The power of one (Nubian that is)
Maju pointed me to a new paper on the genetics of Sudanese today. My interest was piqued, then not so much when I looked more closely. Genetic variation and population structure among Sudanese populations as indicated by the 15 Identifiler STR loci:
Ba…
Toward evolutionary monism
Is there any substantive difference between natural, sexual, and artificial selection? Or is it just semantic sugar, useful for humans in our own cognitive bookkeeping? I lean toward the latter proposition. To some extent I would think that this is an …
AIBioTech Sports X Factor is not worth the money
Last week I posted Don’t buy AIBioTech Sports X Factor kit! I laid out my rationale explicitly:
I’ve been pretty vocal about the impending specter of genetic paternalism in relation to personal genomics, which I believe to be futile in the long ter…
Proper methods and false results
The Pith: Honorable intent and punctilious adherence to proper form and method does not guarantee a set of results which flesh out a genuine phenomenon. Much of science is tragic.
Most of the time I point to and review papers on this weblog which excit…
Adam was African, but perhaps barely
The figure to the left comes from a short paper in The American Journal of Human Genetics, A Revised Root for the Human Y Chromosomal Phylogenetic Tree: The Origin of Patrilineal Diversity in Africa. The paper is interesting because of two factors: 1) …
Don’t buy AIBioTech Sports X Factor kit!
I’ve been pretty vocal about the impending specter of genetic paternalism in relation to personal genomics, which I believe to be futile in the long term, and likely to squelch innovation in the United States in the short term. Like any new produ…
Fashionable bipedalism
There’s a new story blowing up in the media about the origins of bipedalism through male-male competition. The hook is good enough that the headlines write themselves. For example, io9 has a sober and skeptical review of the paper, but the title …
Be “cool” while you can
Blaine Bettinger, who released his genotypes into the “public domain,” has a post up, My Genome Online – A Challenge To You:
I’ve already done a fair amount of analysis myself, including the Promethease reports above (and see here), and…
A map of charismatic canid genomic variation
The Pith: Wolves and coyotes exhibit geographic population structure. The red wolf may “only” be a coyote with a minor admixture of wolf, instead of a “real species.”
I like dogs. For various structural reasons I am not able to …
The Atlantic features “headless fattie”
I was browsing the front page of The Atlantic and I noticed that it featured a “headless fattie.” This is the standard illustration of obese people in the American media which omits their heads, and tends to focus on their mid-section. You …
An Assyrian genotype for the taking (and more)
When my friend offered to allow me to throw his 1,000,000 marker genotype out into the public domain last week I did understand that this would be of marginal utility in and of itself. After all there are many Ashkenazi genotypes out there, and he didn…
Genetic variation in the Caucasus
The Pith: There is a very tight correlation between language and genes in the Caucasus region.
If the Soviet Union was the “The Prisonhouse of Nations,” then the Caucasus region must be the refuge of the languages. Not only is this region l…
Natural selection for height in Europeans
It is known that Northern Europeans tend to be somewhat taller than Southern Europeans. This seems intuitively obvious if you spend a bit of time around representative populations. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest I’ve always been on the short…
How to make your genome public domain
I just got a request from someone how to do this. Honestly I really don’t know, I’m not a lawyer, and lawyers make the simple complex. Great if you’re an innocent guy accused of a dastardly crime, but not so great when you’re tr…
Sorbs: relics of the Ostsiedlung
Relics of a lost race?
One of the issues which I have been exploring and mulling over the past year and a half on this weblog has been the idea that population movements were much more extensive in the past than we have thought until late. I can say 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…
Ashkenazi 23andMe v3 genotype for the taking
Recently a friend got their 23andMe genotype results, and was wondering if there was something they could do for the “greater good.” I told him that he should throw his genotype out to the public domain and attach his name to it. For variou…
California justice and DNA databases
Whenever people question me throwing my genotype into the public domain I express the honest opinion that genetic transparency is only a matter of time, and that the government will have all this stuff on file at some point within the next 10 years in …
Pygmies are short because nature made them so
Aka Pygmies
The Pith: There has been a long running argument whether Pygmies in Africa are short due to “nurture” or “nature.” It turns out that non-Pygmies with more Pygmy ancestry are shorter and Pygmies with more non-Pygmy …
How the “fierce people” came to be
The pith: there are differences between populations on genes which result in “novelty seeking.” These differences can be traced to migration out of Africa, and can’t be explained as an artifact of random genetic drift.
I’m not …