Month: December 2011
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The Hobbit (2012 film)
My working assumption is that this will be a regression back to the mean in relation to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I notice is that the projected budget for the two films is already more than a time and a half greater than all three of those earlier releases. Even accounting…
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The “best of” posts….
Sam Snyder has gone through my archives back to 2006, and complied a “best of” list. Snyder admits that his interest is in “primarily centered on human behavior and health, which is the subject of most of these links.” Also, I want to caution you that 5 years is a long time, so please don’t…
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Out of Africa to Out of Arabia
Dienekes and Greg Cochran have been talking about this possibility for a few years. But a combination of archaeological finds and the current unsettled nature of the human evolutionary genomics literature means that “Out of Arabia” is a real possibility (not laugh-out-loud crazy and weird). So I took the liberty of cooking up a new…
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Culture evolves our bodies!
Human cultural diversity One of the most annoying aspects of talking about human evolution is the rather misguided idea that cultural evolutionary processes operate in a zero-sum environment in relation to biological evolutionary processes. The colloquial rendering of this idea is that because humans are a highly cultural plastic species, we are “beyond” biological evolution.…
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Human origins in 2011
Interesting piece in LiveScience, What We Learned About Our Human Ancestors in 2011. The author highlights the likelihood of a lot of admixture across very diverged lineages, as well as the nascent “Out of Arabia” hypothesis. This quote from Michael Hammer gets at where we’re “going next”: “We’ve probably just scratched the surface of what…
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The last word on dog genesis is not nigh!
In my post below Rob commented: Surely the genetic evidence is pointing towards a single domestication event (see http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/11/new-data-fuels-dogfight-over-the.html?ref=hp) My general response is not to accept the latest press release about the genetic origin of dogs. I keep track of the literature and it’s rather fluid. For example, I woke up this morning, and this…
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Dogs are necessary when man is sufficient
Wolf-to-dog transition had little to do with humans, ancient skull suggests. I think the headline here is deceptive. This is the important part: A Canadian researcher who specializes in the biology of ancient dogs co-authored one of the most significant studies of the year in canine science: a paper detailing the world’s earliest evidence of…
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Lactose intolerant when you shouldn’t be
Milk, it does a body good (or not): I’ve discussed this before earlier this year, when we got our results back (my husband, children, in-laws, parents, siblings… etc have all done genomic scans), two results came back that surprised us but proved true. My mother-in-law and husband were likely lactose intolerant. When I pointed that…
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“Descendant of Genghis Khan” sequenced
Chinese Scientists Announce the First Complete Sequencing of Mongolian Genome: In this study, the DNA sample was from a male adult who belongs to the Mongolian “Royal Family” and is the 34th generation descendant of Genghis Khan. “The sample is very valuable for the study with a full record of family pedigree and no background…
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Nature really is real
I generated the figure at left from table 9.6 in The Genetics of Human Populations. This book was published in 1971, but I purchased the 1999 edition (which was simply a republication of the original text by Dover) in 2005.* At the time I recall reading the section on inferring the number of genetic loci…
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Christmas reading
With some leisure, I plan to read a bit. Here is my tentative “stack”: – The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined – Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 – Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding – Mirroring the Past: The Writing And Use…
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How to reconstruct the Indo-Europeans
As must be obvious, I think now that the spread of Indo-European languages had some demographic impact. It wasn’t analogous to the spread of English to Jamaica, or the existence of French as an official language in Congo-Brazzaville. Because of this, I now believe it is possible in the near future that scientists will reconstruct…
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No studies necessary: do your own replication!
In response to the post below I received the above response on twitter. This is an interesting case. The link goes to a paper in the year 2000, Alu insertion polymorphisms in NW Africa and the Iberian Peninsula: evidence for a strong genetic boundary through the Gibraltar Straits: An analysis of 11 Alu insertion polymorphisms…
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The Basques are genetically distinctive
The Basque people of northern Spain loom large in any attempt to understand the ethnogenesis of European populations. That is because the speak the only indubitably indigenous non-Indo-European language in Western Europe. By this, I mean that other potential non-Indo-European languages such as the Tartessian or Pictish are either doubtful or uncertain in classification and…
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James F. Crow in Genetics
At 95 James F. Crow is not only an eminent population geneticist, but he knew the figures who were responsible for the whole field. The journal Genetics has commissioned a series of essays and perspectives in his honor. The first is by Daniel Hartl. I thought this was funny: Soon after joining the program I…
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The history and geography of genomes
A new paper in PloS Genetics sheds some light on issues which we were already familiar with through conventional history, Ancestral Components of Admixed Genomes in a Mexican Cohort. What we already know: Mexicans and people of Mexican descent predominantly derive from an admixture event(s) between Europeans and Amerindians, with a minor African component. The…
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Are you a caveman?
23andMe finally unveiled a Neanderthal Ancestry estimation feature. I’m at ~2.4 percent. What I’m curious about is the fact that out of the 45 “friends and family” who are surveyed, only two are at 3 percent. One of my them is my sibling who I found seems to have the Neandertal copy of a dystrophin…
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Against Facebook
You’ve probably read The New York Times article, The Facebook Resisters. One of the “resisters” struck me as kind of weird: Tyson Balcomb quit Facebook after a chance encounter on an elevator. He found himself standing next to a woman he had never met — yet through Facebook he knew what her older brother looked…
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Another 23andMe Sale
The sales are getting more modest over the years. But then the firm has pushed its price down a lot. If $23 is going to make the difference, then go at it.