Neanderthals came in all colors
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 […]
The collapse of logic & human culture
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 […]
When independent thought flourishes
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. […]
We are all…Sardinians?
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 […]
Who is the decider of the good life?
‘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 […]
Mike Snyder profile in Science
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 […]
Cloning the mentat
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 […]
The Indonesian cline
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 […]
Health insurance remains (and will remain) relevant
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 […]
Natural selection and dopamine receptor genes
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 […]
Seeing Ötzi through our eyes
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 […]
Not just genomics: the creeping future
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 […]
Tigons, ligers, leguars, and jagupards, oh my!
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 […]
Where the wild clines aren’t
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. […]
Beyond trees and European trees
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 […]
Google+ bombs
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 […]
Half of white liberals want less immigration
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 […]
Extraordinary claims require a lot of evidence
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 […]