Category: Genetics
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On the limits of feathery trees
The NJ tree is from Genome-Wide Analysis in Brazilian Xavante Indians Reveals Low Degree of Admixture. It’s a visualization of a genetic distance matrix. Am I strange, or do these sorts of trees really leave a lot to be desired in terms of actual…
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The law of reversion to type as cultural illusion
A comment below: Does the higher genetic diversity in sub-Saharan Africans explain why mixed children of blacks + other couples usually look more black than anything? As in, the higher number of genetic characteristics overwhelms those of the other pa…
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Humanity 2.0
Dienekes points to a David Reich video where he shows his hand as to future possible results to come out of his lab. The short of it is that it seems likely that most agricultural populations exhibit the same dynamic outlined in Reconstructing Indian H…
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Azores to Atlantis: Africa through the shadows
In many ways the image of Africa in the minds of Westerners has become a trope. The “Dark Continent,” eternal, and primal. Like many tropes the realized existence of this Africa is only within the imagination. The real Africa is far differ…
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On the effects of effective population
Nathaniel Pearson has an eminently readable post up on human effective population sizes. If you don’t know the importance of harmonic means in this domain, worth a read. He finishes though with an issue of practical importance, the proliferation …
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British class differences persisting down centuries?
People with Norman names wealthier than other Britons: Research shows that the descendants of people who in 1858 had “rich” surnames such as Percy and Glanville, indicating they were descended from the French nobility, are still substantial…
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Ashkenazi Jews are not inbred – 2
I know I excoriate readers of this weblog for being stupid, ignorant, or lazy. But this constant badgering does result in genuinely insightful and important comments precisely and carefully stated on occasion. I put up my previous post in haste, and wh…
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Ashkenazi Jews are not inbred
Jews, and Ashkenazi Jews in particular, are very genetically distinctive. A short and sweet way to think about this population is that they’re a moderately recent admixture between a Middle Eastern population, and Western Europeans, which has bee…
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Inbred shorter people
Evidence of Inbreeding Depression on Human Height, a paper with over 1,000 authors! (I exaggerate) It’s interesting because it seems to establish that inbreeding does have a deleterious effect on traits whose genetic architecture is presumably po…
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Society seen through genes
Over the past few months more and more articles like this one in the The New York Times are coming out, Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do’: Jessica Schairer has so much in common with her boss, Chris Faulkner, that a visitor to the day care center they…
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The first, second, and third nations
By now you’ve probably read about the paper which reports that there seem to have been three waves of humans migrating into the New World prior to the arrival of Europeans. A major aspect of this result is that it does not emerge out of a vacuum,…
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Creative bacterial destruction
To the left is a panel from a new paper in PLoS Genetics, Selection-Driven Gene Loss in Bacteria. The y-axis is selection, so above 0 represents a positive selection coefficient, and below a negative one. The lineages above the x-axis then are more fit…
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The privileges and burdens of a novel inversion
There’s two papers in Nature Genetics on the 17q21.31, and variation of haplotypes of inversions in world wide populations. Here’s a part of the discussion from the first paper: In conclusion, we propose that the ancestral H2′ haplotype a…
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Two pulses of white admixture in American slaves?
I noticed today an interesting paper in Genetics by Simon Gravel, Population Genetics Models of Local Ancestry. As indicated by the title this is a general paper where the method is the main course. But, there was an interesting empirical result which …
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The rise of the rare variant
A few people have mentioned to me a couple of new papers in Science are out on rare variants. They’re summed up in a short review article. I suspect this is going to be a big deal for some time. For humans we are coming to toward the end of the …
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Genetics for the 21st century
Rosie Redfield has an opinion piece out in PLoS Biology on refashioning genetics education for the 21st century, “Why Do We Have to Learn This Stuff?”—A New Genetics for 21st Century Students: …Genetic analysis used to be the most powerful …
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Genetics for the 21st century
Rosie Redfield has an opinion piece out in PLoS Biology on refashioning genetics education for the 21st century, “Why Do We Have to Learn This Stuff?”—A New Genetics for 21st Century Students: …Genetic analysis used to be the most powerful …
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Tomatoes!
This story in The New York Times, Flavor Is Price of Scarlet Hue of Tomatoes, Study Finds, is pretty cool: Yes, they are often picked green and shipped long distances. Often they are refrigerated, which destroys their flavor and texture. But now resea…
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SMBE 2012
Dienekes has summaries up of human-related abstracts of Society for Molecular Biology & Evolution 2012. 1) Remember these are not papers, and some of the abstracts may never become papers, at least in recognizable form 2) Speaking of which, Estim…
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The Brahui again
I have talked about the issue of the Brahui before at HAP. A commenter brings up linguistic arguments as to why the Brahui are recent South Indian transplants. That is fine, I can not speak to linguistics. But the genetic evidence strongly would suggest we be skeptical of this position. This does not entail that…