Monthly Archives: March 2012

There’s a report in Science about a new short paper about Neandertal pigmentation genetics. The context is this. First, in 2007 an ingenuous paper was published which inferred that it may be that Neandertals had red hair, at least based on an N = 2 from two divergent locations. The new study looks at three […]

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Slavery’s last stronghold: Moulkheir Mint Yarba returned from a day of tending her master’s goats out on the Sahara Desert to find something unimaginable: Her baby girl, barely old enough to crawl, had been left outdoors to die. The usually stoic mother — whose jet-black eyes and cardboard hands carry decades of sadness — wept […]

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One of the things I instinctively hated about my “ancestral culture,” that of Bangladesh, is that there wasn’t that great of an emphasis on individual independent thought. Why, for example, was it important never to drink water while you were eating, as opposed to after you were done? The response was simple: that’s the rule. […]

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The title is tongue in cheek. But I have been noting with interest Dienekes’ trial runs with TreeMix. With it he has discovered a very peculiar admixture event, at least as determined by the software. The results are below, with my clarifying labels: Basically the software seems to be implying that there has been gene […]

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‘Ashley treatment’ on the rise amid concerns from disability rights groups: A controversial procedure to limit the growth of severely disabled children to keep them forever small – which ignited a fiery debate about the limits of medical intervention when it was first revealed five years ago – has begun to spread among families in […]

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The Sepia Mutiny weblog ends on April 1st. Notice the date; I’m not totally convinced this isn’t a false and humorous move. That being said, I know that the idea has been mooted a bit over the past year or so, because for a period last year I was a contributor and it came up. […]

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Examining His Own Body, Stanford Geneticist Stops Diabetes in Its Tracks: Over a 14-month period, the molecular geneticist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, analyzed his blood 20 different times to pluck out a wide variety of biochemical data depicting the status of his body’s immune system, metabolism, and gene activity. In today’s issue […]

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There’s news about the Woolly Mammoth cloning attempts again. This gets floated every few years, and nothing has come of it…yet. I assume with enough money and time invested it will come to fruition. And whoever invests their time and energy and gets a successful return will probably get really famous, really quickly. But I’ve […]

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Dienekes has touched upon it in detail, so I don’t have much to add. Except for two points: 1) The ancestry cline here is not due to isolation-by-distance, but the expansion of the Austronesian population rather precipitously ~4,000 years ago. As Dienekes observed this was rather clear by non-genetic means; this is just icing on […]

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How a $1,000 test could destroy the health-insurance industry: As we sequence more genomes, mine more data, and conduct more studies, we’ll find a lot more of these connections. Eventually, genomic testing will be a powerful predictor of future illness. And it raises the potential that young people will get themselves tested and then purchase […]

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I’ve mentioned before that though Barack H. Obama’s most salient ethnic identity is that of a black American, in many ways he far more resembles his “Yankee” maternal family (who raised him). By Yankee, I mean that I presumed that they were from the Yankee component of the Kansas population, with names like Emerson in […]

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Long time readers will be familiar with the large literature in behavior genetics/genomics and dopamine receptor genes. So with that, I point you to a paper exploring the patterns of variation and their relationship to possible natural selection, No Evidence for Strong Recent Positive Selection Favoring the 7 Repeat Allele of VNTR in the DRD4 […]

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Dienekes got his hands on Otzi’s genome finally, and decided to confirm some suspicions. In general no great surprise, though I think the number of SNPs he used (44,000) is a little on the low side for the questions he was asking. But the details here aren’t too relevant because all the available evidence points […]

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In 2007 Reihan Salam asked me when the $1,000 genome was going arrive. On paper, probably around this year, or early next. But as I’ve been suggesting it really isn’t that big of a deal (the sticker price isn’t real in any case, someone will want the publicity). Over at The Crux I try and […]

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The recent publicity around the gorilla genome highlighted to me that eastern and western gorilla lineages seem to have diverged ~1 million years ago. In the process of trying to figure out hybridity I stumbled upon this matrix from Wikipedia on panthera hybrids: Lion ♀ Tiger ♀ Jaguar ♀ Leopard ♀ Lion  Lion Liger Liguar Lipard Tiger  Tigon Tiger […]

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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. […]

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Submitted for your approval, a very important post and preprint from Dr. Joseph Pickrell, Identifying targets of natural selection in human and dog evolution. If you read the preprint there’s a lot of good stuff. Dienekes highlighted the most relevant aspect: representation of genetic relationships with phylogenetic trees mask the likely reality of gene flow […]

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Google+ Lags Far Behind Facebook, Twitter and MySpace in Latest Study: Google+ became the fastest growing social network within months of its debut last June, but a recent study casts doubt on whether most of its users are spending much time on the site. According to ComScore, users spent an average of just 3.3 minutes […]

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As I have mentioned elsewhere my espousal of conservatism at Moving Secularism Forward went well. Interestingly several people came up to me afterward and admitted a sympathy for the “conservative” position on immigration (i.e., restrictionism). The rationales were both environmentalist (population control types) and law & order. Just out of curiosity I wanted to see […]

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Several people have emailed me about the Solutrean hypothesis. The trigger is the publication of Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America’s Clovis Culture. To my surprise this has received a lot of media attention. The Washington Post, io9, and The New Scientist. Granted, the coverage has been appropriately skeptical. But it still gets to […]

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Razib Khan