Razib Khan

Category: Genetics

  • Of beasts and men

    “There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare [children] to them, the same [became] mighty men which [were] of old, men of renown.” – Genesis 6:4 Th…

  • Africans aren’t pure humans either

    Last year when discussing the possible admixture of Neandertals with the ancestors of modern non-Africans I joked that Sub-Saharan Africans were “pure humans.” This was tongue-in-cheek in part because the results from the Neandertal genome …

  • Survey on personal genomics

    Just got this email, and I thought I would share with my readers: I’m a biologist from Germany and together with 2 fellow biologists I’m currently working on a project that evaluates the sharing of raw data from DTC-genetic-testing companie…

  • “Aryan invasion”

    Estimating a date of mixture of ancestral South Asian populations: Linguistic and genetic studies have shown that most Indian groups have ancestry from two genetically divergent populations, Ancestral North Indians (ANI) and Ancestral South Indians (ASI). However, the date of mixture still remains unknown. We analyze genome-wide data from about 60 South Asian groups using…

  • Tutsi genetics, ii

    In my post below, Tutsi probably differ genetically from the Hutu, there were many comments. Some I did not post because they were rude, though they did ask valid questions. I will address those issues, but let me quote one comment: That’s an interes…

  • Analysis of a Tutsi genotype

    With this post, Tutsi probably differ genetically from the Hutu, I hope to tamp down all the talk about how the Belgians invented the Tutsi-Hutu division. After putting the call out it took 2 months for me to get my hands on a genotype, and less than 2…

  • Tutsi probably differ genetically from the Hutu

    Paul Kagame with Barack and Michelle Obama I first heard about Rwanda in the 1980s in relation to Dian Fossey’s work with mountain gorillas. The details around this were tragic enough, but obviously what happened in 1994 washed away the events d…

  • Slate, science, and Brian Palmer

    I’m still scratching my head over the rather atrocious Brian Palmer piece in Slate, Double Inanity: Twin studies are pretty much useless. It’s of a quality which would make it appropriate for WorldNetDaily. Here are the responses of Jason C…

  • The HGDP made less racist!

    Back in the 1990s there was a lot of controversy around the Human Genome Diversity Project. In fact there were whole books devoted to the sociology of the project. Though on some of the details critics of the project may have had a point, their overall…

  • Looking for a few good 145+ I.Q. individuals

    Above is the distribution of self-reported I.Q.s of the readers of this weblog according to the 2011 survey. I point this out because my friend Steve Hsu will be giving a talk at Google later today. Here are the details: I’ll be giving a talk at…

  • The point mutation which made humanity

    Steve Hsu points me to a piece in The New Yorker on the science and personality of Svante Pääbo. The personality part includes references to Pääbo’s bisexuality, which to me seemed to be literally dropped into the prose to spice it up. Of cou…

  • Getting better sperm donors

    The British newspapers have been reporting on a bizarre story about a Dutch sperm donor who hid a history of mental problems from recipients. I didn’t pay much attention to it because of the British tabloid media’s tendency to sensationaliz…

  • The end of environmental inequality means the rise of genetic inequality

    A few people have pointed me to Charles Murray’s comment at The Enterprise Blog, The Debate about Heritability of General Intelligence Radically Narrows, which alludes to the recent finding of genomic confirmation of the behavior genetic heritabi…

  • Half the variation in I.Q. due to variation in genes

    A new paper in Molecular Psychiatry has been reported on extensively in the media, and readers have mentioned it several times in the comments. I read it. It’s titled Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly her…

  • Crohn’s disease is about barely keeping you alive

    The Pith: Natural selection is a quick & dirty operator. When subject to novel environments it can react rapidly, bringing both the good and the bad. The key toward successful adaptation is not perfection, but being better than the alternatives. T…

  • Govigama genotype

    At HAP, HRP155.

  • The King Tut DNA story

    Last year some readers forwarded me a strange story about Hitler’s “Jewish genes”. I didn’t think much of it, but enough people asked that I thought I should at least address the story (or lack of one). Today something similar i…

  • The social goods of individual actions

    Over at Genetic Future Dr. Daniel MacArthur has a measured response to a Nature commentary by David Goldstein, Growth of genome screening needs debate. As Dr. MacArthur notes an excessive portion of Goldstein’s piece is taken up with inferences …

  • Non-zero sum transitions in the human past

    A few people have pointed me to the recent paper in Science, Tenfold Population Increase in Western Europe at the Neandertal–to–Modern Human Transition. The basic result is obvious, and not totally revolutionary: anatomically modern humans may simp…

  • ~33% of a Malagasy genotype, first pass

    Last week I begged for a Malagasy genotype. I didn’t quite get that, but I got the second best thing: a part Malagasy-genotype. I decided to take it for a spin. But first some preliminaries. Here’s what we know about this individual (or wha…

Razib Khan