The social and biological construction of race
Many of our categories are human constructions which map upon patterns in nature which we perceive rather darkly. The joints about which nature turns are as they are, our own names and representations are a different thing altogether. This does not mean that our categories have no utility, but we should be careful of confusing […]
1 migrant needed to prevent genetic divergence
In the survey below I asked if you knew about how many migrants per generation were needed to prevent divergence between populations. About ~80 percent of you stated you did not know the answer. That was not totally surprising to me. The reason I asked is that the result is moderately obscure, but also rather […]
Nature really is real
I generated the figure at left from table 9.6 in The Genetics of Human Populations. This book was published in 1971, but I purchased the 1999 edition (which was simply a republication of the original text by Dover) in 2005.* At the time I recall reading the section on inferring the number of genetic loci […]
James F. Crow in Genetics
At 95 James F. Crow is not only an eminent population geneticist, but he knew the figures who were responsible for the whole field. The journal Genetics has commissioned a series of essays and perspectives in his honor. The first is by Daniel Hartl. I thought this was funny: Soon after joining the program I […]
On the real possibility of human differences
I have discussed the reality that many areas of psychology are susceptible enough to false positives that the ideological preferences of the researchers come to the fore. CBC Radio contacted me after that post, and I asked them to consider that in 1960 psychologists discussed the behavior of homosexuality as if it was a pathology. […]
When did population genetics emerge?
I recently heard an eminent geneticist declare that population genetics began with Theodosius Dobzhansky’s Genetics and the Origin of Species in 1937. My immediate reflex was to be skeptical of this, at least going by Will Provine’s treatment in The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics, which seemed to push back the timing to the 1920s. […]
The words of the father
Over at A Replicated Typo they are talking about a short paper in Science, Mother Tongue and Y Chromosomes. In it Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew observe that “A correlation is emerging that suggests language change in an already-populated region may require a minimum proportion of immigrant males, as reflected in Y-chromosome DNA types.” But […]
Out of Africa’s end?
The BBC has a news report up gathering reactions to a new PLoS ONE paper, The Later Stone Age Calvaria from Iwo Eleru, Nigeria: Morphology and Chronology. This paper reports on remains found in Nigeria which date to ~13,000 years B.P. that exhibit a very archaic morphology. In other words, they may not be anatomically […]
Tutsi probably differ genetically from the Hutu
Paul Kagame with Barack and Michelle Obama
I first heard about Rwanda in the 1980s in relation to Dian Fossey’s work with mountain gorillas. The details around this were tragic enough, but obviously what happened in 1994 washed away the events d…
The geography of genes tells us only so much about history
L. L. Cavalli-Sforza’s The History and Geography of Human Genes is a book I reference a great deal. Cavalli-Sforza is the godfather of the field of historical population genetics, the phylogeography of humankind. Though his work was on classical…
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…
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…
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 …
Reify my genes!
BEHOLD, REIFICATION!
In the comments below Antonio pointed me to this working paper, What Do DNA Ancestry Tests Reveal About Americans’ Identity? Examining Public Opinion on Race and Genomics. I am perhaps being a bit dull but I can’t figure …
Pygmies are short because nature made them so
Aka Pygmies
The Pith: There has been a long running argument whether Pygmies in Africa are short due to “nurture” or “nature.” It turns out that non-Pygmies with more Pygmy ancestry are shorter and Pygmies with more non-Pygmy …
John Gillespie, “the evil scientist from America”
I own a book of Motoo Kimura’s collected papers, and of course I have a copy of John Gillespie’s Population Genetics: A Concise Guide. But I’d forgotten the acrimony between the two men. Gillespie has been retired for half a decade no…
Sweeping through a fly’s genome
Credit: Karl Magnacca
The Pith: In this post I review some findings of patterns of natural selection within the Drosophila fruit fly genome. I relate them to very similar findings, though in the opposite direction, in human genomics. Different forms o…
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 […]
To study humankind, AAA responds
This morning I received an email from the communication director of the American Anthropology Association. The contents are on the web:
AAA Responds to Public Controversy Over Science in Anthropology
Some recent media coverage, including an article in the New York Times, has portrayed anthropology as divided between those who practice it as a science and those […]
Painting the human tree of life
Tishkoff et al.
Reading Peter Bellwood’s First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, I’m struck by how much of a difference five years has made. When Bellwood was writing the ‘orthodoxy’ of the nature of the expansion of farming into Europe leaned toward cultural diffusion. Today the paradigm is in flux, as a new generation of […]