Razib Khan

Category: Genetics

  • To be a scientific intellectual today

    George Busy has put up note about changes in his career path, Meditation on the Caltrain. I took offense to this section: On top of this, there was the burgeoning realisation that no one actually reads the academic papers that I write. This is no moot point: writing papers is the main purview of a…

  • The misrepresentation of genetic science in the Vox piece on race and IQ

    I don’t have time or inclination to do a detailed analysis of this piece in Vox, Charles Murray is once again peddling junk science about race and IQ. Most people really don’t care about the details, so what’s the point? But in a long piece one section jumped out to me in particular because it…

  • The population genetic structure of Sicily and Greece

    By total coincidence a paper came out yesterday, Ancient and recent admixture layers in Sicily and Southern Italy trace multiple migration routes along the Mediterranean (I blogged about the topic). It’s open access, and it has a lot of statistics and analyses. I’d recommend you read it yourself. You see the Sicilian and Greek populations and…

  • The Orantes has not mixed much with the Tiber

    In a moment of weakness I decided to read some of Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. I say weakness because I want to wean myself off of excessive reading of Roman history, as in terms of inferential utility I’ve long reached diminishing returns. But I quite enjoy the topic, and so here…

  • The end of insurance (some if it)

    Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock you are aware that the cost of sequencing has been going down. Less clear to many is that genotyping has also been declining. At last year’s ASHG some physicians were talking about SNP-chips in the range of the low tens of dollars. Right now most diseases for most…

  • When conquered pre-Greece took captive her rude Hellene conqueror

    When I was a child in the 1980s I was captivated by Michael Wood’s documentary In Search of the Trojan War (he also wrote a book with the same name). I had read a fair amount of Greek mythology, prose translations of the Iliad, as well as ancient history. The contrast between the Classical Greeks,…

  • When conquered pre-Greece took captive her rude Hellene conqueror

    When I was a child in the 1980s I was captivated by Michael Wood’s documentary In Search of the Trojan War (he also wrote a book with the same name). I had read a fair amount of Greek mythology, prose translations of the Iliad, as well as ancient history. The contrast between the Classical Greeks,…

  • The Beaker is breaking!

    The link is up, The Beaker Phenomenon And The Genomic Transformation Of Northwest Europe, but the paper is still processing: I’ll update the post when I can read the paper.

  • Synergistic epistasis as a solution for human existence

    Epistasis is one of those terms in biology which has multiple meanings, to the point that even biologists can get turned around (see this 2008 review, Epistasis — the essential role of gene interactions in the structure and evolution of genetic systems, for a little background). Most generically epistasis is the interaction of genes in…

  • Africa’s great demographic transformation

    Stonehenge has been a preoccupation for moderns since the Victorian period. It was built over 5,000 years ago, and its usage in some fashion continued down to about 2,500 years ago. For a long while it had been associated with the Celts, but more recently there has been some suspicion that its roots must be…

  • The coming of the Milesians: abstract of “The Bell Beaker Paper” (tBBp)

    I get asked about this all the time, and promised I’d post something first I heard anything, so here is a foretaste, Western Europe during the third millennium BCE: A genetic characterization of the Bell Beaker Complex: The Bell Beaker Complex (BBC) was the first widely distributed archaeological phenomenon of western Europe, arising after 2800…

  • Beyond “Out of Africa” and multiregionalism: a new synthesis?

    For several decades before the present era there have been debates between proponents of the recent African origin of modern humans, and the multiregionalist model. Though molecular methods in a genetic framework have come of the fore of late these were originally paleontological theories, with Chris Stringer and Milford Wolpoff being the two most prominent public exponents of…

  • “Out of Africa” bottleneck is what really matters for mutations

    At least in relation to mutational load, if you read a new preprint in biorxiv, The demographic history and mutational load of African hunter-gatherers and farmers: The distribution of deleterious genetic variation across human populations is a key issue in evolutionary biology and medical genetics. However, the impact of different modes of subsistence on recent…

  • Dost thou know the equilibrium at panmixia?

    If you read a blog about Biblical criticism from a Christian perspective it would probably be best if you were familiar with the Bible. You don’t have to have read much scholarly commentary, rather, just the New Testament. Barring that, at least the synoptic gospels! At this point, with over 400 individuals responding to the…

  • Why the rate of evolution may only depend on mutation

    Sometimes people think evolution is about dinosaurs. It is true that natural history plays an important role in inspiring and directing our understanding of evolutionary process. Charles Darwin was a natural historian, and evolutionary biologists often have strong affinities with the natural world and its history. Though many people exhibit a fascination with the flora and fauna…

  • The logic of human destiny was inevitable 1 million years ago

    Robert Wright’s best book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, was published near 20 years ago. At the time I was moderately skeptical of his thesis. It was too teleological for my tastes. And, it does pander to a bias in human psychology whereby we look to find meaning in the universe. But this is…

  • Aryan marauders from the steppe came to India, yes they did!

    Its seems every post on Indian genetics elicits dissents from loquacious commenters who are woolly on the details of the science, but convinced in their opinions (yes, they operate through uncertainty and obfuscation in their rhetoric, but you know where the axe is lodged). This post is an attempt to answer some questions so I…

  • Mouse fidelity comes down to the genes

    While birds tend to be at least nominally monogamous, this is not the case with mammals. This strikes some people as strange because humans seem to be monogamous, at least socially, and often we take ourselves to be typically mammalian. But of course we’re not. Like many primates we’re visual creatures, rather than relying in…

  • Women hate going to India

    For some reason women do not seem to migrate much into South Asia. In the late 2000s I, along with others, noticed a strange discrepancy in the Y and mtDNA lineages which trace one’s direct male and female lines: in South Asia the male lineages were likely to cluster with populations to the north an…

  • Genetic variation in human populations and individuals

    I’m old enough to remember when we didn’t have a good sense of how many genes humans had. I vaguely recall numbers around 100,000 at first, which in hindsight seems rather like a round and large number. A guess. Then it went to 40,000 in the early 2000s and then further until it converged to…

Razib Khan