Monthly Archives: October 2012

As many of you know around the year 2000 the analyses of Y chromosomal human lineages became a pretty big deal. The reason these lineages are important and useful is that they record the uninterrupted ancestry of males, from father to son, along the Y…

Read more

A paper on the psychology of religious belief, Paranormal and Religious Believers Are More Prone to Illusory Face Perception than Skeptics and Non-believers, came onto my radar recently. I used to talk a lot about the theory of religious cognitive psyc…

Read more

In the comments below there is a lot of talk about the worry of transferring gene X from organism 1 to organism 2, where the two organisms are very far apart on the tree of life. I’m a little sanguine about this, but that’s because there is…

Read more

With the election coming up, California Proposition 37, Mandatory Labeling of Genetically Engineered Food, is on my mind. From Ballotpedia:
If Proposition 37 is approved by voters, it will:
* Require labeling on raw or processed food offered for sale …

Read more

The above infographic from The New York Times article For Asians, School Tests Are Vital Steppingstones, was titled “1027-asians” when I tried to save it. No idea why, but I think that’s an amusing file name. My offensively titled po…

Read more

Here’s a caption from a Time article, What Your Doctor Isn’t Telling You About Your DNA:

Nice to know that two physicians in Philadelphia not only have medical degrees, but specialize in mind-reading the parents of this nation! Above the capti…

Read more

Image credit: Assumption-Free Estimation of Heritability from Genome-Wide Identity-by-Descent Sharing between Full Siblings

I really love the paper Assumption-Free Estimation of Heritability from Genome-Wide Identity-by-Descent Sharing between Full S…

Read more

Let your voice be heard!

Read more

Egg freezing enters clinical mainstream:
Egg freezing is no longer an experimental procedure, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), which on 22 October issued new guidelines on the controversial practice. The change in pol…

Read more

Anthony Damico has a How-to up, with scripts. Last I tried it the GSS data set was rather large, and I preferred using the web interface. But your mileage may vary.

Read more

There is a high likelihood that you know of which ABO blood group you belong to. I am A. My daughter is A. My father is B. My mother is A. I have siblings who are A, O, B, and AB. The inheritance is roughly Mendelian, with O being “recessive&#82…

Read more

Interesting story in The San Jose Mercury News, Open-source science helps San Carlos father’s genetic quest:
“We used materials that are public, freely available,” said Rienhoff, a physician and scientist, as Beatrice frolicked nearby…

Read more

Interesting story in The San Jose Mercury News, Open-source science helps San Carlos father’s genetic quest:
“We used materials that are public, freely available,” said Rienhoff, a physician and scientist, as Beatrice frolicked nearby…

Read more

I noticed today that GEDmatch is trying to raise funds to cover the cost of their web services. What are those services? Basically if you get raw data back from direct-to-consumer genotyping firms GEDmatch allows you to run further analytics. You can d…

Read more

The domestication of the dog is a complex and unresolved topic. But at this point I am convinced that this is one domestication event which well predates agriculture. To some extent this is common sense. There are tentative archaeological finds of dome…

Read more

I have mentioned the PLoS Genetics paper, The Date of Interbreeding between Neandertals and Modern Humans, before because a version of it was put up on arXiv. The final paper has a few additions. For example, it mentions the generally panned (at leas…

Read more

Every now and then I get emails/inquiries about using my simple “quick & dirty” charts. I always give permission, and in fact I never complain when other (usually more popular!) weblogs use them. Even on the very rare occasions where at…

Read more

The Pith: Natural selection comes in different flavors in its genetic constituents. Some of those constituents are more elusive than others. That makes “reading the label” a non-trivial activity.
As you may know when you look at patterns of…

Read more

Read more

You know that Newsweek is ending its print edition. This was long in the coming. What I find interesting is that apparently its circulation peaked in 1991, at 3.3 million. It declined to 3.1 million in 2007, and literally cratered over the past 5 years…

Read more

20/62
Razib Khan