Monthly Archives: January 2018

The fact that platforms tend to disappear has started to make me wonder: what posts should I figure out a way to preserve for posterity? Do any long-time readers have opinions? I’m not talking popular posts necessarily even, that I can find through google analytics. (note that I have my full archives on this site, […]

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Spencer and I are doing a Facebook live AMA at 2 PM EDT/1 PM CDT/12 PM MDT/11 AM PDT on the 1st of February (tomorrow as of when I’m writing this). People will ask us questions, and the questions will be relayed to us, and we’ll answer live on video. In other ‘media’ news our podcast […]

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Spencer and Razib discuss how geneticists infer ancestry from genomic data, with guest Joe Pickrell – geneticist, founder & CEO of consumer genomics startup Gencove.  Find out why telling you you’re 6% Greek is harder than it seems…

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One of the first things I wrote at length about historical population genetics, in late 2002, happened to be a rumination on the Y chromosomal phylogeography of Finnic peoples. At the time there was debate as to the provenance of the N1c Y chromosomal haplotype (this is the haplotype of the Rurikids by the way). […]

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I have mentioned before that the 1000 Genomes Chinese are heterogenous. Many of the ones sampled in Beijing are North Chinese. But there is structure within the South Chinese samples as well. The PCA above shows it. I’ve pruned some of the data for clarity (it’s probably a cline really, with cut-offs and breaks happening […]

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What is a species? I don’t know. And honestly, I don’t really care too much. Species is just a semantic label I place on a set of individuals related to a phylogeny. There tends to be a correlation in genetic variants between these creatures. For sexual organisms, which does not include all organisms, it generally […]

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Punjabi Genetic Variation In 1000 Genomes: Hindu Caste In The Land Of The Pure?.
I don’t know much about caste in Punjab (Pakistan) at all. But there’s a lot of genetic structure in this Lahore sample (these are people who claim their paren…

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Dienekes Pontikos resurfaces with a post, Out of Africa: a theory in crisis. The title is a bit hyperbolic. But in Dienekes’ defense, he’s been on this wagon for over ten years, and the evidence is moving in his direction, and not against it. I think a little crowing is understandable on this part. With […]

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If you’ve used Storify in the past, it’s time to save your stories before they shut down in May https://t.co/KQfOPZGhgL — Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer) January 28, 2018 In Robert Heinlein’s uneven late work Friday the mentor of the protagonist mentions that because of a possible collapse of technological civilization he maintains a collection of paper […]

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For various reasons we focus Classical Greece and Rome, but neglect the Hellenistic period, with the exception of the biography of Alexander. If you want to read something besides Alexander to Actium, check Dividing the Spoils. A heads up, this week on The Insight we’ll be talking to Joe Pickrell of Gencove. The main topic […]

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In the 1000 Genomes, there is a Punjabi dataset. Here is the description: These cell lines and DNA samples were prepared from blood samples collected in Lahore, Pakistan. The samples are from a mix of parent- adult child trios and unrelated individuals who identified themselves and their parents as Punjabi. A few years ago I […]

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Anhui is inland of the prosperous lower Yangzi river valley. According to Wikipedia this province is a recent creation, dating to the Kangxi Emperor. The northern part of the province is part of North China while the south closer to the Yangzi river valley regions. It’s relatively poor in comparison to the provinces to the […]

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I feel that for whatever reason that over the past few years that many people have started to exhibit weak intuitions about the magnitude of between population differences on this weblog. Two suggestions for why this might occur. * First, the proliferation of PCA plots with individuals can make it hard to discern averages * […]

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The recent African origins hypothesis for modern humans had several things going for it. First, most of the old fossils that look like modern humans were in Africa. Chris Stringer and others were pushing the African origins of our modern lineage before genetics came to the fore. But of course, you also have DNA. The […]

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At my other blog. Some charts.

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Since people asking me about this, and I’m running the South Asian Genotype Project, I thought I would post two non-PCA visualizations of how various South Asian groups relate to each other (along with a few outgroups). The radial plot above is a neighbor-joining tree visualized from pairwise Fst statistics (basically a proxy for genetic […]

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Sarah Haider in the talk above outlines the reality that she has particular privileges in regards to talking skeptically and critically of Islam because of who she is, not the force of her arguments. More precisely, her status as an immigrant, woman, and a person with brown skin, inoculates her against the reflexive charges of […]

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A new preprint in bioRxiv reports on the high likelihood if elevated Sephardic Jewish ancestry in New World populations, Latin Americans show wide-spread Converso ancestry and the imprint of local Native ancestry on physical appearance: …Using novel haplotype-based methods here we infer the sub-populations involved in admixture for over 6,500 Latin Americans and evaluate the […]

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Spencer, Razib and Gareth discuss the past, present and future of consumer genomics, from its early days as a cottage industry to where it goes in 2018 – and beyond.

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Razib Khan