The future shall belong to the odorless!
My blog post prompted this response:
He notes research hypothesizing a link between high latitudes and the dry earwax gene, and also research that suggests that the dry earwax gene, something that would seem to have little selective impact, may be linked to the same gene that regulates body odor. Low body odor might conceivably confer […]
Australian Aboriginal people are one?
Richard Broome’s Aboriginal Australians is one of those books which I own which I finally managed to finish recently. It was a quick overview of Australian Aboriginals and their relationship with the settler society, and later in modern Australia. From what I could tell it was a serviceable introduction, though it took a persistent preachy […]
‘dem bones tell strange tales
There is a new paper in PNAS on remains from China which re-order and muddle our understanding of the emergence of anatomical and behavioral modernity in Eurasia. Human remains from Zhirendong, South China, and modern human emergence in East Asia:
The 2007 discovery of fragmentary human remains (two molars and an anterior mandible) at Zhirendong (Zhiren […]
The Dodecad ancestry project
Dienekes Pontikos, Introducing the Dodecad ancestry project:
1) Project goals
The Dodecad ancestry project has two goals:
– To provide detailed ancestry analysis to individuals who have tested with 23andMe; other testing companies may be included in the future.
– To build samples of individuals for regions of the world (e.g. Greeks, Finns, Albanians, Southern Italians, etc.) currently under-represented […]
History and Geography of Genes on a Desktop
In case you don’t know, Dienekes Pontikos has been posting a lot of analyses of available population genetic data sets with the ADMIXTURE program. You can find his myriad posts under the ADMIXTURE-experiments tag. Below is a bar plot he generated today. To follow up a debate which occurred last spring, it does seem from […]
Body odor, Asians, and earwax
When I was in college I would sometimes have late night conversations with the guys in my dorm, and the discussion would random-walk in very strange directions. During one of these quasi-salons a friend whose parents were from Korea expressed some surprise and disgust at the idea of wet earwax. It turns out he had […]
Genetic watersheds on the Great Himalayas
One of the great geological landmarks on earth are the Himalayas. Not only are the Himalayas of importance in the domain of physical geography, but they are important in human geography as well. Just as South Asians and non-South Asians agree that the valley of the Indus and its tributaries bound the west of the […]
Sex with thee and the last woman
A quintessentially sexy topic in biology is the origin of sex. Not only are biologists interested in it, but so is the public. Of Matt Ridley’s older books it is predictable that The Red Queen has the highest rank on Amazon. We humans have a fixation on sex, both in our public norms and our […]
The blood of kings
One of the more fertile grounds of modern genetics with all its various tools is that it makes for some interesting possibilities of inquiry in relation to the genealogy of aristocratic elites. The vast majority of us have very shallow roots in terms of genealogy. Some of this ignorance can be compensated if you have […]
The essence of the alien
If you found out a new fact about yourself could that reshape how you view yourself? An extreme case involves the Polish Neo-Nazis who found out that they are actually of Jewish origin. But it can be more subtle. A friend recently told me that her proud Irish American father found out that he carried […]
Heritability and fitness
Words matter, and they can confuse. Here’s Wikipedia’s preamble for heritability:
Heritability is the proportion of phenotypic variation in a population that is attributable to genetic variation among individuals. Phenotypic variation among individuals may be due to genetic and/or environmental factors. Heritability analyses estimate the relative contributions of differences in genetic and non-genetic factors to the […]
Can’t we all just get long: evolution of altruism edition
Samir Okasha is a philosopher of science and author of Evolution and the Levels of Selection. So his recent comment in Nature, Altruism researchers must cooperate, is informed by a scholarly background in these controversies. From what I can gather Okasha’s stance in this case is to “push back” on Nowak & Wilson in […]
Natural selection in our time
Last month in Nature Reviews Genetics there was a paper, Measuring selection in contemporary human populations, which reviewed data from various surveys in an attempt to adduce the current trajectory of human evolution. The review didn’t find anything revolutionary, but it was interesting to see where we’re at. If you read this weblog you probably […]
Genomes Unzipped – the naked sequence
Looks like Dr. Daniel MacArthur & company went and did it, go get their genotypes, or browse them online. This should be interesting. Since Dr. MacArthur’s wife has agreed to be a participant in some ways Tobias MacArthur is also part of the project by implication. To some extent the same is true of the […]
A generation of human genetics & genomics
If you are interested in human genomics and the types of papers I often review and discuss in this space, there’s a chapter of Vogel and Motulsky’s Human Genetics: Problems and Approaches you might find of interest. And, I just noticed that you can get it online (if you have academic access). It’s titled: Genetics and […]
Epigenetics – what revolution?
A reader who goes by the handle “biologist,” and happens to be a molecular geneticist by training, states more clearly what is probably close to my own position (though he is far more well informed) in the comments below. I think it’s worth promoting:
As far as I can tell, the existence of epigenetic mechanisms doesn’t […]
Arise the vehicle! Arise the cell!
A quick follow up to my post Epigenetics arise! Adam Keiper, the editor of The New Atlantis, has graciously sent me a copy of the article, Getting Over the Code Delusion. I’ve also been told that the piece will be free to all on the website at any moment, so I invite readers to […]
Epigenetics arise!
Last week I quipped on twitter that epigenetics had started to become the scientific deus ex machina of our age, a phenomenon which offered the potential for boundless explanatory power. In the past I have felt that sexual selection and random genetic drift have fulfilled the same roles as one-size-fits-all-explanations at the service of all. […]
The adaptive space of complexity
Evolution means many things to many people. On the one hand some scholars focus on time scales of “billions and billions,” and can ruminate upon the radical variation in body plans across the tree of life. Others put the spotlight on the change in gene frequencies on the scale of years, of Ph.D. programs. While […]
Every variant with an author!
I recall projections in the early 2000s that 25% of the American population would be employed as systems administrators circa 2020 if rates of employment growth at that time were extrapolated. Obviously the projections weren’t taken too seriously, and the pieces were generally making fun of the idea that IT would reduce labor inputs and […]