Month: February 2018
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Open Thread, 2/11/2018
I just found out that @insitome has a weekly podcast about human genetic history: https://t.co/yzNY3dyVmb. I just listened to the one with @razibkhan and @spwells, on what changed since the publication of Journey of Man and now I’m looking forward to listening to the others! — Philippe Lemoine (@phl43) February 11, 2018 The podcast that…
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Unlurking thread
Basically, a thread to unlurk if you want.
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Reflecting on Journey of Man 15 years later
Journey of Man, Spencer Wells’ book and documentary, came out 15 years ago. To a great extent the impact of TV is such that one can argue it introduced genetic anthropology to a whole generation. A lot has happened since then. On this week’s The Insight we review what’s happened since then, and how Spencer,…
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Preference falsification in our time and evermore
One of the main reasons I listen to the Secular Jihadists podcast is that there’s an earnest honesty from the hosts which is fading from our society in public discourse. Though I’m not a “New Atheist” personally (just an atheist), I don’t mind, and even appreciate, people who can discuss the reality that according to…
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No one understands the targets of selection in humans (except disease)
I’m proposing on an upcoming episode of The Insight that we should talk about natural selection in the context of humans. The reason is that there seems to be a lot of it. It may even be ubiquitous. But, in most cases which aren’t trivial, we have no good idea what’s going on. By not…
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Journey of Man Redux
15 years after the premiere of the PBS/National Geographic documentary ‘Journey of Man’ and the publication of Spencer’s book, Spencer and Razib talk about the impact they have had on the public’s understanding of genetics and human prehistory. This ep…
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The genome of “Cheddar Man” is about to be published
If you are American you have probably heard about “Cheddar Man” in Bryan Sykes’ Seven Daughters of Eve. If you don’t know, Cheddar Man is a Mesolithic individual from prehistoric Britain, dating to 9,150 years before the present. Sykes’ DNA analysis concluded that he was mtDNA haplogroup U5, which is found in ~10% of modern…
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Why SpaceX matters
Unless you were sleeping under a rock today you saw what SpaceX did. I don’t really follow Musk closely. My friends in Silicon Valley speak highly of him. He shares an interest in some of the same topics I do (he’s a fan of Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence). But in general on an analytical level I…
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Neanderthal introgression in the ancient DNA age
Over the past ten years or so the idea of “adaptive introgression” in the human context has gone from seeming ludicrous to banal. When I first began entertaining this idea in 2006 some commenters literally heckled me, because the idea of admixture with Neanderthals seemed so ludicrous. Then, in 2010 the maturation of the field…
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In the long run sex always wins
Carl Zimmer has an incredible piece up, This Mutant Crayfish Clones Itself, and It’s Taking Over Europe: All the marbled crayfish Dr. Lyko’s team studied were almost genetically identical to one another. Yet that single genome has allowed the clones to thrive in all manner of habitats — from abandoned coal fields in Germany to…
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Open Thread, 2/4/2018
One of the things that reading Land of Liberty has prompted in me is the need to read Matt Stoller’s book, when it comes out. Land of Liberty in many ways was a historical foil of Stoller’s article, How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul. And yet both exhibit an intellectual honesty which I generally find…
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Why the Chinese don’t buy deodorant
In human populations a SNP in ABCC11 is correlated with two salient traits: 1) wet or dry earwax 2) body odor. When I had my first son sequenced before his birth the main variant of phenotypic consequence that I noticed (aside from him being a heterozygote on KITLG), was that he carried a derived…
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Perhaps the Genghis Khan modal haplotype is not Genghis Khan’s?
Literally hundred of thousands of people have read my post, 1 in 200 men direct descendants of Genghis Khan, since 2010. It was based on the paper The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols*, which reported that one particular Y chromosomal lineage was very common in Central Asia, and, that it exhibited hallmarks of explosive growth…