The Jewish people: genetic unity in diversity
The Western WallThe religion of the Jews has had a great influence on the history of the world. Both Christianity and and Islam look to the Jewish tradition. Figures such as Moses are iconic in the Abrahamic context as lawgivers, setting a precedent fo…
Humanity’s Genes Reveal Its Tangled History
Reality, it turns out, is more complex and interesting than scientists ever imagined.
The Others were people too
Neanderthals, cousins we knew.In 2010, our understanding of Neanderthals, our human cousins, changed forever. Before this year, there was a live debate about whether they were human at all, whether they had fully elaborated language, or even culture.Wh…
The day we saw Stephen Hawking
In the spring of 1996, several of my dormmates decided to trek north to the University of Portland, to attend a speech by Stephen Hawking. We were still in that phase where we barely left campus, so intense was our social world. So this was a major undertaking. I don’t recall how we found out […]
The postdoc salary range with cost of living (situation probably worst than reported)
Nature has an article, Pay for US postdocs varies wildly by institution. True, but as Matt Hahn, professor of biology at Indian University in Bloomington (cost of living 93% of the USA average) observed there isn’t any correction for cost of living. The researcher who dug through the data actually posted it online, so I […]
The Indo-Aryan question nearing resolution
India Today published my review of the current state of the genetics and genomics of the Indian subcontinent, and what it can tell us about the ethnogenesis of South Asians generally. In the piece I tried to be very circumspect and stick to what we know with a high, if not perfect, degree of certainty. … Continue reading “The Indo-Aryan question nearing resolution”
Indian genetics, the never-ending argument
I am at this point somewhat fatigued by Indian population genetics. The real results are going to be ancient DNA, and I’m waiting on that. But people keep asking me about an article in Swarajya, Genetics Might Be Settling The Aryan Migration Debate, But Not How Left-Liberals Believe. First, the article attacks me as being … Continue reading “Indian genetics, the never-ending argument”
Indian media is finally reporting on the Aryan migration into South Asia
For various ideological reasons in India there has been a strong resistance to the idea that Aryans came from outside of South Asia. When David Reich’s Reconstructing Indian Population History was published 2009 the Indian media had a weird response. For example, Aryan-Dravidian divide a myth: Study. Though Reich’s paper was equivocal, it was clear … Continue reading “Indian media is finally reporting on the Aryan migration into South Asia”
The last days of pre-ancient DNA Indian population genomics
If anyone wants to know about the population genetics of South Asia, I recommend three papers (all are open access): – Genetic Evidence for Recent Population Mixture in India – A genetic chronology for the Indian Subcontinent points to heavily sex-biased dispersals – The promise of disease gene discovery in South Asia In the near … Continue reading “The last days of pre-ancient DNA Indian population genomics”
Razib Khan at the Center of Eurasia
The Eurogenes blog is running a fundraiser. I chipped in mostly to support his continued blogging. I don’t agree with everything he posts, but the site is a good and valuable resource. “Genome blogging” hasn’t gotten as far as I’d have thought it would…
Genomics Is Not Magic, There Is No Magic
MIT Technology Review has an article up, Do Your Family Members Have a Right to Your Genetic Code?, which is now part of the genomics-human-interest-piece genre you see regularly. Here you have the exemplar of this sort of narrative: what do you do whe…
Afro-Asiatic and Eurasian Backflow
If you follow Y genealogy you know that the distribution of R1ba2 exhibits a peculiar pattern. R1b is the most common haplgroup in Western Eurasia, and shares a deep common ancestry with R1a. It seems to have risen to high frequencies in Europe only du…
The Species Barriers Between Neanderthals and Anatomically Modern Humans
A new paper in The American Journal of Humans Genetics, The Divergence of Neandertal and Modern Human Y Chromosomes, reports on possible reasons why we don’t see Y chromosomes in modern humans from this archaic lineage, despite exhibiting detectable le…
The species barriers between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans
A new paper in The American Journal of Humans Genetics, The Divergence of Neandertal and Modern Human Y Chromosomes, reports on possible reasons why we don’t see Y chromosomes in modern humans from this archaic lineage, despite exhibiting detectable levels of autosomal admixture. As you might recall the clear lack of deep branching Y and […]
The species barriers between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans
A new paper in The American Journal of Humans Genetics, The Divergence of Neandertal and Modern Human Y Chromosomes, reports on possible reasons why we don’t see Y chromosomes in modern humans from this archaic lineage, despite exhibiting detectable levels of autosomal admixture. As you might recall the clear lack of deep branching Y and […]
Heritability and why Parents (but not Parenting) Matter
Non-additive effects don’t breed true with the same degree of fidelity—in fact these effects bust up the clean transmission of traits from parents to children (to use a sports analogy, it’s a bit like a cornerback in football deflecting the quarterback’s perfect spiral aimed at the receiver).
The culture of science is the culture of the Left
Robert Tracinski, in What Atheists Have To Offer The Right‘s, kindly points to this website. He also goes on to assert: That leads me to what atheists have to offer to this agenda. One of the problems with citing a religious foundation for freedom and Americanism is that these arguments tend not to appeal to […]
How genetics are rewriting the history of the Caribbean
Over the past century history has been approached from many different angles, despite the stereotype of scholars haunting dusty archives. Adventurers once called antiquarians became archaeologists, and inspired the fictional Indiana Jones. Today it is the turn of the geneticists to put their stamp upon history. By tracing patterns of variation they gain insights as to the […]
bioRxiv is here
For years many in the biological sciences community have been jealous of the exist of arXiv. This preprint server allows researchers to distribute their work widely to all comers. On occasion when when there have been debates about mimicking arXiv for biology there has been skepticism about the nature of the outcomes (my own rejoinder […]
The post bioRxiv is here appeared first on Gene Expression.
Why so few Asians in ecology? Not all groups have similar preferences
A week ago Keith Kloor had a post up, What Science, Environmentalism and the GOP Have in Common, where he bemoaned the lack of representation of non-whites in these categories. As a matter of fact I think Keith is wrong about science. Even constraining the data set to American citizens and permanent residents people of […]