Jerry Coyne on race: a reflection of evolution
After my post on the ‘race question’ I thought it would be useful to point to Jerry Coyne’s ‘Are there human races’?. The utility is that Coyne’s book Speciation strongly shaped my own perceptions. I knew the empirical reality of clustering before I read that book, but the analogy with “species concept” debates was only […]
Are Sardinians like Iberians?
Dienekes asks: In terms of autosomal DNA, the Iceman clearly clusters with modern Sardinians, and also appears slightly more removed than them compared to continental Europeans. Interestingly, at least as far as the PC analyssi shows, Sardinians appear to be intermediate between the Iceman and SW Europeans, rather than Italians. Perhaps, this makes sense if […]
Ötzi the Iceman and the Sardinians
Well, the paper is finally out, New insights into the Tyrolean Iceman’s origin and phenotype as inferred by whole-genome sequencing. In case you don’t know, Ötzi the Iceman died 5,300 years ago in the alpine region bordering Austria and Italy. His seems to have been killed. And due to various coincidences his body was also […]
Neandertal population structure
There’s a new paper out, Partial genetic turnover in neandertals: continuity in the east and population replacement in the west. The primary results are above. Basically, using 13 mtDNA samples the authors conclude that it looks as if there was a founder effect for Neanderthals in Western Europe ~50 K years ago, generating a very […]
What the World Is Made Of
I know you’re all following the Minute Physics videos (that we talked about here), but just in case my knowledge is somehow fallible you really should start following them. After taking care of why stones are round, and why there is no pink light, Henry Reich is now explaining the fundamental nature of our everyday […]
Men on the move and women in place?
After posting on Basque mtDNA I wanted to make something more explicit that I alluded to below, that uniparental lineages are highly informative, but they may not be representative of total genome content. This is plainly true in the case of mestizos from Latin America, but we don’t need genetics to point us in the […]
Parkinson’s disease patients & free 23andMe
Michelle tipped me off to 23andMe’s new initiative to get Parkison’s disease sufferers genotyped. Basically, if you are a sufferer, you get the service for free. The goal presumably to increase the sample size so as to pick up new possible associations. But a question: can you think of a downside for Parkinson’s disease sufferers? […]
Basque maternal heritage & continuity
There’s a new paper in AJHG which caught my eye, The Basque Paradigm: Genetic Evidence of a Maternal Continuity in the Franco-Cantabrian Region since Pre-Neolithic Times (ungated). The first thing you need to know about this paper is that it focuses on only the direct maternal lineage of Basques via the mtDNA. In some ways […]
The data sets in the dark
Recently I was tipped off to the appearance of a new paper, Genome-Wide Association Study Identifies Chromosome 10q24.32 Variants Associated with Arsenic Metabolism and Toxicity Phenotypes in Bangladesh. This is the section which caught my eye: “Using data on urinary arsenic metabolite concentrations and approximately 300,000 genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for 1,313 arsenic-exposed Bangladeshi […]
Friday Piano Solo
Keith Emerson has been doing some interesting work on wave mechanics, Fourier transforms, and temporal structure. Here are some of his findings.
Not exactly what you see at the Grammy’s these days. (Not that it was back in 1974, either.)
How common are godless liberals?
I’m going to be speaking at the Moving Secularism Forward conference in Orlando next week. They invited me because I’m a conservative atheist public intellectual, and the three other conservative atheist public intellectuals in the United States were presumably busy. In any case, going over what I’m going to talk about I was double-checking political […]
Adam’s end was never in the cards
There has been a lot of talk in the media about a new paper which reports that the Y chromosome is not deteriorating, as had been previously inferred from the data. In the 2004 Bryan Sykes wrote Adam’s Curse: A Future Without Men which used this model as a framing device (and naturally elicited great general […]
Everything is Connected
They do things differently over in Britain. For one thing, their idea of a fun and entertaining night out includes going to listen to a lecture/demonstration on quantum mechanics and the laws of physics. Of course, it helps when the lecture is given by someone as charismatic as Brian Cox, and the front row seats […]
Ending the Ice Ages
We Are All Panamanians: When the Isthmus of Panama rose from the sea, it may have changed the climate of Africa–and encouraged the evolution of humans. The emergence of the Isthmus of Panama has been credited with many milestones in Earth’s history. When it rose from the sea some 3 million years ago, the isthmus […]
The race question: are bonobos human?
Recently Jason Antrosio began a dialogue with readers of this weblog on the “race question.” More specifically, he asked that we peruse a 2009 review of the race question in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Additionally, he also pointed me to another 2009 paper in Genome Research, Non-Darwinian estimation: My ancestors, my genes’ ancestors. […]
Neutrinos and Cables
I’m a little torn about this: the Twitter machine and other social mediums have blown up about this story at Science Express, which claims that the faster-than-light neutrino result from the OPERA collaboration has been explained as a simple glitch: According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from […]
Loss-of-function & variation in load
Greg Cochran pointed out something that I’d been considering about the MacArthur et al. paper: if the average human (OK, non-African human) has ~100 loss-of-function variants, then the standard deviation should be ~10. That’s because the distribution is presumably poisson, and variance = mean, and the square root of the of the variance (~100) is the […]
Books Made From Electrons!
[Updated to provide a better link for DtU overlord Carl Zimmer.] The conventional presentation of a book — words and images printed on sheets, bound together in a folio — is a perfected technology. It hasn’t changed much in centuries, and likely will be with us for centuries to come. But that doesn’t mean that […]
The future of the world
May be Mumbai.
Money vs. Science
Everyone who has been paying attention knows that there is a strong anti-science movement in this country — driven partly by populist anti-intellectualism, but increasingly by corporate interests that just don’t like what science has to say. It’s an old problem — tobacco companies succeeded for years in sowing doubt about the health effects of […]