Europeans as Middle Eastern farmers
The Pith: Over the past 10,000 years a small coterie of farming populations expanded rapidly and replaced hunter-gatherer groups which were once dominant across the landscape. So, the vast majority of the ancestry of modern Europeans can be traced ba…
Incest, “the children,” and personal genomics
Mischa Angrist and Brendan Maher point me to two interest personal genomics related stories. First, a follow up on inadvertent uncovering of incest story from last winter in GenomeWeb, Incidental Findings:
Recently, he and his colleagues encountered a …
Evolution in higher dimensions
Ornithomimosaurian dinosaur & ostrich, image credit Nobu Tamura & James G. Howes
The Pith: This post explores evolution at two different scales: the broad philosophical and the close in genetic. Philosophically, is evolution a highly conti…
Evolution may explain why baby comes early
Image credit
The Pith: In this post I review a paper which covers the evolutionary dimension of human childbirth. Specifically, the traits and tendencies peculiar to our species, the genes which may underpin those traits and tendencies, and how that …
Gene flow stops at Gibraltar (mostly)
Rock of Gibraltar
In The Humans Who Went Extinct the author makes much of the fact that Neandertals obviously lacked skill at crossing the water, insofar as their range was constricted by barriers to their south in Iberia. This sort of issue is kind o…
I am not a genetic blend of my parents
One of the aspects of genetics which I think tends to reoccur is that people have a fixation on the two extreme ends of visible genetic inheritance. On the one hand you have discrete Mendelian or quasi-Mendelian traits where most of the variation is co…
23andme Sale Tomorrow (April 11th, 2011)
23andMe Sale tomorrow:
For a limited time, you can order a 23andMe kit for $0 up front, plus a 12-month commitment to our Personal Genome Service® at $9/month. This is down from the regular price of $199 plus $9/month.
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This promotional price w…
The Sandawe: after the demographic flood
Over the past few days I’ve been trying to read a bit on the Sandawe. Most of the stuff I’ve been able to find is in the domain of linguistics, and is basically unintelligible to me in any substantive manner. The crux of the curiosity here …
D.I.Y. genome-wide association
Saw this on Twitter, but I’ve talked to others who have brought up this issue:
It seems the logistic issues are the big problem. How do you validate phenotype? Tight-knit communities could probably work just based on trust, but then how do you sc…
A best case scenario for unsupervised ADMIXTURE?
One of the great things about ADMIXTURE is that the population elements shake out of the data through the logic of the program. The worst thing is that it is then left up to you to make sense of the elements. A useful way to use ADMIXTURE and avoid exc…
The men of Africa
Khoikhoi on the move….
Dienekes mentioned today a new paper, Signatures of the pre-agricultural peopling processes in sub-Saharan Africa as revealed by the phylogeography of early Y chromosome lineages. Because of the recent comments in this s…
Africa in 12 ADMIXTURE chunks
Some have asked what the point is in poking around African population structure when Tishkoff et al. and Henn et al. have done such a good job in terms of coverage. First, it is nice to run your own analyses so you can slice & dice to your preferen…
The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, free!
Long time readers are aware that one of my favorite books is R. A. Fisher’s The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. It’s a touch on the spendy side for a slim, though dense, book. But looking for stuff that’s public domain for my K…
You learn from failure
In yesterday’s post on African genetics I tried to work with a large set of populations, but narrowed SNPs down to ~40,000. Today I thought I’d go another route, focus on having a thicker market set, but with fewer populations. So I did a b…
My Goodness My Guinea-ness?
Update: After this post a researcher who is planning on publishing work on the genetic structure of Great Britain and Ireland and who has a very large N forwarded me a PCA which he gave me permission to repost. I’ve uploaded it here.
As you mi…
The Bantu völkerwanderung
Image Credit: Mark Dingemanse
I recall years ago someone on the blog of Jonathan Edelstein, a soc.history.what-if alum as well, mentioning offhand that archaeologists had “debunked” the idea of the Bantu demographic expansion. Because, unf…
The day of the farmer
About five months ago I read Peter Bellwood’s First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies. Bellwood’s thesis is simple: that the first adopters of farming entered into a period of rapid demographic expansion and by and large replac…
The limits of computational power – shades of 1982
Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back:
I got my daughter a netbook, so now my computer is doing Harappa Prohect work 24×7.
Also, Simranjit was nice enough to offer me the use of a server. For privacy reasons, I am not going to upload any of the participan…
Genetic paternalists are very patronizing
An comment below on my post Genetic paternalism & the F.D.A.:
I came across your inflamed post from March 9th and the more I read the more disappointed I became, especially when I read your comment “following twitter, it seems there may be a dis…
The flat and the fit
The Pith: In evolution if you want to win in the long run you don’t want all your eggs in one basket, even if that’s the choicest basket. Sh*t happens, and you better have some back up strategies.
Diversity is a major question in evolution…