Evolution may explain why baby comes early
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The Pith: In this post I review a paper which covers the evolutionary dimension of human childbirth. Specifically, the traits and tendencies peculiar to our species, the genes which may underpin those traits and tendencies, and how that …
The evolution of man is no cartoon
I was semi-offline for much of last week, so I only randomly heard from someone about the “Science paper” on which Molly Przeworski is an author. Finally having a chance to read it front to back it seems rather a complement to other papers…
Why siblings differ differently
The Pith: In this post I examine how looking at genomic data can clarify exactly how closely related siblings really are, instead of just assuming that they’re about 50% similar. I contrast this randomness among siblings to the hard & fast de…
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 […]
Are Turks acculturated Armenians?
To the left you see a zoom in of a PCA which Dienekes produced for a post, Structure in West Asian Indo-European groups. The focus of the post is the peculiar genetic relationship of Kurds, an Iranian-speaking people, with Iranians proper, as well as Armenians (Indo-European) and Turks (not Indo-European). As you can see in […]
Not misunderstanding the past requires suspicion
In my post on African farmers someone responded: It was famously reported last winter that Bushmen seem to differ genetically amongst themselves more than Europeans and Asians do. These two latter groups have been separate for at least 40,000 years. At least? Razib, you are way off on the separation time of Europeans and East […]
Homozygosity runs in the family (or not)
The number 1 gets a lot more press than -1, and the concept of heterozygosity gets more attention than homozygosity. Concretely the difference between the latter two is rather straightforward. In diploid organisms the genes come in duplicates. If the alleles are the same, then they’re homozygous. If they’re different, then they’re heterozygous. Sex chromosomes […]
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 […]
The silver age of altitude adaptation
With all the justified concern about “missing heritability”, the age of human genomics hasn’t been a total bust. As I have observed before in 2005’s excellent book Mutants the evolutionary geneticist Armand M. Leroi asserted that we really didn’t have a good understanding of normal variation of human pigmentation. At the time I think it […]