Category Archives: Biology

Carole Hooven’s T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us is well written. I recommend it to everyone. There are lots of little details that make […]

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Man and dog share a long history. In much of the world, a history as old as humanity. The latest genetic evidence now tells us that the emergence of the domestic dog lineage occurred soon after the human expansion out of Africa 50,000 years ago, in the depths of the last Ice Age. We came. We saw. And we befriended. This we knew, but now we can closely examine how. A paper out today in Science uses 27 ancient dog genomes from the past 11,000 years to construct an evolutionary history nearly as rich as that produced by human population geneticists over the last decade. The authors found five lineages of ancient dogs that were present at the end of the last Ice Age. These were the dogs that interacted with human migrations during the rise of agriculture and the fall of civilizations to produce the riotous dog diversity that we know today. Familiar breeds like the Pekingese and the St. Bernard, as well as stray Asian village mutts, they’re all the products of a …

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Citation: Modeling Human Population Separation History Using Physically Phased GenomesEvolution is sometimes difficult to comprehend in terms of how it plays out in your mind’s eye. This is different from believing that evolution occurred. Evolutionary…

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In Massive Migrations? The Impact of Recent aDNA Studies on our View of Third Millennium Europe there is a reference to “molecular biological work.” I regularly see scholarship in evolutionary and population genomics and genetics referred to as “molecular biology” outside of the field, because since the 1960s molecular methods have been part and parcel […]

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Most of you have probably seen this stylized graphic somewhere along the away (I think it was on PBS at some point). But it’s still cool….

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I really love the fact that I live in the early 21st century for a host of reasons. That being said, one aspect that’s certainly true is that when it comes to charismatic natural variety and geography there are very few “blank spots” …

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BEHOLD, REIFICATION!

In the comments below Antonio pointed me to this working paper, What Do DNA Ancestry Tests Reveal About Americans’ Identity? Examining Public Opinion on Race and Genomics. I am perhaps being a bit dull but I can’t figure …

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I’ve been taking about ‘meat things’ for nearly 10 years, so I was really excited by the new Michael Specter piece in The New Yorker about artificially grown meat, Test-tube Burgers. You can’t read most of it online, so I want t…

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Josh Roseneau, when he’s taking time off from the evolution-creation wars, is poking around his own genome. Some sage advice:
On DNA Day, 23 and Me had a sale on their personal genomics service. They’d do their standard scan of your genome …

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The Pith: Biological complexity may be a particular evolutionary path taken due to to random acts of nature, not because there is a selective advantage to complexity.
The title above basically describes the message of evolutionary biologist Mike Lynch …

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John Hawks and Jerry Coyne are mooting the ‘species concepts’ debate, with particular focus on recent human origins (specifically, the relationship of modern humans to Neandertals and Denisovans). Coyne, who coauthored the book Speciation …

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This morning I received an email from the communication director of the American Anthropology Association. The contents are on the web:
AAA Responds to Public Controversy Over Science in Anthropology
Some recent media coverage, including an article in the New York Times, has portrayed anthropology as divided between those who practice it as a science and those […]

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Rosie Redfield has a “must read” post, Arsenic-associated bacteria (NASA’s claims). I won’t excerpt it, read the whole thing. To me it is very interesting that many pieces of her critique are ones I’ve encountered in emails or Facebook postings. She stitches them together into a coherent whole. She’ll be writing a letter to Science. […]

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One of the most persistent debates about the process of evolution is whether it exhibits directionality or inevitability. This is not limited to a biological context; Marxist thinkers long promoted a model of long-term social determinism whereby human groups progressed through a sequence of modes of production. Such an assumption is not limited to […]

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If you haven’t, check out the Leigh Van Valen obituary in The New York Times. I hadn’t been aware of the breadth of his work, and the disciplinary range he showed over his career.

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Razib Khan