Pruning the family tree, chance & inevitability
I picked up Clive Finlayson’s The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived mostly for its alternative history value. By this, I mean that it was published in the fall of 2009, less than a year before research which sugge…
D.I.Y. bio, power to the people!
In light of my last post, I want to point to some groups attempting to create some “bottom-up” biological science in the real world. In the Los Angeles area you have SoCal DIY Bio, and in northern California you have BioCurious. And you als…
Your genes, your rights – FDA’s Jeffrey Shuren misleading testimony under oath
Update: Welcome Instapundit readers! Please make sure to follow the very thorough discussion/debate over at Discover Blogs, where this has been cross-posted. End Update Over the past few days I’ve been very disturbed…and angry. The reason is that I’ve been reading Misha Angrist and Dr. Daniel MacArthur. First, watch this video: In the very near […]
Your genes, your rights – FDA’s Jeffrey Shuren misleading testimony under oath
Over the past few days I’ve been very disturbed…and angry. The reason is that I’ve been reading Misha Angrist and Dr. Daniel MacArthur. First, watch this video:
In the very near future you may be forced to go through a “profess…
Where in the world did anatomically modern humans come from?
The Pith: I review a recent paper which argues for a southern African origin of modern humanity. I argue that the statistical inference shouldn’t be trusted as the final word. This paper reinforces previously known facts, but does not add much th…
Out of South Africa?
Credit: Ian Beatty
Apparently there’s a new paper on Bushmen genetic diversity coming out in PNAS. It reports that this group is the most diverse in the world in terms of intra-population variance. This is not a great surprise after the much her…
How technology makes ideology irrelevant
Dienekes points to two interesting phenomena which when juxtaposed together show how the pace of technological change can outrun ideological arguments and hand wringing. Those of you who have been reading me since the early 2000s know where I stand on …
Are we still evolving….
The question whether humans are still evolving is something that crops up now and then. If the story is British you know that the evolutionary geneticist Steve Jones will be approached for his obligatory quote. There’s apparently going to be a pr…
The residual of the genes & geography correlation
David of the Eurogenes Genetic Ancestry Project has a cautionary post up, When is a genetic map also a geographic map? Always and never. In it, he uses a specific peculiar pattern as a launching point into a broader exploration of the relationship betw…
My parents, looking east and west
Yesterday Michelle decided to put up a post with her own analysis of her ADMIXTURE results. With that in mind, I thought I’d revisit some results from my parents. After many runs of ADMIXTURE, both by myself and Zack, some consistent differences …
Brazilians, more European than not?
Credit: Dragon Horse
The Pith: Brazil is often portrayed as the second largest black nation in the world, after Nigeria. But it turns out that the majority of the ancestors for non-white Brazilians are European.
One of the more popular sources of se…
Run as fast as you can!
Since his move to Wired I swear that Dr. Daniel MacArthur has gotten a bit more pugnacious. In any case, today he has a post up which smacks-down the A.M.A.’s attempt to expand the long arm of its regulatory capture:
The American Medical Associat…
Better comprehension through visualization
Zack has started to improve on static R plots with Google powered charts. Check it out. Alas, I can’t inject script tags into the body of my posts, so that’s not feasible for me. Notice on Zack’s plot that I’m more East Asian th…
Sweeping through a fly’s genome
Credit: Karl Magnacca
The Pith: In this post I review some findings of patterns of natural selection within the Drosophila fruit fly genome. I relate them to very similar findings, though in the opposite direction, in human genomics. Different forms o…
Visualizing “typical” Eurasians
A few weeks ago I started looking at the 23andMe raw files of some of my friends and integrating them into HGDP and HapMap population data sets. One of the first things I did is remove the African populations from my total data. The reasons is as you c…
The evolution of man is no cartoon
I was semi-offline for much of last week, so I only randomly heard from someone about the “Science paper” on which Molly Przeworski is an author. Finally having a chance to read it front to back it seems rather a complement to other papers…
Tea leaves and population substructure
Image credit: Wikimol
Over the past few months I’ve been encouraging people to pull down ADMIXTURE, and push the public data sets through it. Additionally, you can also convert your 23andMe raw file into pedigree format pretty easily and integ…
The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do
Short comment: “Behavior genetics” you can use. Every potential parent should read this book.
Personal genome in the public domain
Image credit: Vikrum Lexicon
Manu Sporny reflects on one week of being in the public domain in terms of personal genomics. I already pulled down his data, as has Zack. The whole post is fascinating, but this is really interesting: “I found out …
Eurasia + Mozabites + Papuans
I’m in a hurry right now, and won’t be posting much this week. But, I thought I’d dump some of the ADMIXTURE runs I have. This is one with 80,000 markers, and Eurasian populations, Papuans and Mozabites. I removed the New World and Af…