Genetics as the myth buster: Indian edition
Whenever Zack Ajmal posts a new update to the Harappa Ancestry Project he appends some data to his ethnic database. This sends me to Wikipedia, because how many people are supposed to know what a “Muslim Rawther” means? Well, if you are a M…
It’s about heritability….
I’m going to promote a comment:
…would knowing the root biological cause for differences which are already apparent to us change anything?
It’s obvious to you that there’s a contradiction here, but to the average educated person this…
Human population genetics & identity politics
Joshua Lipson has a column up in the Harvard Political Review, DNA and the New Identity Politics. I’m generally very keen on spreading insights from the biological sciences into other domains; not as an imperialist, but as a intellectual entrepre…
Twins: Brazil edition
A few years ago a story came out about a town populated by Germans in Brazil which exhibited a tendency toward twinning. The combination of Germans, Brazil, and twins, naturally meant that Josef Mengele came into the picture. A more prosaic explanation…
The genetic world in 3-D
When Zack first mooted the idea of the Harappa Ancestry Project I had no idea what was coming down the pipe. I wonder if his daughter and wife are curious as to what’s happened to their computer! Since collecting the first wave of participants he…
The shadow of the Emishi
Randy McDonald just pointed me to a 2008 paper in AJHG, Japanese Population Structure, Based on SNP Genotypes from 7003 Individuals Compared to Other Ethnic Groups: Effects on Population-Based Association Studies. It speaks to an issue I brought up ear…
Genetic paternalism & the F.D.A.
It’s been over a week since I’ve addressed the “F.D.A. D.T.C.” controversy. I plan on getting back to the issue in more detail later, but right now I thought I’d point you to Robert Verbruggen’s article in National R…
Puzzling the odds of disease risk
I don’t currently put much stock in disease risk estimates given by personal genomics firms. My pedigree is pretty large, so I already have a lot of information on the table (though the demographic transition across the generations in Bangladesh …
Genome bloggers & Indian genomics
Dienekes, David, and Zack, have now integrated the insight from Reconstructing Indian History that the programs which infer population structure, such as STRUCTURE, frappe, and ADMIXTURE, can produce ancestral components which are themselves actually s…
Can biologists admit they are wrong?
Jason Collins, an economist strongly grounded in biological principles, has a post up in response to Mike the Mad Biologist’s critique of economic misunderstandings of biology. Jason asks:
On the flip side, did Dawkins or Gould (or their respecti…
Space, the final evolutionary frontier
There’s a rather perplexing paper out in PNAS which I stumbled upon today, An evolutionary process that assembles phenotypes through space rather than through time. Perplexing because I wonder if it is almost so obvious as to be boring, in the tr…
Input determining output in ADMIXTURE
One reason I posted about how to run ADMIXTURE was so that the more readers themselves could become familiar with the biases of the program. That way they would get cautious about over-reading one particular set of results (the same goes for using PCA …
Looking for relatedness in the HapMap Gujaratis
Recently I was looking at a 3-D PCA animation which Zack generated from the Harappa Ancestry Project data set. Click the link and come back. Notice the outlier clusters? The Burusho are straightforward, they seem to have low levels of Tibetan admixtur…
Population structure within Africa
John Hawks, reviews Henn et al., and notes:
By the time we find “modern” humans in West Asia, the African population had long since diversified into regional populations. This is not news; the mtDNA evidence has suggested for several years …
Eurasia, ADMIXTURE supervised & unsupervised
After yesterday’s post I thought it might be useful to see how running ADMIXTURE in different modes would impact the outcomes. Probably the major reason I wish more people would use this software is that they’d see that this program is jus…
Analyzing ancestry with ADMIXTURE, step by step
Over the past few months I was hoping more people would start doing what Zack Ajmal, Dienekes, and David, have been doing. There are public data sets, and open source software, so that anyone with nerdy inclination can explore their own questions out o…
Think twins!
In the comments below, John Howard asks in relation to me releasing my genotype into the public domain: “I’m curious if this means you give permission to be cloned, or for someone to reproduce with you, by making gametes from your genome. Do yo…
DTC testing, mailing addresses, contact information, etc.
Chris, and others, have encouraged me to put up some contact information in regards to DTC testing and the . Here is what Chris has gathered….
The Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) is the division of the FDA that would be respon…
DTC, FDA, regulation, etc.
It’s been a few days since my post on the FDA DTC hearings was linked around the blogosphere, and generated some incredibly well informed discussion. There are plenty of reactions, but there are two which I want to point to specifically. First, M…
Harappa Ancestry Project @ N ~ 50
Zack Ajmal now has over 50 participants in the Harappa Ancestry Project. This does not include the Pakistani populations in the HGDP, the HapMap Gujaratis, the Indians from the SVGP. Nevertheless, all these samples still barely cover vast heart of Sout…