A lighter shade of brown: the Dan MacArthur chronicles, not a Romani
A few days ago I suggested that Dr. Daniel MacArthur might have South Asian ancestry. Now, when confronted with surprise the best option is to stick with your prior assumption, unless that surprise is powerful enough for you to “update” your model. After a few days of further analysis I will update: I do think […]
A lighter shade of brown: the Dan MacArthur chronicles, not a Romani
A few days ago I suggested that Dr. Daniel MacArthur might have South Asian ancestry. Now, when confronted with surprise the best option is to stick with your prior assumption, unless that surprise is powerful enough for you to “update” your model. After a few days of further analysis I will update: I do think […]
Don’t wait to have children!
The New Republic has a piece up, How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society, which won’t have surprising data for readers of this weblog. But it’s nice to see this sort of thing go “mainstream.” My daughter was born when her parents were in their mid-30s, so I know all the statistics. They aren’t good […]
We don’t know why Ethiopians breathe easy
Most people are aware that altitude imposes constraints on individual performance and function. Much of this is flexible; athletes who train at high altitudes may gain a performance edge. But over the long term there are costs, just as there are with computers which are ‘overclocked.’ This is the point where you make the transition […]
$99 for 1 million markers
Looks like 23andMe has a new $99 price point. If so, that’s 100 markers per cent! (here’s the press release) 1) Privacy: Yes, this a privacy risk. 23andMe is fundamentally an IT company, and IT companies mess up. But I am confident that within 10-15 years genetic information is going to be pretty easy to […]
$99 for 1 million markers
Looks like 23andMe has a new $99 price point. If so, that’s 100 markers per cent! (here’s the press release) 1) Privacy: Yes, this a privacy risk. 23andMe is fundamentally an IT company, and IT companies mess up. But I am confident that within 10-15 years genetic information is going to be pretty easy to […]
Is Daniel MacArthur ‘desi’?
My initial inclination in this post was to discuss a recent ordering snafu which resulted in many of my friends being quite peeved at 23andMe. But browsing through their new ‘ancestry composition’ feature I thought I had to discuss it first, because of some nerd-level intrigue. Though I agree with many of Dienekes concerns about […]
The origins of the Romani determined definitively
In many cases there are questions of a historical and ethnographic nature which are subject to controversy and debate. Scholarly arguments are laid out, and further dispute ensues. For decades progress seems fleeting, as one hypothesis is accepted, only to be subject to later revision. This sort of pattern gives succor to the most cynical […]
Too many feeds, too many views
Since I feed all my blogs into my Twitter account sometimes that leads to confusion. Here is a Twitter follower from Chitral: Peculiarly, anti-religious screeds are very, very, common on many science blogs. Though usually they are directed at Christianity. … Continue reading →
On getting gated papers
I get a fair number of emails (often press release blasts) to my public address, contactgnxp -at- gmail -dot- com. Of these a non-trivial are requests for papers. If I have access to a paper I always send that paper. That being said I’ve confused some of these emails for publicist-junk mail and what not. […]
The balancing act
I am going to expand this into a post on Discover, but it is useful here. Do my parents really want me to get married?: Abstract Evolutionary theory predicts that based on sex-specific reproductive interests maternal grandparents increase child well-being more … Continue reading →
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TreeMix: Who were the West Eurasian ancestors of Ethiopians?
One of the primary concerns/questions I had about Luca Pagani’s paper on the genetic origin of Ethiopians is that he found that their West Eurasian ancestor was closer to Levantine than Arabian. I was confused by this because on model-based clustering (e.g., Admixture) when you push down to a fine level of granularity you always […]
More diversity in the Personal Genome Project
Seeking Diversity (Especially Families): Because the PGP is self-recruiting, we don’t have a very balanced set of participants. “Self-recruitment” means that all participants have enrolled in our project through word of mouth, finding our website and enrolling online. To put it bluntly, that means we mostly end up with young white men…. …Research within one […]
Layering genetic histories
As a follow up to my post from yesterday, I decided to run TreeMix on a data set I happened to have had on hand (see Inference of Population Splits and Mixtures from Genome-Wide Allele Frequency Data for more on TreeMix). Basically I wanted to display a tree with, and without, gene flow. The technical […]
Africa’s hidden people hold the keys to the past
I mentioned this in passing on my post on ASHG 2012, but it seems useful to make explicit. For the past few years there has been word of research pointing to connections between the Khoisan and the Cushitic people of Ethiopia. To a great extent in the paper which is forthcoming there is the likely […]
Ah, the joys of multiculturalism!
I’m not particularly close to my family, but this Christmas we are thinking of inviting my parents for a bit. The reason is that they haven’t seen their first grandchild very often since she was born. But for me the … Continue reading →
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High culture in the mega-city
A Passage to Bangladesh: For years, Dhaka—the sprawling capital of Bangladesh—has been known for the ancient beauty of its mosques, its nauseating traffic jams, and the thick parade of rickshaws lining the narrow streets. But English literature? In Dhaka? Any … Continue reading →
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Sudhir Venkatesh goings on
I’m skeptical of most academic sociology, so I don’t follow Sudhir Venkatesh too closely. But it seems that some people are peeved, Columbia’s Gang Scholar Lives on the Edge: Today, he is a celebrity in an otherwise low-key academic field … Continue reading →
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Northern Europeans and Native Americans are not more closely related than previously thought
A new press release is circulating on the paper which I blogged a few months ago, Ancient Admixture in Human History. Unlike the paper, the title of the press release is misleading, and unfortunately I notice that people are circulating it, and probably misunderstanding what is going on. Here’s the title and first paragraph: Native […]
Northern Europeans and Native Americans are not more closely related than previously thought
A new press release is circulating on the paper which I blogged a few months ago, Ancient Admixture in Human History. Unlike the paper, the title of the press release is misleading, and unfortunately I notice that people are circulating it, and probably misunderstanding what is going on. Here’s the title and first paragraph: Native […]