Machine learning swallowing population genetics = understanding patterns in population genomics
Dan Schriber and Andy Kern have a new review preprint out, Machine Learning for Population Genetics: A New Paradigm. On Twitter there has already been a little snark to the effect of “oh, you mean regression?” That’s fair enough, and the preprint would probably benefit from a lower key title, though that’s really the sort […]
Carving nature at its joints more realistically
If you are working on phylogenetic questions on a coarse evolutionary scale (that is, “macroevolutionary,” though I know some evolutionary geneticists will shoot me the evil eye for using that word) generating a tree of relationships is quite informative and relatively straightforward, since it has a comprehensible mapping onto to what really occurred in nature. […]
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 […]
Quantitative genomics, adaptation, and cognitive phenotypes
The human brain utilizes about ~20% of the calories you take in per day. It’s a large and metabolically expensive organ. Because of this fact there are lots of evolutionary models which focus on the brain. In Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human Richard Wrangham suggests that our need for calories to feed our […]
Why you should learn some population genetics
From reader surveys I know a substantial portion of the people who will see this post are financially well off (of those who aren’t, a large number are students). Therefore, you can invest in some books. Often people ask me questions related to population genetics in the comments (sometimes I get emails). That is all […]
Dost thou know the equilibrium at panmixia?
If you read a blog about Biblical criticism from a Christian perspective it would probably be best if you were familiar with the Bible. You don’t have to have read much scholarly commentary, rather, just the New Testament. Barring that, at least the synoptic gospels! At this point, with over 400 individuals responding to the […]
Why the rate of evolution may only depend on mutation
Sometimes people think evolution is about dinosaurs. It is true that natural history plays an important role in inspiring and directing our understanding of evolutionary process. Charles Darwin was a natural historian, and evolutionary biologists often have strong affinities with the natural world and its history. Though many people exhibit a fascination with the flora and fauna […]
Why overdominance probably isn’t responsible for much polymorphism
Hybrid vigor is a concept that many people have heard of, because it is very useful in agricultural genetics, and makes some intuitive sense. Unfortunately it often gets deployed in a variety of contexts, and its applicability is often overestimated. For example, many people seem to think (from personal communication) that it may somehow be […]
Why only one migrant per generation keeps divergence at bay
The best thing about population genetics is that because it’s a way of thinking and modeling the world it can be quite versatile. If Thinking Like An Economist is a way to analyze the world rationally, thinking like a population geneticist allows you to have the big picture on the past, present, and future, of […]
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. […]
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 […]
Northern Europeans and Native Americans are not more closely related than previously thought
A new press release is circulating on the paper which I blogged a few months ago, Ancient Admixture in Human History. Unlike the paper, the title of the press release is misleading, and unfortunately I notice that people are circulating it, and probably misunderstanding what is going on. Here’s the title and first paragraph: Native […]
Northern Europeans and Native Americans are not more closely related than previously thought
A new press release is circulating on the paper which I blogged a few months ago, Ancient Admixture in Human History. Unlike the paper, the title of the press release is misleading, and unfortunately I notice that people are circulating it, and probably misunderstanding what is going on. Here’s the title and first paragraph: Native […]
A plea for population genetics
The title here is somewhat misleading. This is not just a plea for population genetics, but for quantitative genetics as well. Genetics is a big field. But today it is defined by and large by DNA, the concrete entity in which the abstraction of the gen…
Paleopopulation Genetics
It seems a new field is being born! Jeff Wall & Monty Slatkin have a pretty thorough review out, Paleopopulation Genetics:
Paleopopulation genetics is a new field that focuses on the population genetics of extinct groups and ancestral populations …
Evolutionary & population genetics preprints – Haldane’s Sieve
OK, perhaps I can help with that. Dr. Coop speaks of the collaboration between himself & Dr. Joseph Pickrell, Haldane’s Sieve, which I added to my RSS days ago (and you can see me pushing it to my Pinboard). From the “About”:
As …
What is inbreeding?
I’ve put up a bunch of posts relating to inbreeding recently (1, 2, 3, 4). But I haven’t really defined it. First, let’s stipulate what inbreeding is not: it is not the same as incest. Acts of incest can include individuals who have n…
On theoretical evolutionary genetics
Joe Felsenstein in the comments:
The books you have listed are good ones, by fine people. But may I immodestly suggest a book of mine? If you want to work your way through the theory of theoretical population genetics, I have set of notes for my Genome…
Learning population and evolutionary genetics
A reader emailed me to ask what I thought would be a good way to better understand some of the more technical posts I put up.
First, two course notes which I’ve found useful as personal references:
– EEB 5348 — Population Genetics
– Evoluti…
Where the wild clines aren’t
In the recent ‘do human races’ exist controversy Nick Matzke’s post Continuous geographic structure is real, “discrete races” aren’t has become something of a touchstone (perhaps a post like Cosma Shalizi’s on I.Q. and heritability).* In the post Matzke emphasized the idea of clines, roughly a continuous gradient of genetic change over space. Fair enough. […]