So what’s point of demographic models which leave you scratching your head
There’s a new paper on Tibetan adaptation to high altitudes, Evolutionary history of Tibetans inferred from whole-genome sequencing. The focus of the paper is on the fact that more genes than have previously been analyzed seem to be the targets of natural selection. And I buy most of their analyses (not sure about the estimate […]
How Tibetans can function at high altitudes
About seven years ago I wrote two posts about how Tibetans manage to function at very high altitudes. And it’s not just physiological functioning, that is, fitness straightforwardly understood. High altitudes can cause a sharp reduction in reproductive fitness because women can not carry pregnancies to term. In other words, high altitude is a very strong selection […]
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 […]