Month: March 2011
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Portlandia, OVER
Keep watching until the end, that’s the funniest part….
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Population structure within Africa
John Hawks, reviews Henn et al., and notes: By the time we find “modern” humans in West Asia, the African population had long since diversified into regional populations. This is not news; the mtDNA evidence has suggested for several years …
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Eurasia, ADMIXTURE supervised & unsupervised
After yesterday’s post I thought it might be useful to see how running ADMIXTURE in different modes would impact the outcomes. Probably the major reason I wish more people would use this software is that they’d see that this program is jus…
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Analyzing ancestry with ADMIXTURE, step by step
Over the past few months I was hoping more people would start doing what Zack Ajmal, Dienekes, and David, have been doing. There are public data sets, and open source software, so that anyone with nerdy inclination can explore their own questions out o…
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Think twins!
In the comments below, John Howard asks in relation to me releasing my genotype into the public domain: “I’m curious if this means you give permission to be cloned, or for someone to reproduce with you, by making gametes from your genome. Do yo…
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DTC testing, mailing addresses, contact information, etc.
Chris, and others, have encouraged me to put up some contact information in regards to DTC testing and the . Here is what Chris has gathered…. The Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) is the division of the FDA that would be respon…
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DTC, FDA, regulation, etc.
It’s been a few days since my post on the FDA DTC hearings was linked around the blogosphere, and generated some incredibly well informed discussion. There are plenty of reactions, but there are two which I want to point to specifically. First, M…
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Saturday Stuff – March 12th, 2011
Due to a “busy” cat-schedule, the regular Friday posting was delayed for one day. If you have a problem with it, the individual with whom you can take it up is indefinitely taking a nap. So good luck with that! 1) First, a post from the pa…
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Harappa Ancestry Project @ N ~ 50
Zack Ajmal now has over 50 participants in the Harappa Ancestry Project. This does not include the Pakistani populations in the HGDP, the HapMap Gujaratis, the Indians from the SVGP. Nevertheless, all these samples still barely cover vast heart of Sout…
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Pruning the family tree, chance & inevitability
I picked up Clive Finlayson’s The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived mostly for its alternative history value. By this, I mean that it was published in the fall of 2009, less than a year before research which sugge…
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D.I.Y. bio, power to the people!
In light of my last post, I want to point to some groups attempting to create some “bottom-up” biological science in the real world. In the Los Angeles area you have SoCal DIY Bio, and in northern California you have BioCurious. And you als…
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Your genes, your rights – FDA’s Jeffrey Shuren misleading testimony under oath
Update: Welcome Instapundit readers! Please make sure to follow the very thorough discussion/debate over at Discover Blogs, where this has been cross-posted. End Update Over the past few days I’ve been very disturbed…and angry. The reason is that I’ve been reading Misha Angrist and Dr. Daniel MacArthur. First, watch this video: In the very near…
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Your genes, your rights – FDA’s Jeffrey Shuren misleading testimony under oath
Over the past few days I’ve been very disturbed…and angry. The reason is that I’ve been reading Misha Angrist and Dr. Daniel MacArthur. First, watch this video: In the very near future you may be forced to go through a “profess…
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Where in the world did anatomically modern humans come from?
The Pith: I review a recent paper which argues for a southern African origin of modern humanity. I argue that the statistical inference shouldn’t be trusted as the final word. This paper reinforces previously known facts, but does not add much th…
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Out of South Africa?
Credit: Ian Beatty Apparently there’s a new paper on Bushmen genetic diversity coming out in PNAS. It reports that this group is the most diverse in the world in terms of intra-population variance. This is not a great surprise after the much her…
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Friday Face
Since I posted about facial composites last week, I need to mention this, The most typical face on the planet: The researchers conclude that a male, 28-year-old Han Chinese man is the most typical person on the planet. There are 9 million of them. The…
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Is this a parody of James Franco?
OK, a little off topic for this weblog…not science, not nerdy. But The New York Times has an article up, James Franco Straddles Two Roles at Yale, which made me think of this SNL sketch: Do you think The New York Times reporter was playing an in…
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How technology makes ideology irrelevant
Dienekes points to two interesting phenomena which when juxtaposed together show how the pace of technological change can outrun ideological arguments and hand wringing. Those of you who have been reading me since the early 2000s know where I stand on …
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Friday Fluff – March 4th, 2011
1) First, a post from the past: Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. 2) Weird search query of the week: “are you allowed to drink alcohol in class.” 3) Comment of the week, in response to “Are we still evolving”…
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Nerd alert!
Apparently July 12th, 2011, is now a hard date for the publication of George R. R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons, the 5th book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. Martin has confirmed the date on his website: “Barring tsunamis, general st…