Whole genome sequencing comes to Cavalli-Sforza’s data
More than twenty years ago L. L. Cavalli-Sforza published The History and Geography of Human Genes. Based on decades of analysis of ‘classical’ markers, this work lays out results of statistical genetic analyses based on a few hundred genes, as well as displaying Cavalli-Sforza’s encyclopedic ethnographic knowledge. A close look at this book will yield […]
The HGDP in the post-ascertainment era
In the 1990s there was a huge debate around the “Human Genome Diversity Project” (HGDP). By the HGDP I don’t mean what you probably know as the HGDP panel, but a more ambitious attempt to genotype tens of thousands of individuals across the world. In the end activists “won”, and the grand plans came to […]
The HGDP made less racist!
Back in the 1990s there was a lot of controversy around the Human Genome Diversity Project. In fact there were whole books devoted to the sociology of the project. Though on some of the details critics of the project may have had a point, their overall…
Visualizing variation, input → output
I have noted a few times that one thing you have to be careful about in two dimensional plots which show genetic variance is that the dimensions in which the data are projected upon are often generated from the data itself. So adding more data can chan…
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 […]