Your child’s genome before the 2nd trimester?
A long piece in Slate, Will Gattaca come True?:
When Lo licensed his technology to Sequenom, he stipulated that it could not be used for sex selection. Rabinowitz says Natera won’t test for sex at this point, either. But how long such provisions will…
Redefining “impact factor”
In rereading the paper on Pygmy height genetics, I noticed that PLoS had rolled out some nice new metrics. To my shock this paper, which I think is a moderately big deal, had less than 1,000 views, and only ~150 PDF downloands! This is going to change,…
Pygmies: “old” populations, and a new “look” (?)
Over the years one issue that crops up repeatedly in human evolutionary genetics and paleoanthropology (or more precisely, the popular exposition of the topics in the media) is the idea that is that “population X are the most ancient Y.” X …
Rise and fall of celebutantes
Kim Kardashian was at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner. Wow. But it made me wonder whatever happened to Paris Hilton? Did she drop off the face of the earth? Here’s Google Trends:
The bottom panel is news, the top panel public s…
Comparing American conservative Protestants & Muslims
A few years ago a book came out, American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right. The title clearly was aimed to push copies, but the gist of the title has moderately wide circulation. The rough sketch is that conser…
Her identity by descent made flesh
As I have indicated before, my daughter has a family tree where everyone out to 0.25 coefficient of relatedness has been genotyped by 23andMe. This is convenient in many ways. Before, relatedness was a theory. Now relatedness can be ascertained on the …
Elizabeth Warren, Native American
Elizabeth Warren, Native American
It has come to my attention that Elizabeth Warren, who is running for a Senate seat in Massachusetts, claims Native American ancestry. This did not surprise me. Warren is from Oklahoma, where nearly 10% of the popul…
Facing the ocean
Halford Mackinder’s conceptualization of the world
With the recent publication of the paper on the archaeogenetics of Neolithic Sweden I feel like we’re nearing a precipice. That precipice overlooks lands of great richness, filled with ho…
Iraq: the model that wasn’t
The magazine Foreign Policy recently had a “sex” issue out. This issue is particularly famous for Mona Eltahaway’s jeremiad against Arab male culture, and their attitudes toward women. Over at bloggingheads.tv Charli Carpenter express…
Handicap breeds excellence?
There’s a wide-ranging story in LA Weekly on the decline of 35mm film. It covers a lot of angles, but this one issue jumped out at me:
No wonder, then, that directors like Christopher Nolan worry that if 35mm film dies, so will the gold standard …
Handicap breeds excellence?
There’s a wide-ranging story in LA Weekly on the decline of 35mm film. It covers a lot of angles, but this one issue jumped out at me:
No wonder, then, that directors like Christopher Nolan worry that if 35mm film dies, so will the gold standard …
America: as if it is 1970
I noticed that The Washington Post had an article up, Number of biracial babies soars over past decade, based on 2010 Census data. I was immediately curious if my expectations were correct in this case, because the term “biracial” has a ver…
The last days of Grendel
A new paper in Science has just been published which in its broad outlines has been described in conference presentations. When examining the autosomal genetic variation of three individuals of the hunter-gatherer Pitted Ware Culture (PWC), and one of …
Types of genetics
Molecular genetics
Developmental genetics
Population genetics
Quantitative genetics
Phylogenetics
Thoughts? Recently had a discussion whether phylogeneticists considered themselves geneticists (qualified “no”). Quantitative genetics really…
Sometimes men like women like the Chinese like pork
Why Do They Hate Us?, is a powerful and moving jeremiad by Mona Eltahawy. It accurately describes without dispute the sorry state of female flourishing in the Middle East, broadly understood. And yet I wonder at the quasi-Freudian rationale on offer, that these men “hate” women. A rationale of this sort seems more derived from the worries […]
Leaning the wrong way?
Many of the people I socialize with in “real life” have a biological sciences background. That being said, a relatively deep understanding of ncRNA does not give you any better sense of behavior genetics than the person off the street. And …
One baby, alone on a PCA island
A week ago I reported that according to 23andMe I’m 40% Asian, and she is 8% Asian (in the future if I say “she” without explanation, you know of whom I speak). Obviously something is off here. The situation resolved itself when I tu…
The world is as it should be in personal genomics
I’ve been having some fun with my daughter’s personal genomics. You see, she has her whole pedigree out to r = 1/4. So, for example, contributions from her grandparents seem to be about on this order:
Paternal grandfather = 0.28
Paternal gr…
An algorithm is just an algorithm
In the comments below:
You should include a Moroccan or otherwise native North African sample. Without a North African sample West Africans act as proxy for some of that North African ancestry that does exist in Iberia, specially the Western third (Por…
Paternity most assured
The myth that 10 percent of children the product of ‘non-paternity events’ is rather persistent. I have no idea why, but I do know that even biologists accept it. But how we can we continue to accept this when surnames can provide populatio…