Category: Genetics
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After agriculture, before bronze
The above plot shows genetic distance/variation between highland and lowland populations in Papa New Guinea (PNG). It is from a paper in Science that I have been anticipating for a few months (I talked to the first author at SMBE), A Neolithic expansion, but strong genetic structure, in the independent history of New Guinea. What…
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Quantitative genomics, adaptation, and cognitive phenotypes
The human brain utilizes about ~20% of the calories you take in per day. It’s a large and metabolically expensive organ. Because of this fact there are lots of evolutionary models which focus on the brain. In Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human Richard Wrangham suggests that our need for calories to feed our…
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South Asian gene flow into Burmese and Malays?
I happen to have a data set merged from the 1000 Genomes and Estonian Biocentre which has Malays, Burmans, and other assorted Southeast Asians, East Asians, and South Asians. In light of recent posts I thought I would throw out something in relation to this data set (you can download the data here). Above you…
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Genetics books for the masses!
Since I’ve become professionally immersed in genetics I haven’t read many books on the topics. I read papers. And I do genetics. But back in the day I did enjoy a good book. The standard recommendation would be to read Matt Ridley’s Genome. It’s a bit dated now (it was published around when the Human…
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Why do percentage estimates of “ancestry” vary so much?
When looking at the results in Ancestry DNA, 23andMe, and Family Tree DNA my “East Asian” percentage is: – 19% – 13% – 6% What’s going on here? In science we often make a distinction between precision and accuracy. Precision is how much your results vary when you re-run an experiment or measurement. Basically, can…
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When journalists get out of their depth on genetic genealogy
For some reason The New York Times tasked Gina Kolata to cover genetic genealogy and its societal ramifications, With a Simple DNA Test, Family Histories Are Rewritten. The problem here is that to my knowledge Kolata doesn’t cover this as part of her beat, and so isn’t well equipped to write an accurate and in…
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But evolution converges!
Stephen Jay Gould became famous in part for his book Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. By examining the strange creatures in the Burgess Shale formation Gould makes the case that evolution is a highly contingent process, and that if you reran the experiment of life what we’d see might be…
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Jon Snow + Daenerys Targaryen far creepier genetically than you know
If you have been following Game of Thrones you have been noticing that there is a brewing romance between Jon Snow, King in the North, and Daenerys Targaryen, the aspiring claimant to her father’s Iron Throne. Of course there is a twist to all of this: unbenknownst to either, Jon Snow’s biological father is Daenerys’…
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When the ancestors were cyclops
The Greeks are important because Western civilization began with Greece. And therefore modern civilization. I don’t think the Greeks were “Western” truly; my own preference is to state that the West as we understand it is really just Latin Christendom, which emerged in the late first millennium A.D. in any coherent fashion. Yet without Classical…
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The Indo-Aryan question nearing resolution
India Today published my review of the current state of the genetics and genomics of the Indian subcontinent, and what it can tell us about the ethnogenesis of South Asians generally. In the piece I tried to be very circumspect and stick to what we know with a high, if not perfect, degree of certainty.…
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The future will be genetically engineered
If the film Rise of the Planet of the Apes had come out a few years later I believe there would have been mention of CRISPR. Sometimes science leads to technology, and other times technology aids in science. On occasion the two are one in the same. The plot I made above shows that in…
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Indian genetic history: before the storm
Over at Brown Pundits I’ve mentioned the continuing simmer of controversy over a recent piece, How genetics is settling the Aryan migration debate. This has prompted responses in the Indian media from a Hindu nationalist perspective. One of these notes that the author of the piece above cites me, and then goes on to observe…
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Indian genetics, the never-ending argument
I am at this point somewhat fatigued by Indian population genetics. The real results are going to be ancient DNA, and I’m waiting on that. But people keep asking me about an article in Swarajya, Genetics Might Be Settling The Aryan Migration Debate, But Not How Left-Liberals Believe. First, the article attacks me as being…
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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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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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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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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…
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Ancient Egyptians: black or white?
One of the most fascinating things about ancient Egypt is its continuity, and our granular and detailed knowledge of that continuity. We can thank in part the dry climate, as well as the Egyptian penchant for putting their hieroglyphs on walls and monuments (as well as graffiti!). And we can also thank the fact that…
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At an inflection point of archaeology and genetics
People always ask me what to read in relation to the field of historical population genetics. In the 2000s there were a series of books which focused on the mtDNA and Y results from modern phylogeographic analysis. Journey of Man, Seven Daughters of Eve, The Real Eve, and Mapping Human History. But there hasn’t been…
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Applying intelligence to genes for intelligence
Carl Zimmer has an excellent write up on the new new Nature study of the variants associated with IQ, In ‘Enormous Success,’ Scientists Tie 52 Genes to Human Intelligence. The issue with intelligence is that it’s a highly polygenic trait for which measurement is not always trivial. You need really large sample sizes. It’s about ten…