneticist told me that his colleagues who worked with mice really didn’t have their stuff together. Actually, his language was a touch more colorful than that. But the gist of the argument seemed plausible enough to me. …