It’s raining adaptive loci!
It never ends with these Denisovans. More and more results. Filling the gaps in our knowledge. Denisovan DNA found in cave on Tibetan Plateau: For today’s Buddhist monks, Baishiya Karst […]
What did modern humans look like during the “Out of Africa” event?
Recently I was having an email exchange with a friend (a prominent public intellectual who is not a scientist), and we were thinking about what “ancestral Africans” looked like. More precisely, the populations which were resident around ~100,000 to ~200,000 years before the present. These are the people who are depicted in paleoanthropology documentaries. Here […]
The architecture of skin color variation in Africa
Very interesting abstract at the ASHG meeting of a plenary presentation,Novel loci associated with skin pigmentation identified in African populations. This is clearly the work that one of the comments on this weblog alluded to last summer during SMBE. There I was talking about the likely introduction of the derived SLC24A5 variant to the Khoisan peoples […]
The Tibeto-Burman and Austro-Asiatic ancestry of Bengalis
When I first got my father’s 23andMe results the Y and mtDNA were an interesting contrast. He, and therefore myself, carried Y lineage R1a1a, the lord of the paternal lineages. That was not that great a surprise. In the 1000 Genomes results for the Bangladeshi sample 20% of the men were direct paternal descendants of […]
Release the UK Biobank! (the prediction of height edition)
There’s so much science coming out of the UK Biobank it’s not even funny. It’s like getting the palantír or something. Anyway, a preprint, submitted for your approval. A vision of things to come? Accurate Genomic Prediction Of Human Height: We construct genomic predictors for heritable and extremely complex human quantitative traits (height, heel bone density, […]
After agriculture, before bronze
The above plot shows genetic distance/variation between highland and lowland populations in Papa New Guinea (PNG). It is from a paper in Science that I have been anticipating for a few months (I talked to the first author at SMBE), A Neolithic expansion, but strong genetic structure, in the independent history of New Guinea. What […]
SLC24A5 is very important, but we don’t know why
The golden of pigmentation genetics started in 2005 with SLC24A5, a putative cation exchanger, affects pigmentation in zebrafish and humans. Prior to that pigmentation genetics was really to a great extent coat color genetics, done in mice and other organisms which have a lot of pelage variation. Of course there was work on humans, mostly […]
The Bronze age demographic transformation of Britiain
In Norman Davies’ the excellent The Isles: A History, he mentions offhand that unlike the Irish the British to a great extent have forgotten their own mythology. This is one reason that J. R. R. Tolkien created Middle Earth, they gave the Anglo-Saxons the same sort of mythos that the Irish and Norse had. But […]
Why the future won’t be genetically homogeneous
While reading The Founders of Evolutionary Genetics I encountered a chapter where the late James F. Crow admitted that he had a new insight every time he reread R. A. Fisher’s The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. This prompted me to put down The Founders of Evolutionary Genetics after finishing Crow’s chapter and pick up […]
Mitochondrial Eve: a de facto deception?
The above image, and the one to the left, are screenshots from my father’s 23andMe profile. Interestingly, his mtDNA haplogroup is not particularly common among ethnic Bengalis, who are more than ~80% on a branch of M. This reality is clear in the map above which illustrates the Central Asian distribution my father’s mtDNA lineage. […]
Buddy, can you spare some ascertainment?
The above map shows the population coverage for the Geno 2.0 SNP-chip, put out by the Genographic Project. Their paper outlining the utility and rationale by the chip is now out on arXiv. I saw this map last summer, when Spencer Wells hosted a webinar on the launch of Geno 2.0, and it was the […]
Unveiling the genealogical lattice
To understand nature in all its complexity we have to cut down the riotous variety down to size. For ease of comprehension we formalize with math, verbalize with analogies, and visualize with representations. These approximations of reality are not reality, but when we look through the glass darkly they give us filaments of essential insight. […]
We are Nature
There’s an interesting piece in Slate, The Great Schism in the Environmental Movement, which seems to be a distillation of trends which have been bubbling within the modern environmentalist movement for a generation now (I’ve read earlier manifestos in a similar vein). I can’t assess the magnitude of the shift, but here’s the top-line: But […]
A lighter shade of brown: Dan MacArthur, look east or south!
In the post below I offered up my supposition that Dan MacArthur’s ancestry is unlikely to be Northwest Indian, which precludes a Romani origin for his South Asian ancestry. Indeed this is almost certainly so, Dienekes Pontikos followed up my crude analyses with IBD-sharing calculations (IBD = ‘identity by descent,’ which is basically what you […]
A lighter shade of brown: the Dan MacArthur chronicles, not a Romani
A few days ago I suggested that Dr. Daniel MacArthur might have South Asian ancestry. Now, when confronted with surprise the best option is to stick with your prior assumption, unless that surprise is powerful enough for you to “update” your model. After a few days of further analysis I will update: I do think […]
A lighter shade of brown: the Dan MacArthur chronicles, not a Romani
A few days ago I suggested that Dr. Daniel MacArthur might have South Asian ancestry. Now, when confronted with surprise the best option is to stick with your prior assumption, unless that surprise is powerful enough for you to “update” your model. After a few days of further analysis I will update: I do think […]
Don’t wait to have children!
The New Republic has a piece up, How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society, which won’t have surprising data for readers of this weblog. But it’s nice to see this sort of thing go “mainstream.” My daughter was born when her parents were in their mid-30s, so I know all the statistics. They aren’t good […]
We don’t know why Ethiopians breathe easy
Most people are aware that altitude imposes constraints on individual performance and function. Much of this is flexible; athletes who train at high altitudes may gain a performance edge. But over the long term there are costs, just as there are with computers which are ‘overclocked.’ This is the point where you make the transition […]
Is Daniel MacArthur ‘desi’?
My initial inclination in this post was to discuss a recent ordering snafu which resulted in many of my friends being quite peeved at 23andMe. But browsing through their new ‘ancestry composition’ feature I thought I had to discuss it first, because of some nerd-level intrigue. Though I agree with many of Dienekes concerns about […]
The origins of the Romani determined definitively
In many cases there are questions of a historical and ethnographic nature which are subject to controversy and debate. Scholarly arguments are laid out, and further dispute ensues. For decades progress seems fleeting, as one hypothesis is accepted, only to be subject to later revision. This sort of pattern gives succor to the most cynical […]