Why race as a biological construct matters

Credit: Characterizing the admixed African ancestry of African Americans My own inclination has been to not get bogged down in the latest race and IQ controversy because I don’t have that much time, and the core readership here is probably not going to get any new information from me, since this is not an area of hot novel research. But that doesn’t mean the rest of the world isn’t talking, and I think perhaps it might be usef Read more...

Angelina Jolie, Myriad Genetics, & patents on genes

Because of Angelina Jolie’s revelation people are talking about the Myriad Genetics case is in the news again. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look it up. Because of the patent Myriad can charge thousands of dollars for a test which would otherwise be much cheaper (and putting it out of reach of many without health insurance). My question here is simple: if you are a geneticist do you think Myriad’s position has Read more...

GATTACA: utopia or dystopia?

Kevin Mitchell of Wiring the Brain has a very long post up inveighing against the specter of eugenics. I don’t have a great deal of time to engage Kevin right now. But in addition to Kevin’s post I highly recommend this episode of WBUR’s On Point. It has Steve Hsu on, and he articulates many of the positions that I myself hold. Steve’s work with BGI has triggered the latest discussion of eugenics thanks to Vice‘s sen Read more...

Europeans share common ancestors to differing extents

Don’t forget the deep structure in Italy!Credit: Rita Molnar Standard apologies that I have had not the marginal time to blog much, but I thought it was important that I least note that Dr. Peter Ralph and Dr. Graham Coop’s paper on identity-by-descent segments and European populations and history is out in its final form in PLoS Biology, The Geography of Recent Genetic Ancestry across Europe. I’ve been familiar with the outli Read more...

Maternal-fetal health and natural selection

Credit: USDA A few years back I was rather fixated on issues of maternal fetal health. In particular I was worried about gestational diabetes in relation to my wife because I come from an ethnic group with an elevated risk for these sorts of problems, and the effect when you are in mixed-race marriages seems to be additive (i.e., unlike some risk factors associated with pregnancies the mother’s ethnicity is not the only relevant variable Read more...

Turtles all the way down!

Nature Genetics (2013) doi:10.1038/ng.2615 No time to comment extensively, but check out The draft genomes of soft-shell turtle and green sea turtle yield insights into the development and evolution of the turtle-specific body plan (open access). The paper and the ScienceDaily press release allude to some phylogenetic confusion as to the relationship of turtles to other reptilian lineages, but my own superficial knowledge of this area left me r Read more...

The end of demic diffusion

German woman, product of Mid-Neolithic?Source: Siebbi Yesterday I pointed to a paper which was interesting enough, but didn’t pass the smell test in relation to other evidence we have (at least in my opinion!). A primary concern was the fact that uniparental (male and female lineages) show a peculiar distribution of variation in comparison to autosomal genetic variation (i.e., the vast majority of the genome) in the case of Europe (genome Read more...

Models are great, because rejection is easy

There’s a new paper in PLoS ONE, Female and Male Perspectives on the Neolithic Transition in Europe: Clues from Ancient and Modern Genetic Data, which uses a combination of contemporary and ancient (that is, from subfossils) Y and mitochondrial DNA to understand the demographic past of Europe. Recall that the Y traces the direct male lineage, and the mtDNA the direct female lineage. Because they don’t recombine and generate clean conv Read more...

Don’t forget parents share genes with their offspring

In 2002 I read The Blank Slate. With all due respect to Steven Pinker one of the most fascinating aspects of this book was actually a review of the work of another psychologist, Judith Richard Harris. Harris’ own views are explicated crisply in The Nurture Assumption. In it she reviews and expands on a major insight from behavior genetics: over the long term parental influence seems to be a relatively marginal predictor in terms of many be Read more...

Ancient Ainu mariners!

Ainu man from 1870 (colorized) Well, not really. But a new paper in PLOS GENETICS has a really weird speculation nested into the discussion of what seems a relatively banal paper on the phylogeography of South Americans. It’s a Y chromosomal survey of the populations of the New World, so it’s tracing the male lineage only. Because Amerindian populations likely went through at least one (more if you accept multiple migrations) bottle Read more...