Category: Genetics
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The archaeologist, James Fallows, and Neandertals
A month ago I posted Don’t trust an archaeologist about genetics, don’t trust a geneticist about archaeology, in response to James Fallows at At 5% Neanderthal, You Are an Outlier. Fallows has now put up a follow up, The Neanderthal Defense Com…
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Eugenics, the 100 year cycle
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a piece out by Nathaniel Comfort, The Eugenic Impulse. I would just like to offer that to a great extent we already live in the second age of eugenics. The high frequency of abortions of fetuses which come back pos…
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The Genographic Project’s Scientific Grants Program
While I was at Spencer Wells’ poster at ASHG I was primarily curious about bar plots. He’s got really good spatial coverage, so I’m moderately excited about the paper (though I didn’t see much explicit testing of phylogenetic hy…
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Inflammatory bowel syndrome is nature’s side effect
Last week Luke Jostins (soon to be Dr. Luke Jostins) published an interesting paper in Nature. To be fair, this paper has an extensive author list, but from what I am to understand this is the fruit of the first author’s Ph.D. project. In any cas…
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Prop 37 and the right to have the government enforce your right to know
With the election coming up, California Proposition 37, Mandatory Labeling of Genetically Engineered Food, is on my mind. From Ballotpedia: If Proposition 37 is approved by voters, it will: * Require labeling on raw or processed food offered for sale …
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Doctors are apparently gods, get used to it
Here’s a caption from a Time article, What Your Doctor Isn’t Telling You About Your DNA: Nice to know that two physicians in Philadelphia not only have medical degrees, but specialize in mind-reading the parents of this nation! Above the capti…
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Why chimpanzees can donate blood in movies
There is a high likelihood that you know of which ABO blood group you belong to. I am A. My daughter is A. My father is B. My mother is A. I have siblings who are A, O, B, and AB. The inheritance is roughly Mendelian, with O being “recessiveR…
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Buddy can you spare a selective sweep
The Pith: Natural selection comes in different flavors in its genetic constituents. Some of those constituents are more elusive than others. That makes “reading the label” a non-trivial activity. As you may know when you look at patterns of…
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Yes, a young boy was forced from school for carrying cystic fibrosis alleles
Update II: This comment sums up the pertinent issues. Update: Please see comments below. This may be an infectious disease story, and not a genetic one. When a reader sent me an email about the story, I assumed it was a rather sophisticated hoax. The …
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You don’t need “genes” for genetics
After yesterday’s post I feel it is important again to reiterate that there is an unfortunate tyranny of the gene-as-physical-entity when it comes to our understanding of human heredity. To clarify what I mean, I think it is useful to borrow a fr…
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A dangerous man
I was a little sad when I heard my friend Steve Hsu had accepted a position at Michigan State some months back. My reasons were two-fold. First, I swing by Eugene now and then, and I wouldn’t have the opportunity to drop in on his office. Second,…
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The rise of the farming lineages
There’s an open access paper/preprint on Y chromosomal lineages that just came out, A calibrated human Y-chromosomal phylogeny based on resequencing. Since it is open access you can read the whole thing (it’s short). Let me quote from the d…
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Introgressing toward becoming rice
Rice is a pretty big deal. There’s really no need to justify research on this crop. It feeds literally billions, so the funding will always flow. Would that we knew rice as well as we know C. elgans. After yesterday’s travesty of a paper o…
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Thinking about heritability
Heritability: The heritability of a trait within a population is the proportion of observable differences in a trait between individuals within a population that is due to genetic differences. Factors including genetics, environment and random chance c…
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Signal of Indo-Aryan admixture in South Indian Brahmins
I’ve mentioned a few times that the Reich lab has been finding suggestive evidence for admixture between indigenous South Asians and a West Eurasian group on the order of ~3,000 years before the present. The modal explanation is probably an Indo-…
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Paleopopulation Genetics
It seems a new field is being born! Jeff Wall & Monty Slatkin have a pretty thorough review out, Paleopopulation Genetics: Paleopopulation genetics is a new field that focuses on the population genetics of extinct groups and ancestral populations …
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Paying for pop gen a thing of the past?
Via Haldane’s Sieve, Genetics has a new preprint policy: POLICY ON PRE-PRINT DEPOSITS GENETICS allows authors to deposit manuscripts (currently under review or those for intended submission to GENETICS) in non-commercial, pre-print servers such a…
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Re-imagining genetic variation
To the left is a PCA from The History and Geography of Human Genes. If you click it you will see a two dimensional plot with population labels. How were these plots generated? In short what these really are are visual representations of a matrix of gen…
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The great Malagasy leap into the unknown
Today there was a short article in Discover on a paper published last spring on the models for the settling of Madagascar. I didn’t pay too much attention when the paper came out for two reasons. First, it focused on Y and mtDNA, and I’ve b…
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The Bushmen tell us a lot about human evolution because they are humans who have evolved
When it comes to the human genetics of the Khoe-San there’s a little that’s stale and unoriginal for me in terms of presentation. The elements are always composed the same. The Bushmen are the “most ancient” humans, who can tell…