Monthly Archives: January 2011

Zack is going to post the first batch of results from HAP tomorrow. It looks like he’s going to be using mostly the merged HGDP, HapMap, SVGP, and Behar data set, supplemented by a second set which also merges the Xing et al. sample (the intersec…

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With all the geopolitical tumult and news I was a bit curious to see what The World Values Survey could tell us about public opinion in Egypt and Tunisia. Unfortunately, Tunisia hasn’t been in any of their surveys, though Egypt has. So I thought …

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The first month of 2011 is almost over….
Exiled Islamist Leader Returns to Tunisia. “…while Ennahdha was branded an Islamic terrorist group by Ben Ali, it is considered moderate by scholars.” I remember talking to a gay friend a…

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mtDNA haplogroup G1a2
The pith: In this post I examine the most recent results from 23andMe for my family in the context of familial and regional (Bengal) history. I also use these results to offer up a framework for the ethnognesis of the eastern Ben…

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1) First, a post from the past: Theological incorrectness – when people behave how they shouldn’t….sort of .
2) Weird search query of the week: “khoikhoi woman in porn.” I had a suspicion I knew who entered this search …

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Zack has been posting his data sources, as well as how he filtered and formatted them, all this week. I assume that the first wave of results will be online soon. As of yesterday, this is what he had (I know he got some more today):
– Punjab 7
– Bengal…

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Zack has been posting his data sources, as well as how he filtered and formatted them, all this week. I assume that the first wave of results will be online soon. As of yesterday, this is what he had (I know he got some more today):
– Punjab 7
– Bengal…

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John Farrell pointed me to this Anne Gibbons’ piece, A New View Of the Birth of Homo sapiens. Here’s some interesting passages:
The new picture most resembles so-called assimilation models, which got relatively little attention over the yea…

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A comment below inquired about “good books” on American history. Unfortunately I don’t know as much about American history as I do about Roman or Chinese history. But over the years there have been several books which I find to have been very value-add in terms of understanding where we are now. In other words, […]

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The media is reporting rather breathlessly a new find out of Arabia which seems to push much further back the presence of anatomically modern humans in this region (more accurately, the archaeology was so sparse that assessments of human habitation see…

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There is pretty much a 100% probability that I carry Neandertal origin genes, since I’m Eurasian. That being said, I hadn’t looked too closely into the matter in regards to my own genome, because the whole “which SNPs are Neandertal&#…

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Image credit: Luna04

My post The paradigm is dead, long live the paradigm! expressed to some extent my befuddlement at the current state of human evolutionary genetics and paleoanthropology. After the review of the paper of possible elevated admixtur…

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Walter Russell Mead has a fascinating blog post up, The Birth of the Blues. In it, he traces the roots of modern American “Blue-state” liberalism back to the Puritans, the Yankees of New England. This is a plausible argument. I believe that many social-political coalitions and configurations in contemporary America do have deep historical roots. […]

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If you’re a regular reader, you may have noticed some changes. Since I moved to Discover blogs I’ve been posting less and less here. Additionally, I’ve been putting some of my shorter less science oriented stuff at Brown Pundits and Secular Right. And I suspect twitter has cannibalized some of the link aggregation function of […]

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I have noted a few times that one thing you have to be careful about in two dimensional plots which show genetic variance is that the dimensions in which the data are projected upon are often generated from the data itself. So adding more data can chan…

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After 2010′s world-shaking revolutions in our understanding of modern human origins, the admixture of Eurasian hominins with neo-Africans, I assumed there was going to be a revisionist look at results which seemed to point to mixing between diffe…

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Yesterday the first batch of results from 23andMe’s v3 chip came online. Instead of 550,000 SNPs you get ~1 million. The difference is pretty clear when you look at the raw SNPs. Under Account → Browse Raw Data, I can enter LCT, and this is wha…

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Participants So Far. Zack reports 10 people of South Asian ancestry have sent their raw data. His coverage seems OK, but he only has multiple samples from Punjabis. I know some people who will be sending their data in soon, and I’m going to swap …

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Last week I announced the Harappa Ancestry Project. It now has its own dedicate website, http://www.harappadna.org. Additionally, it has its own Facebook page. For Zack to get his own URL he needs about 10 more “likes,” so please like it! (…

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Image Credit: Anirudh Koul
One of the great things about the mass personal genomic revolution is that it allows people to have direct access to their own information. This is important for the more than 90% of the human population which has sketchy ge…

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Razib Khan