The Assyrians and Jews: 3,000 years of common history
2 Kings, 17:
[5] Then the king of Assyria came up throughout all the land, and went up to Samaria, and besieged it three years.
[6] In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in H…
More bad mutations = greater fitness
Does the chart above strike you as strange? What it shows is that the mean fitness of a population drops as you increase the rate of deleterious mutation (many more mutations are deleterious than favorable)…but at some point the fitness of the population bounces back, despite (or perhaps because of?) the deleterious mutations! This would […]
When genes matter for intelligence
Image credit: Aleksandra Pospiech One of the interesting and robust nuggets from behavior genetics is that heritability of psychological traits increases as one ages. Imagine for example you have a cohort of individuals you follow over their lives. At the age of 1 the heritability of I.Q. may be ~20%. This means that ~20% of […]
The $50 genome in 2014?
John Hawks notes the MacArthur-Herper debate on the “$1,000 genome”, and responds, Genomes too cheap to meter: ….In it, he notes the comments of several professionals that the $1,000 number itself is not an important fact, it is the availability of sequencing within that order of magnitude. The inevitability of the $1000 genome has already […]
Me, myself, and Myanmar
I have spoken of my somewhat atypical, for a South Asian, genetic results before. Recently Dienekes performed some cluster analysis which confirmed the initial findings, while adding a little detail: I am DOD075. The Southeast Asian component is modal in Malays, while the East Asian component is modal in the North Chinese. Vietnamese and Cambodians […]
The genetic affinities of Ethiopians
In the open thread someone asked: “Any recent stuff on the genetics of Ethiopians.” That prompted me to look around, because I’m curious too. Poking around Wikipedia I couldn’t find anything recent. A lot of the studies are older uniparental lineage based works (NRY and mtDNA). Ethiopia is interesting because unlike almost all other Sub-Saharan […]
Ancestry in the Americas
The populations of the African Diaspora have a particular interest in the new genomics, and its relationship to ancestry. Unlike other post-Columbian Diasporas they have sketchy, at best, knowledge of the regions from which their ancestors arrived. This probably explains the popularity of Roots and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s various genealogical projects which have utilized […]
Of association & evolution
Two of the main avenues of research which I track rather closely in this space are genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which attempt to establish a connection between a trait/disease and particular genetic markers, and inquiries into the evolutionary parameters which shape the structure of variation within the human genome. Often with specific relation to a particular […]
Visualizing West Eurasia
Over at his blog Dienekes Pontikos has taken some public data sets and his own Dodecad samples and generated a massive MDS plot of West Eurasian populations. The MDS is fine as it goes. It illustrates clearly that when you visualize an individual on a plot defined by the two largest dimensions of variation in […]
Hobbit DNA in 2011
I predicted earlier that Hobbit DNA would be extracted in 2011. It was pretty much an educated guess based on various omissions I sensed in papers in 2010. But it seems that an attempt is going to be made: Scientists are planning an attempt to extract DNA from the ‘hobbit’ Homo floresiensis, the 1-metre-tall extinct distant […]
Profiling hair color by DNA
Hair Color of Unknown Offenders Is No Longer a Secret: The research findings demonstrate that on the basis of DNA information it is possible to determine with an accuracy of more than 90 percent whether a person has red hair, with a similarly high accuracy whether a person has black hair, and with an accuracy […]
Are Turks acculturated Armenians?
To the left you see a zoom in of a PCA which Dienekes produced for a post, Structure in West Asian Indo-European groups. The focus of the post is the peculiar genetic relationship of Kurds, an Iranian-speaking people, with Iranians proper, as well as Armenians (Indo-European) and Turks (not Indo-European). As you can see in […]
Out of Africa: mend it, don’t end it!
Dilettante human genetics blogger Dienekes Pontikos has a post up with a somewhat oblique title, Is multi-regional evolution dead? I say oblique because a straightforward title would be “Multi-regionalism lives!” He posted a chart from a 2008 paper which outlines various models of human origins, and their relationship to molecular data at the time. I […]
Patterns of human height & lifestyle
Steve Hsu, The mystery of height: I was looking at The Formosan Encounter: Notes on Formosa’s Aboriginal Society, A Selection of Documents from Dutch Archival Sources. The Dutch came to Taiwan (then called Formosa) in the early 17th century and these translated documents record their impressions of the Austronesian natives. (Both the Dutch and Chinese […]
Reminder, 23andMe sale through Christmas
A reminder that 23andMe’s sale is valid until Christmas. Including the mandatory yearly subscription to their “Personal Genome Service”, that’s $160 (though you only get charged $99 + shipping initially, the subscription is $5/month). I didn’t quite go up to the 10 kits per person, but I did come close. There will likely be new […]
The paradigm is dead, long live the paradigm!
Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution: Mitochondrial DNA from 147 people, drawn from five geographic populations have been analysed by restriction mapping. All these mitochondrial DMAs stem from one woman who is postulated to have lived ab7out 200,000 years ago, probably in Africa. All the populations examined except the African population have multiple origins, implying that […]
Heritability and genes as causes
Since the beginning of this weblog (I’ve been writing for eight years) heritability has been a major confusion. Even long time readers misunderstand what I’m trying to get at when I talk about heritability. That’s why posts such as Mr. Luke Jostins‘ are so helpful. I had seen references to a piece online, The Causes of […]
The year of the Other human
Update: Please see follow up post. Carl Zimmer, Siberian Fossils Were Neanderthals’ Eastern Cousins, DNA Reveals: An international team of scientists has identified a previously shadowy human group known as the Denisovans as cousins to Neanderthals who lived in Asia from roughly 400,000 to 50,000 years ago and interbred with the ancestors of today’s inhabitants […]
Not misunderstanding the past requires suspicion
In my post on African farmers someone responded: It was famously reported last winter that Bushmen seem to differ genetically amongst themselves more than Europeans and Asians do. These two latter groups have been separate for at least 40,000 years. At least? Razib, you are way off on the separation time of Europeans and East […]
Some of the Indo-Europeans found?
School girls in Hunza, Pakistan A few days ago I observed that pseudonymous blogger Dienekes Pontikos seemed intent on throwing as much data and interpretation into the public domain via his Dodecad Ancestry Project as possible. What are the long term implications of this? I know that Dienekes has been cited in the academic literature, […]