Slate, science, and Brian Palmer
I’m still scratching my head over the rather atrocious Brian Palmer piece in Slate, Double Inanity: Twin studies are pretty much useless. It’s of a quality which would make it appropriate for WorldNetDaily. Here are the responses of Jason C…
Deleterious drag as a side effect of adaptation
The Pith: Evolution is a sloppy artist. Upon the focal zone of creative energy adaptation can sculpt with precision, but on the margins of the genetic landscape frightening phenomena may erupt due to inattention. In other words, there are often downsid…
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…
The point mutation which made humanity
Steve Hsu points me to a piece in The New Yorker on the science and personality of Svante Pääbo. The personality part includes references to Pääbo’s bisexuality, which to me seemed to be literally dropped into the prose to spice it up. Of cou…
Crohn’s disease is about barely keeping you alive
The Pith: Natural selection is a quick & dirty operator. When subject to novel environments it can react rapidly, bringing both the good and the bad. The key toward successful adaptation is not perfection, but being better than the alternatives. T…
The King Tut DNA story
Last year some readers forwarded me a strange story about Hitler’s “Jewish genes”. I didn’t think much of it, but enough people asked that I thought I should at least address the story (or lack of one). Today something similar i…
~33% of a Malagasy genotype, first pass
Last week I begged for a Malagasy genotype. I didn’t quite get that, but I got the second best thing: a part Malagasy-genotype. I decided to take it for a spin.
But first some preliminaries. Here’s what we know about this individual (or wha…
Quest for the Malagasy genotype
I would like to throw out the word that I am looking for a person with Malagasy ancestry for the African Ancestry Project. To my knowledge there are no thick marker autosomal analyses of the Malagasy people. After my recent exploration of Southeast As…
How Chinese genetics is like Chinese food
Representatives of Szechuan and Shangdong cuisine
The Pith: The Han Chinese are genetically diverse, due to geographic scale of range, hybridization with other populations, and possibly local adaptation.
In the USA we often speak of “Chinese fo…
DIY admixture analysis
Dienekes Pontikos has just released DIY Dodecad, a DIY admixture analysis program. You can download the files yourself. It runs on both Linux and Windows. Since I already have tools in Linux I decided to try out the Windows version, and it seems to wor…
When sociology meets statistical genetics
In Dr. Daniel MacArthur’s post on Roots into the Future Blaine Bettinger left an interesting comment:
It will be interesting to see how 23andMe deals with the pool of people that respond to the 10,000 free kits. Doesn’t seem like they can p…
Why the human X chromosome is less diverse
The Pith: The human X chromosome is subject to more pressure from natural selection, resulting in less genetic diversity. But, the differences in diversity of X chromosomes across human populations seem to be more a function of population history than …
To the antipode of Asia
Markers show populations sampled by HUGO Pan-Asian SNP Consortium
The Pith: Southeast Asia was settled by a series of distinct peoples. The pattern of settlement can be discerned in part by examination of patterns of genetic variation. It seems like…
What one (or more) genomes can tell us
The Pith: We are now moving from the human genome project, to the human genomes project. As more and more full genomes of various populations come online new methods will arise to take advantage of the surfeit of data. In this paper the authors crunch …
Tightening the interval of the expected
The Pith: The rarer the genetic variant, the more likely that variant is to be specific to a distinct population. Including information about the distribution of these genetic variants missed in current techniques can increase greatly the precision of …
You are a mutant!
The Pith: You are expected to have 30 new mutations which differentiate you from your parents. But, there is wiggle room around this number, and you may have more or less. This number may vary across siblings, and explain differences across siblings. …
A genomic sketch of the Horn of Africa
Iman, a Somali model
Since I started up the African Ancestry Project one of the primary sources of interest has been from individuals whose family hail for Northeast Africa. More specifically, the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia. The pr…
The continuing tangling of the human tree
Last summer I made a thoughtless and silly error in relation to a model of human population history when asked by a reader the question: “which population is most distantly related to Africans?” I contended that all non-African populations…
The evolutionary effect of the sky gods
Last week I reviewed ideas about the effect of “exogenous shocks” to an ecosystem of creatures, and how it might reshape their evolutionary trajectory. These sorts of issues are well known in their generality. They have implications from th…
Visualization of genetic distances, part n
Zack Ajmal has been taking his Reference 3 data set for a stroll over at the Harappa Ancestry Project. Or, more accurately, he’s been driving his computer to crunch up ADMIXTURE results ascending up a later of K’s. Because it is the Harappa…