What Heritability is Not
Because so many people abuse or misunderstand the concept of heritability, I decided that it would be nice to have a list of what heritability is not in one place. If you have questions or if there is a misconception about heritability you’d like me t…
Carbs & ancestry
Stable Patterns of Gene Expression Regulating Carbohydrate Metabolism Determined by Geographic Ancestry:Methodology/Principal FindingsUsing a combination of genetic/genomic and bioinformatics approaches, we identified a large number of genes that were …
GWAS, population structure and the Han Chinese
Two new articles in AJHG, Genomic Dissection of Population Substructure of Han Chinese and Its Implication in Association Studies:To date, most genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and studies of fine-scale population structure have been conducted pr…
R1a1 and the peopling of Eurasia
A few weeks ago people in the comments were nagging me a bit about some new papers on the haplogroup R1a1. This Y chromosomal lineage is found at very high frequencies from East-Central Europe into India. Initially, researchers such as Spencer Wells as…
Why whales get no bigger
Carl Zimmer reports that it might be a function of physics. Bigger whales have proportionality bigger mouths, but at some point the biological engineering runs up against constraints:s they report today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Goldboge…
1 million SNPs to bind us all
A a new paper in PLoS ONE, Genetic Variation and Recent Positive Selection in Worldwide Human Populations: Evidence from Nearly 1 Million SNPs:Our analyses both confirm and extend previous studies; in particular, we highlight the impact of various disp…
The mosaic of North American populations
A few months ago an interesting paper connected the historical demographics of New Hampshire with genetic variation. One of the notable features of North American history and culture is that it is a mosaic of different populations, and, that mosaic has…
Latin America is not panmixia
A new provisional paper, Ancestry-related assortative mating in latino populations. Here are the results:Using 104 ancestry informative markers, we examined spouse correlations in genetic ancestry for Mexican spouse pairs recruited from Mexico City and…
Spengler does it again!
Just Spengler (David Goldman) being Spengler, From “Zionism is Racism” to “Judaism is Racism”:Judaism has nothing to do with race-there are Jews of every race-but it does have to do with family. Jews are members of Abraham’s family. Not only tradition,…