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…
One root for rice
The Pith: There was one rice domestication event somewhere in central China about 10,000 years ago. Probably!
Going by the numbers rice is the real staff of life. Rice is the staple for ~50% of humans alive today. So the science of rice is of major pr…
Osama bin Laden and the DNA match
How they determine Osama bin Laden really is Osama bin Laden:
Once samples from all sources are in hand, analysts isolate a bit of DNA from each sample, make lots of copies of it, and then process the copies through a machine that analyzes genetic mark…
ADMIXTURE, African Ancestry Project, and confirmation bias
I’ve been running the African Ancestry Project for a while now on the side on Facebook. But it’s getting unwieldy, so I finally set up the website. The main reason I started it up is that there have been complaints for a while now of proble…
Genetic testing comment period, last day
I posted a pointer to this a few days ago, but if you care about the regulation of personal genomics the FDA is taking comments on the issue up until today. Here’s the direct link to the comment page. Say whatever you want, up to 2000 characters.
The royal wedding and outbreeding
In the wake of the post from earlier this week on the inbreeding within the House of Windsor (and current lack thereof), Luke Jostins, a subject of the British monarch, has a nice informative post up, Inbreeding, Genetic Disease and the Royal Wedding. …
The three poles of South Asian genetic variation
Zack Ajmal has posted his K = 11 Reference 3 results including Harappa Ancestry Project participants. Below are the results sorted by the East Asian, South Asian, and Onge. I limited it to those who had 5% or more East Asian. All caps = reference popul…
Neandertal hybridization & Haldane’s rule
Mr. James Winters at A Replicated Typo pointed me to a short hypothesis paper, Neanderthal-human Hybrids. This paper argues that selective mating of Neandertal males with females of human populations which had left Africa more recently, combined with
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…
Outbreeding won’t save the British royal family
Image credit: Wikimedia
A few years ago I blogged a paper on how inbred the last Spanish Habsburgs had become, leading to all sorts of ill effects. Take a look at Charles II of Spain! He was as inbred as the product of a sibling mating. An extreme cas…
South Asian endogamy predates the British
One of the things that happens if you read ethnographically thick books like Nicholas Dirks’ Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India is that you start to wonder if most castes were simply created by the British and for the Brit…
The evolutionary effect of the sky gods
Last week I reviewed ideas about the effect of “exogenous shocks” to an ecosystem of creatures, and how it might reshape their evolutionary trajectory. These sorts of issues are well known in their generality. They have implications from th…
The future of knowledge?
Matt Ridley has a predictable op-ed in the WSJ (based on our knowledge of his prior normative frame), Your Genes in an Envelope? More, Please. But the last section is interesting:
If freedom does not appeal, the clinching argument for allowing consumer…
Resolutions in the Indian genetic layer cake
Two years ago Reconstructing Indian Genetic History reframed how we should view South Asian historical genomics. In short, Indians can be viewed as a hybrid between a West Eurasian group, “Ancestral North Indians” (ANI) and a very different…
Knowledge of one’s own mortality
In my persistent slog beating the drums for open genomics I’ve made the argument that people should have the right to have more information about what their genetic code entails without the necessary and mandatory imprimatur of professional asse…
Visualization of genetic distances, part n
Zack Ajmal has been taking his Reference 3 data set for a stroll over at the Harappa Ancestry Project. Or, more accurately, he’s been driving his computer to crunch up ADMIXTURE results ascending up a later of K’s. Because it is the Harappa…
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…
23andMe, Stanford, personal genomics study
Call to Participate in a New Study on Social Networking and Personal Genomics:
Do you share your information with others? How has your personal genetic information influenced your lifestyle and the way you approach your health and medical decisions? Ca…
The coincidental intersection of sociology & genetics
Hispanic – Definitions in the United States:
The 1970 Census was the first time that a “Hispanic” identifier was used and data collected with the question. The definition of “Hispanic” has been modified in each successive …
John Gillespie, “the evil scientist from America”
I own a book of Motoo Kimura’s collected papers, and of course I have a copy of John Gillespie’s Population Genetics: A Concise Guide. But I’d forgotten the acrimony between the two men. Gillespie has been retired for half a decade no…