Month: June 2017
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The origin of the Finnic peoples
One of the very first things I wrote about in relation to historical population genetics was in on the origins of the Finnic peoples. The reasons are two fold: – first, the Finns and Estonians speak language is rather peculiar in a Europe dominated by Indo-European tongues (I suspect one reason that Tolkien based…
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Indian media is finally reporting on the Aryan migration into South Asia
For various ideological reasons in India there has been a strong resistance to the idea that Aryans came from outside of South Asia. When David Reich’s Reconstructing Indian Population History was published 2009 the Indian media had a weird response. For example, Aryan-Dravidian divide a myth: Study. Though Reich’s paper was equivocal, it was clear…
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Amazon purchases whole foods and the distribution channel comes to you
The purchase of Whole Foods by Amazon has sent grocery store stocks into tailspin. Could Amazon do to Safeway and Korger what it did to Borders and Barnes & Noble? Some people have observed that the purchase impacts the nascent grocery delivery sector more than the established supermarkets. That was my first thought. For me…
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The cultural revolution that will happen in China
If you’ve been hiding under a rock, please see Baby Genome Sequencing for Sale in China: A Boston-based DNA sequencing company is offering to decode the complete genomes of newborns in China, leading some to ask how much parents should know about their children’s genes at birth. Veritas Genetics says the test, ordered by a doctor,…
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The system of the world by William H. McNeill
In the post below on book recommendations I forgot to mention William H. McNeill and John Robert McNeill’s The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History. It’s arguably been one of the most influential works that has percolated in my mind throughout the years. It’s less than 400 pages, and illustrates in broad sketches…
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The fad for dietary adaptations is not going away
Food is a big deal for humans. Without it we die. Unlike some animals (here’s looking at you pandas) we’re omnivorous. We eat fruit, nuts, greens, meat, fish, and even fungus. Some of us even eat things which give off signals of being dangerous or unpalatable, whether it be hot sauce or lutefisk. This ability…
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10 million DTC dense marker genotypes by end of 2017?
Today I got an email from 23andMe that they’d hit the 2 million customer mark. Since they reached their goal of 1 million kits purchased the company seems to have taken its foot off the pedal of customer base growth to focus on other things (in particular, how to get phenotypic data from those who…
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Books I suggest you read so you won’t be misled as often
People often ask me for history books on a very specific topics often, assuming I’ve read something on an issue because I exhibit some fluency discussing something that might seem abstruse or arcane. The thing is that I haven’t always read a monograph on a singular topic even if I know a fair amount on…
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Open Thread, 06/12/2017
Every now and then I check Kindle Daily Deals, and I saw the book The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise. The author is a legitimate professor so I bought it even though the title seemed a little obnoxious (I was really disappointed with the nature of the scholarship in Emmett Scott’s Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited:…
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The search for Eden opens up new vistas
The end of Eden A particular conception of the “Out of Africa” model of human origins died in this decade. This model hooked into preexistence narratives about “Adam” and “Eve”, utilizing Y and mitochondrial DNA lineages passed down through direct male and female lines respectively. Its most extreme manifestation could be exemplified by Richard Klein’s…
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Sarah Haider on Sam Harris’ show
In general I would recommend listening to everything Sarah has to say. She’s speaking for a lot of people. Also see what she has to say about free expression:
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The last days of pre-ancient DNA Indian population genomics
If anyone wants to know about the population genetics of South Asia, I recommend three papers (all are open access): – Genetic Evidence for Recent Population Mixture in India – A genetic chronology for the Indian Subcontinent points to heavily sex-biased dispersals – The promise of disease gene discovery in South Asia In the near…
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India = Nigeria + Italy in terms of fertility
The map above shows the most recent district level fertility rates in India. It is immediately clear why comparing India to Pakistan and Bangladesh (let alone Nepal, Sri Lanka, or Bhutan) is a major error. In some of the northern regions of the Hindi-speaking “cow belt” as well as the lightly populated Northeast the total…
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A reticulation + pulse expansion of modern human genetic variation
Ancient genomes from S Africa pushes modern human divergence beyond 260,000 years ago https://t.co/HaO7GO2KAs WANTED TO GO TO SLEEP!!! — Razib Khan (@razibkhan) June 6, 2017 In response to a little bit of fatigue at the constant stream of ancient DNA, John Hawks digs the knife in a bit deeper. There’s more. Since Hawks is…
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Origin of modern humanity pushed back 260,000 years BP (?)
The above figure is from a preprint, Ancient genomes from southern Africa pushes modern human divergence beyond 260,000 years ago. The title and abstract are pretty clear: Southern Africa is consistently placed as one of the potential regions for the evolution of Homo sapiens. To examine the region’s human prehistory prior to the arrival of…
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St. Augustine knew of the Buddha!
St. Augustine is a very influential figure in Western Christianity. Partly this is surely due to the fact that the Latin Church favored a doctor who was of their own cultural persuasion, schooled in their mores and folkways, as opposed to the ‘logic-choppers’ of the Greek world. In the intellectual Protestant tradition his influence on…
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The issue is how you experience Islam
Sadiq Khan: This sickening act has nothing to do with the Islam I know: To murder innocent people, especially during Ramadan, is a rejection of the true values of my religion. Since religion is made up I’ll take Khan’s assertion at face value and not dispute them. The aspect that people like Khan are not…
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A reply to a stupid, ignorant, or malicious commenter
A commenter below who probably scores OK on an IQ test left a note which is worth responding to. First, “If this was a Christian or Muslim emigrant to US who wanted to marry within religion.” In the original post I focused on marrying within subcaste for a reason. It’s generally socially acceptable to marry within…
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Open Thread, 06/05/2017
Just a plug for Elements of Evolutionary Genetics by Charlesworth & Charlesworth. These are two great evolutionary geneticists, and we’re lucky to have a “core dump” from them on hand. The curious thing is that there is so much science that is tacit and implicit, that the passing of each generation of scholars means that…
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The nadir of genetics in the Soviet Union
A fascinating excerpt in Slate from How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog), : This skepticism of genetics all started when, in the mid-1920s, the Communist Party leadership elevated a number of uneducated men from the proletariat into positions of authority in the scientific community, as part of a program to glorify the…