Category: Human Genetics
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Peeling the population genetic Indian onion
There’s a new paper in The American Journal of Human Genetics, Shared and Unique Components of Human Population Structure and Genome-Wide Signals of Positive Selection in South Asia. It’s free, so go read it. I don’t have time to comment in detail, but I did read the paper, and I want to mention a few…
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Introducing “genoeconomics”
A new paper (open access) in The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Molecular Genetics and Economics. The authors introduce the term “genoecomics.” They start out with the proposition that the intersection of genomics and behavioral economics suffers from 1) the study samples are way too small, 2) there’s a publication bias toward false results. It’s a…
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Thoughts on the $1,000 genome, circa 2007
You’ve probably read Andrew Pollack’s DNA Sequencing Caught in Deluge of Data, by now. This section caught my eye: “The cost of sequencing a human genome — all three billion bases of DNA in a set of human chromosomes — plunged to $10,500 last July from $8.9 million in July 2007, according to the National…
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But it still adapts!
Dienekes and Maju recently pointed to a paper, Contrasting signals of positive selection in genes involved in human skin color variation from tests based on SNP scans and resequencing, in Investigative Genetics. Skin color is an interesting trait because it’s one of the big “wins” in human genomics over the past 10 years. To a great…
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On structure, variation, and race
I noticed yesterday that Andrew Sullivan, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and a cast of others were having a roiling debate on race and I.Q. My name came up in several comment threads on various issues. I’m aware of this because I have Google Alerts set for my name. I don’t have the time or energy to get immersed…
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Genetic Creationism
Carl Zimmer points me to a piece in a publication called GeneWatch, The Crumbling Pillars of Behavior Genetics. I won’t quote from it because it’s kind of a tired rehash of the confusions and misrepresentations found in The Great DNA Data Deficit: Are Genes for Disease a Mirage?, thoroughly refuted by Luke Jostins and Dan…
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Genetic distinctiveness vs. genetic diversity
Meeting the Taino In the comments below a few days ago someone expressed concern at the diminishing of genetic diversity due to the disappearance of indigenous populations. My response was bascally that it depends. The issue here is whether that disappearance is due to assimilation, or extinction. If a given population is genetically absorbed into…
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On the real possibility of human differences
I have discussed the reality that many areas of psychology are susceptible enough to false positives that the ideological preferences of the researchers come to the fore. CBC Radio contacted me after that post, and I asked them to consider that in 1960 psychologists discussed the behavior of homosexuality as if it was a pathology.…
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How the worm turns the genic world
In the middle years of the last decade there were many papers which came out which reported many ‘hard’ selective sweeps reshaping the human genome. By this, I mean that you had a novel mutation arise against the genetic background, and positive selection rapidly increased the frequency of that mutation. Because of the power and…
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How many human genomes have been sequenced?
That query doesn’t seem to have an easy answer on Google, so I’m trying to enter it here. A prominent genomicist asserted a ballpark figure of ~30,000 human genomes in the year 2011. Most of that is in the year 2011 itself. Also, in regards to the “$1,000 genome” question, it seems that some labs…
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The hunter-gatherers within us
Lesley-Ann Brandt One of the reasons that the HGDP populations are weighted toward indigenous groups is that there was the understanding that these populations may not be long for the world in their current form. But the Taino genome reconstruction illustrates that even if populations are no longer with us…they are still within us. With…
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Are most people “behaviorally modern”?
Paintings at Lascaux, Prof saxx Behavioral modernity: Behavioral modernity is a term used in anthropology, archeology and sociology to refer to a set of traits that distinguish present day humans and their recent ancestors from both living primates and other extinct hominid lineages. It is the point at which Homo sapiens began to demonstrate a…
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How Archimedes’ lever explains human evolution
Last August I had a post up, The point mutation which made humanity, which suggested that it may be wrong to conceive of the difference between Neanderthals and the African humans which absorbed and replaced them ~35,000 years ago as a matter of extreme differences at specific genes. I was prompted to this line of…
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Ancient Roman DNA project
Dienekes already mentioned it, but readers might be curious about the Ancient Roman DNA Project. Here are the details: I’m asking for $6,000 for this project, which will cover the cost of testing DNA from the 20 immigrants to Rome I found in my previous project. Of course, I would love to test additional individuals…
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Men on the move, part n
Ancient DNA suggests the leading role played by men in the Neolithic dissemination: The impact of the Neolithic dispersal on the western European populations is subject to continuing debate. To trace and date genetic lineages potentially brought during this transition and so understand the origin of the gene pool of current populations, we studied DNA…
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When genetics comes in handy in politics
In Mother Jones Andrew Serwer has a long profile up of a Mitt Romney adviser who has associations with Lebanese Christian sectarian radicals. This section jumped out at me: Régina Sneifer, who served in the Fifth Bureau in 1981 at the age of 18, remembers attending lectures where Phares told Christian militiamen that they were…
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When genetics comes in handy in politics
In Mother Jones Andrew Serwer has a long profile up of a Mitt Romney adviser who has associations with Lebanese Christian sectarian radicals. This section jumped out at me: Régina Sneifer, who served in the Fifth Bureau in 1981 at the age of 18, remembers attending lectures where Phares told Christian militiamen that they were…
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Ancient DNA in the near future
I recently inquired if anyone was sequencing Cheddar Man. In case you don’t know, this individual died ~9,000 years ago in Britain, but the remains were well preserved enough that mtDNA was retrieved from him. He was of haplogroup U5, which is still present in the local region. Cheddar Man is also particularly interesting because…
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The perils of human genomics
A friend pointed me to the heated comment section of this article in Nature, Rebuilding the genome of a hidden ethnicity. The issue is that Nature originally stated that the Taino, the native people of Puerto Rico, were extinct. That resulted in an avalanche of angry comments, which one of the researchers, Carlos Bustamante, felt…
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The Ötzi embargo
Dienekes has some harsh words for the way some science is produced, focusing on the genome of Ötzi the Iceman as a case in point: Yesterday, I twitted in exasperation that Otzi’s genome, which must have been available in at least some sort of draft form since at least the beginning of this year, has been under…