Category: Genetics
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The great Eurasian explosion
Dr. Joseph Pickrell has updated his preprint, The genetic prehistory of southern Africa, with some more material on the Sandawe. I’ve explored the genetics of the Sandawe a bit using ADMIXTURE, so I jumped straight to the section on ROLLOFF: R…
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What the substrate tells
One of the weird things about genetics is that it encompasses both the abstract and the concrete. The formal and physical. You can talk to a geneticist who is mostly interested in details of molecular mechanisms, and is steeped in structural biology. F…
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Predicting someone’s face: look at their parents
A few years ago there was a paper out which illustrated that standard Galtonian method of regression of offspring upon parents still predicted height far better than the most modern genomic techniques. The issue is that height is a quantitative trait w…
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ADMIXTOOLS is out
The time for commentary uninformed by DIY exploratory analysis is fast coming to a close. The alpha version of ADMIXTOOLS is out. It’s a moderately large download, 166 MB in compressed format. Do note that most of this consists of data files, not…
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A genetic map of Italy
Since the Ralph & Coop paper on IBD patterns across Europe I’ve been keen to see what gets uncovered about Italy. Recall, if you will, that in that paper the authors noted that Italy in particular of European nations exhibits a lot of deep po…
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Mutation: how about dividing by two?
There’s been a mild debate in the literature about the human mutation rate recently. I assume it will reach some consensus within the next few years, but until then Nature Reviews Genetics has published something which lays out the implications…
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The West Asian mix
IE-speaking West Europeans are West Asian-admixed relative to Non-IE speaking Basques. Dienekes explicitly confirms what seems obvious using ADMIXTURE. When I get a chance I’m going to see if this difference is evident when comparing some South I…
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Genes, a gene, genes….
I spend some time thinking about genetic architecture. If you read media accounts of genetics you wouldn’t know there was such a thing. Why not? Because it makes a narrative rather messy and complex. Rather, a better story is one where you have a…
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Joseph Smith prophesied ASHG 2012
The ASHG 2012 website says that their abstract search feature will go online “on/after September 6, 2012.” It’s 13 minutes after on the west coast of the USA as I write this, so I guess after? So I decided to double-check the teasers…
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On ENCODE
There’s a reason that people say that the 21st century is the century of biology, whereas the 20th was the century of physics. See Brendan Maher, Ed Yong, and Dr. Daniel MacArthur’s coverage. I haven’t read the papers, so I can’…
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Me & my 0.55 brother against my 0.45 brother
One of the more fascinating things about getting much of your child’s pedigree genotyped is that one can ascertain true relatedness to various relatives, rather than just expected relatedness. For example, 28% of her genome is identical by descen…
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Not all genes are created the same
The map to the right shows the frequencies of HGDP populations on SLC45A2, which is a locus that has been implicated in skin color variation in humans. It’s for the SNP rs16891982, and I yanked the figure from IrisPlex: A sensitive DNA tool for a…
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Evolutionary & population genetics preprints – Haldane’s Sieve
OK, perhaps I can help with that. Dr. Coop speaks of the collaboration between himself & Dr. Joseph Pickrell, Haldane’s Sieve, which I added to my RSS days ago (and you can see me pushing it to my Pinboard). From the “About”: As …
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Genes & geography – the great correlation
A paper is out in PLoS Genetics which attempts to formalize the relationship between genes and geography, A Quantitative Comparison of the Similarity between Genes and Geography in Worldwide Human Populations. They found a reasonable correlation, but …
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Inter-population difference in European height
A quick mea culpa. Yesterday I put up a post on the difference in height between northern and southern Europe, following the lead of the heading of the paper which I blogged. But, in the text they do note that their sample is skewed toward northern Eur…
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Cultures & genes: Paleolithic to the Neolithic
Spatial linguistic variation Spatial genetic variation Temporal linguistic variation Temporal genetic variation Paleolithic Very high High Moderate-to-high Moderate-to-low Neolithic Moderate Moderate-to-low Moderate High Bronze Age Mod…
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The Age of Heroes
Sometimes when you read reviews or papers you need to look very closely at what people say in a tentative speculative fashion. That’s because though the prose may be as such when read plainly and without context, you often have more prior informa…
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Ötzi – more Neandertal than the average bear
Neandertal ancestry “Iced”: Evaluating recent evolution, migration and Neandertal ancestry in the Tyrolean Iceman Paleogenetic evidence from Neandertals, the Neolithic and other eras has the potential to transform our knowledge of human po…
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The Jewish Diaspora: not an empire of the mind
Berber queen? In light of the previous post you know that I was going to post on the new paper in PNAS, North African Jewish and non-Jewish populations form distinctive, orthogonal clusters. Additionally, the press people at Albert Einstein did reach …
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An exegesis of Robert Pollack?
I was going to review North African Jewish and non-Jewish populations form distinctive, orthogonal clusters at some point soon, but I’m going to have to move that up. Someone on Twitter pointed me to this really weird article, Being Jewish Is Mor…