Razib Khan

Month: February 2012

  • Free 23andMe genotyping

    From OpenSNP: At the end of last year we announced that we’ve got some funding from the German WikiMedia foundation to get more people – who are willing to share their results – genotyped. We have now settled on a process that should allow us to perform the project without too many problems.Starting today, you can…

  • Europe’s special northeast

    The Fennoscandia Project has now gone through chromosomes 1 to 6 with Chromopainter/fineSTRUCTURE. The conclusion: If we looker at the bigger picture we see that most of continental Europe is tied to each other more trough mutations than others making them harder to seperate even at this level (6 chromosomes). We see that Lithuanians seem…

  • Extraordinary mutations require extraordinary evidence

    Over at Genomes Unzipped Dr. Daniel MacArthur has a review up of a paper in Science where he is first author (note for grad students and aspiring post-docs, Dr. MacArthur is starting a new lab, where he posted an ungated version of the paper). He hits all the salient points, so I will cover two…

  • Kalash haplotype sharing

    Prompted by my posts, Dienekes, A teaser on the Kalash: I am in the middle of a ChromoPainter/fineSTRUCTURE analysis of a broad dataset designed to explore certain mysteries that have often come up in my previous experiments. Barring the unexpected, the analysis should be completed sometime next week. Below you can see the normalized number…

  • Kalash on the human tree

    A recent paper on Turkish genetics has a tree which illustrates a summary of how the Kalash shake out: I say summary because this tree takes a lot of information and tries to generate the best fit representation. It does hide some information by the nature of its aggregation of patterns. For example, the position…

  • The Nanopore footnote?

    The New York Times and Nature both have favorable reviews of Oxford Nanopore’s showy claims at Advances in Genome Biology and Technology. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please see the twitter stream, or the post at Genomes Unzipped. A note of caution: look back at The New York Times reporting on Pacific…

  • Minor note on “the hack”

    A “test” post showed up on this website earlier. I’ve been told it was probably an error by IT. I had no idea that it was even up because I was off the internet and not checking my phone for ~18 hours for various reasons. Just thought…

  • test

    test one two one two link internal link

  • The Kalash in perspective

      When Zack ran ChromoPainter/fineStructure on South Asians the results naturally yielded a blueish hue along the diagonal. This is expected because the diagonal represents the population’s own relationship with itself. The bluer the diagonal, the more inbred and isolated the population is likely to be. To the top left you see various Austro-Asiatic tribes,…

  • Update on the Afrikaner genotype

    Since my original post on the Afrikaner genotype, I’ve gotten many responses. No genotypes yet though. At some point I need to organize how to pay for typing many individuals. Currently my intent is to pay for those who will allow their identities to be public so that people can confirm their genealogies. Other people…

  • South Asian archaeogenetics

    Estimating a date of mixture of ancestral South Asian populations: Linguistic and genetic studies have shown that most Indian groups have ancestry from two genetically divergent populations, Ancestral North Indians (ANI) and Ancestral South Indians (ASI). However, the date of mixture still remains unknown. We analyze genome-wide data from about 60 South Asian groups using…

  • Non-overlapping magisteria for the social and biological?

    Most of you know that Stephen Jay Gould proposed ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ for science and religion. I don’t care much for the framing myself, though neither am I on the same page as Sam Harris and company. But I thought of this model when reading this comment below: Kind of a tangent, but I think it…

  • Darwinism of the Inanimate

    Via Laura Hollis at the Twitter machine, here’s an interesting paper by chemist Addy Pross. The author tries to extend the idea of Darwinian natural selection to the realm of inanimate objects. Toward a general theory of evolution: Extending Darwinian theory to inanimate matter Addy Pross Though Darwinian theory dramatically revolutionized biological understanding, its strictly…

  • Clusters where they “shouldn’t be”….

    Uyghur girls A few people have pointed me to the paper, Implications for health and disease in the genetic signature of the Ashkenazi Jewish population. You should check it out if you don’t have academic access to papers, it’s not gated. Rather, I want to focus on a methodological issue. In the genetics reader survey…

  • Open Thread – Brown Pundits

    Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.

  • American medicine & American red-tape

    I just attended a presentation where a researcher outlined how epigenomics could help patients with various grave illnesses. Normally I don’t focus on human medical genetics too much because it always depresses me. I don’t understand how medical geneticists don’t start wondering what hidden disease everyone around them has. In any case the researcher outlined…

  • Working class vs. middle class white seculars

    Rod Dreher at The American Conservative, White Working-Class ‘Seculars’: What’s interesting to think about is that these working-class non-churchgoers are probably not secular in the same way white intellectual elites are secular. I bet if you polled them, 999 out of 1,000 would say they believed in God and considered themselves to be Christians. It’s…

  • Metaphysics Matters

    Chattering classes here in the U.S. have recently been absorbed in discussions that dance around, but never quite address, a question that cuts to the heart of how we think about the basic architecture of reality: are human beings purely material, or something more? The first skirmish broke out when a major breast-cancer charity, Susan…

  • Kkkhhhaaannn!!!

    My post, 1 in 200 men direct descendants of Genghis Khan, is linked up somewhere almost every week. Why is it so popular? No idea. But one thing that has come to mind: we’ve come a long way in since the early 2000s in assembling databases of human scientific genealogies. Soon enough a substantial proportion…

  • The social and biological construction of race

    Many of our categories are human constructions which map upon patterns in nature which we perceive rather darkly. The joints about which nature turns are as they are, our own names and representations are a different thing altogether. This does not mean that our categories have no utility, but we should be careful of confusing…

Razib Khan